bgoodr

My question is about "blocked sections", but honestly, I don't know what the correct terminology is.

I have a Panasonic CP-67 DVD player. Works fine, mostly. Except for one thing: When first loading some DVDs, it starts playing a section of video, usually for an advertisement for other movies or shows. When that section plays, and I press either the Menu button or fast-forward button on the remote, it blocks it, showing an icon in the upper right corner of the TV screen.

Now most of the time its a minor annoyance that I just put up with. But tonights DVD, HBO's "The Wire", Second Season, Disc one, the advertisement lasts 2 or 3 minutes. I've had enough of that!

What are my options to disable the blocking of the fast-forward or menu buttons? And, I would like to do this for any arbitrary DVD I play. Are there players out on the market that can allow me to permanently disable that blocking behavior so that I can skip past any section of video regardless of how it is encoded on the DVD?

Thanks,
bgoodr

Mr. Salty

Those are called user-prohibited controls. There's not much you can do about it other than to buy a player that ignores such commands. Most discs these days allow you to at least skip past that junk, but maybe "The Wire" isn't one of them.

klemsaba

I've seen a bunch of DVDs and Blu-ray discs where the menu button doesn't work but I've always been able to use the next chapter button on my remote to skip through the ads quickly.

I recently have started going into the chapter menu and starting the movie that way to skip all the FBI warnings and disclaimers about the commentary. It works on most Blu-ray discs.

I use to have a DVD player that automatically found the movie and started playing it automatically. Pretty neat.

bgoodr

Thanks folks. Does anyone know a specific brand and model of DVD player that does allow the use to skip past the junk reliably? I can always test it out using this The Wire DVD

bg

Jeremy517

You can indeed skip those ads with the next chapter button.

Spiky

Another option that may be faster with some discs is to press Stop, Menu.

bgoodr

I found the "next chapter" button and tested it on the problematic DVD and it works like a charm! This has removed a big annoyance. Thanks for your and everyone elses help!

bg