JaredR

Is there a trend in Toshiba DVD players where the players tend to "freeze" for no reason during play? I've owned 2 different players, one several years ago, another I purchased in December to compliment my Tosh projection set, and BOTH have consistently had this problem (I had forgotten about the problem when I bought the new player).

Now, I'm not talking about a layer change. This is an annoying "hiccup" where the movie will, without warning, "pause" for upwards of 3 to 5 seconds in the middle of scenes. My current player did it to me twice last night in the course of watching the last forty-five minutes of a factory-new, pristine disc.

Has anyone else had this problem? Is this a known problem?

chente

I own a toshiba sd-4900 and i've had it happen to me a few times. I own 4 dvds where this happens

R1 Iron Giant
R1 Grave of the Fireflies
R1 Black Angel
Supplements disc for the R0 Mei Ah 2046

They all stutter during playback through component cables but work fine when I run them through a composite cable. I have no idea why these 4 out of the ~700 discs I've run through my player do this, but they do.

Slowpc

My 4900 started to ask up a little bit , but got it running in the other room still.. and works fine about 99.5% of the time.

J-DAM

I just retired an SD-3750 that was buggy like this. It would freeze, stutter (like the OP described), drop audio, and just generally act weird at random moments on random discs. New, old, it didn't matter. It was fine 85-90% of the time, but odd things would happen. I thought a ghost was in there or something.

I got sick of it and picked up a Samsung HD-845 from BB. Originally, the Sammy was open box for $99.99, but it wouldn't play discs, so I had to argue with them to give me an unopened one. I had the edge since their salesman said they check their open-box items, yet the manager told me later they only take the word of the returnee. Figures.

Another odd thing is I have a 5-year old SD-1600 that works great in the bedroom. Guess Tosh's quality went downhill.

chente

Just to be clear, I don't think there is anything wrong with my player since it plays normally for 99.999999% of the stuff I've used. I think the problem has more to do with how it reads a select few authored discs.

Jeremy517

This is definitely a known problem with some Toshiba models.

My most recent experience of this problem was with one of their newer upconverting models. I told the people that bought it to take it back and buy an Oppo...

JaredR

Jeremy517--you're the second person to recommend an Oppo to me as a replacement. I know I can get them online, but is there a retailer that is known to carry them (I live in Southern California)?

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one to experience this problem. I'm a little stunned that Tosh hasn't ironed this out over the years.

JaredR

Also, it's been doing this on just about everything I play, I'm not having a "discriminatory disc" problem -- it's everything.

cloudnin

My Toshiba SD-4900 did the temporary freezing thing twice on the unrated cut of Wedding Crashers. I think the temporary freeze has occurred one or two other times as well but it's pretty rare. I don't think my SD-3750 has ever had that particular problem (the Wedding Crashers scenes that temporarily froze on the 4900 played perfectly on the 3750), although it has its own peculiar problem of its own that happens somewhat regularly, a very brief scrambled screen that usually only happens during high intensity scenes. I posted about it a couple years ago, with a more detailed description of the problem here: Toshiba 3750 problem

Jeremy517

Nowhere that I know. Buying straight from Oppo also has the advantage that they give you a DMI and DMI->HDMI cable. Here is a recent thread about the Oppo: http://www.dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=443684