Weird DVD behavior

[essentialsaltes]

Got a Netflix DVD of Fantastic Planet. Popped it in the DVD player, and it behaved a little weird. The warning screen came up, and then while that was still showing, there was a wooshy-tingly noise, as would accompany a distributor/studio logo. The animated menu showed up, but when I hit play, or selected a chapter, the video was black, but the audio played more or less normally (I could hear a few occasional stutters).

Stuffed it in the PS3 and it played perfectly normally (there *was* a distributor logo that went with the whoosh).

Is my DVD player dying? Exerting its taste in film? Demanding a dose of psychedelic drugs before showing the film? Rejecting some alien DVD codec?

Comments

[jimkeller.livejournal.com]

My first question to you would be to ask you to look at the disc and see if it's scratched or discolored. The PS3 has fairly robust error correction built into it, which most DVD players do not (and at the lower end of the market certainly do not). If there is damage to the disc, I'd report it as a damaged disc to Netflix and not worry about your player.

If the disc is in great shape, then it's possible it was encoded at too high a bit rate for your DVD player, especially if the player is a basic model. Check the player with a couple of discs that you've watched on it successfully before. If they're fine, again, the problem is probably with the disc (though, in that case, it may not be damage).

Of course, it's also possible that the DVD player is beginning to give up the ghost, or that you've just got a loose connection...

thanks

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

It was definitely a fairly scratched disc, but no worse than others that have successfully played (and with Netflix, I see a lot of pretty thrashed discs -- either the postal service or the average Netflix user is not very kind to them). Of course, with data, it depends a lot on *which* data gets damaged. Usually, with a badly scratched disc, the movie will play fine until a crucial scene in act 3, and then the player will start to choke on it. But this behavior seemed really odd.