[grovberg]

Repost from Application forum since no one responded.

A few weeks back, DVD player started playing with weird bands of off color or B&W. It's as if it just picks a random blob of pixels and throws off the tint or something. At first I thought it was just a bad disc (Netflix), but every disc since then has done the same. I assumed that installing the new version of DVD player with 10.4 would fix it, but even doing an archive and install didn't fix it. It's worth noting that VLC plays most discs just fine with no problems at all. I also installed the update.

It's also worth noting that the color is fine when you fast forward or rewind. It also seems to cumulative (ie, FF will reset the color correctly and when I start to play, the color is fine for a second and gets progressively worse).

I haven't tried a full wipe and clean install yet, and I thought I'd post here just to see if anyone had a fix for this before I went that far. I couldn't be a hardware problem, could it?

Thanks for any input.
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[Spoffo]

This is just a shot in the dark, but if DVD player were somehow trying to read your NTSC disks as if they were PAL, you might get a symptom like this. I believe that PAL vs. NTSC is something that is set by one of the DVD Player preferences files. Before doing anythig drastic, I'd try trashing all the preferences files associated with DVD Player. Some of these may be invisible, so use a utility that lets you see ALL the files in your prefs folders,

There is also a file that DVD Player creates down in the root-level libraray (it may be invisible) that records all the disks you've ever viewed and somehow relates this to to region management, so you should trash that too. There have been a couple of threads over at <www.videohelp.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=9> discussing this file and the fact that someone has written a little piece of freeware that finds and deletes it. (It's a security issue to some folks, who just don't like the idea that someone might be able to get hold of this file and see every DVD they've ever watched. )

Sorry I can't be more specific about the names and locations of these files, but my hunch is that one of them is bad and is causing your problem. (The fact the VLC works fine tends to support this, since VLC pays no attention to a disk's region or whether it is PAL or NTSC, and just plays them all)

[Spoffo]

Well, it was an interesting theory, but now I don't believe it. I just tried a region-free PAL disk on DVD player, and it played without a hiccup, just like VLC. So while the Apple software is fussy about regions, it's apparently oblivious to video format.