My friend's pb 12" superdrive machine is having a problem with dvd player. When he plays a movie it shows up with what looks like digital static
shown here.
The movie is on his disk. He hasn't tried a dvd or another other content but:
1) the movie plays fine in VideoLAN
2) If I boot from his disk in target mode the movie plays fine on my pb 12" in dvd player.
3) If he boots from my disk the movie is noisy as shown in the screen photo above.
4) I can even play it okay in dvd player on my machine by mounting his disk over the network.
Sounds like hardware but it seems to me an unsual problem for hardware and I haven't found any mention of it with searches here and the Apple forums.
One other possibly relevant piece of information is a little while before we noticed the problem he ran DVD player and it said he had no dvd drive. We rebooted and still no DVD drive. It wasn't in the Apple System Profile either. Not long before that we had used the drive to load software into Virtual PC, (star gazer or some such) so it had been working. Then we power cycled and when it came on there was a significant ka-thunk like a spring snapping back into place or something. Not the usual noise the 12" pb makes when you turn it on or wake it from sleep. But then he was able to run dvd player without it complaiing outright about a missing drive, just video noise.
I advised him to call apple. I suspect he may wait until near the end of his 3 year apple protection plan (he rarely wants to play movies). But I'm curious. Has anyone seen this or does anyone have a guess as to what the problem might be other than "broken"?
Thanks,
ber
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