Borat_Drives_A_Scooby

This has been bugging me for a while, i have a genuine dvd which is Pal 2 and aspect ratio 4.3 which will play in my normal dvd player under the tv but it won`t play in my drive on my laptop.

My laptop is only about 3 years old and ive never had a problem playing any dvd`s in the laptop drive before including divx, i even put a random genuine one in after which worked fine but its this one particular dvd that won`t play.

Ive even bought the same dvd again just incase the other was a dud in some way and it still won`t play. Any ideas why ?

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

Need a bit more information please:

- what's the title?
- can you open an explorer window on the disc and see the VIDEO_TS folder and its contents?
- do you notice any noise / vibration with this particular disc? (I have an otherwise excellent Denon stand-alone player that's very picky in this respect; cheaply made discs with the hole off-centre vibrate a lot and simply won't play).
- what's the laptop and DVD playback software?

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

Does the laptop have a DVD drive? Not all do, some are just CD drives.

Borat_Drives_A_Scooby

Right, first off i`m not the greatest when it comes to computers so not sure how you open an explorer window on the disc and ive no idea what a VIDEO_TS folder is.

Yes my laptop has a drive where you can burn CD-R discs for things like music and the drive allows me to play dvd`s.

The dvd is called Steve Coogan Live The Man Who Thinks He`s It.

The software i have on the laptop is as follows.

Windows media player
WinDVD 4
K-lite codec pack with the classic player.

When i put the disc in it starts to spin then clicks and that repeats itself until it just stops in the drive.

I think the drive supports the following

Supported CD Formats: CD Text, CD Extra, CD-DA (audio), CD-I, CD-ROM XA, Mixed-mode CD, Photo CD, Video CD, CD-ROM, CD+G (Karaoke CD)

Supported Media Types: CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RAM, DVD-RW

HPLovecraft

Check that the disk is readable

Go to My Computer and right click the drive (D: or E: etc) corresponding to your DVD drive and click OPEN

If its unreadable it will say so

If readable you should get to the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders on the disk. The film is stored in the VIDEO_TS folder as a series of VOB files (basically mpeg2 video and audio).

Try right clicking on one of these and go to 'open with'

Then select your desired player from the list (eg windows media player)

If one doesn't work try another (eg. I use PowerDVD).

If your laptop happily plays other DVDs then it should play ok

What is the default player for DVDs - is it windows media player ? Try setting the computer to play DVDs with a different player and see if this makes any difference.

Otherwise I'm at a loss...

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

If it clicks repeatedly, that sounds to me like it's having trouble physically reading the disk. If other disks play OK, it's very unlikely to be a problem with your PC.

Does the disk play in any other DVD player? If not, it's definitely faulty. Even if it does, it could simply be that the other DVD player is more tolerant of bad disks.

A bad batch of disks isn't unheard of - I bought a box set last year in which about half of them either suffered severe vibration and/or were badly scratched. It's just down to penny pinching by the manufacturer.

Borat_Drives_A_Scooby

I tried to open the disc info in my D drive while the disc was in but its not even loading up so you can`t get the info i need, its just spinning and clicking then it eventually just stops idle in the drive. I think they must have been done on the cheap on poor quality discs as my drive is usually spot on at reading films.

Thanks for the input above.