[snafu]

I am experiencing a very strange problem with DVDs. My Pismo will play older (I guess at least one year) DVDs but recent releases behave strangely. When I insert a DVD into the drive I can here a very unpleasant noise (difficult to describe, but it doesn't sound right) and after 30 s or so it stops and nothing happens. The disc icon doesn't appear on the desktop and, needless to say, the movie doesn't play.

I've rented "Lord of the rings" in January and it didn't play, however, the supplementary DVD in the same box played OK???

From all that I conclude that
1. my drive is OK (it plays older DVDs and CDs very well)
2. Region settings shouldn't be the problem because I don't get asked if I want to change anything (I don't get a chance to do that)
Anyway, I am in Australia
3. There could be some kind of coding on newer DVDs that won't allow my special configuration (Pismo G3) to recognize the DVD.

BTW, the same happens whether I run MacOS X or OS9.

Does anybody have an idea?

[jtbowden]

I never had this happen in my Pismo, but my sister's lime iBook did this. When I called Apple for her, they said that the drive was probably OK and that the DVD was bad. In other words, it's tolerances were good enough for commercial DVD players but not the iBook's DVD-drive. They suggested exchanging the DVD and seeing if it worked then. Weird, I know.

[bstone]

Dear fellow Pismo owner,
The stock optical drive in the Pismos, LG drives, suck. They die en mass and Apple doesn't care. Look at my signature for some ideas on how to fix it.

Brad

[angelmb]

Yes, there are some problems with Pismos with LG drives, mine is a Panasonic, no problem.

But there is a movie I can not play, Casablanca.

[snafu]

Thanks everybody for your input and help. I love this forum and I wish I'd have known about it earlier.

I am still not convinced that there is some funny business done by the DVD manufacturers. I have a Matsushita drive SR-8174-C and not an LG and I haven't heard anything bad about Matsushita.

The other thing I still don't understand is that some (older) DVDs get recognized but newer ones don't. And the weirdest thing is that one of two DVDs in the same box presumably by the same manufacturer plays but the other doesn't???

The Pismo plays DVDs beautifully and I had no problems hooking it up to a TV. So really, to replace the drive is one of the last things I want to resort to.

[Eug]

Are the problematic newer ones dual layer? It might help to list the specific discs that work and don't work.