I've had a DVD player for about a year and every once in a while I come across a piece of news that says "X DVD won't play on Y Player".

How exactly is this possible? I mean isn't the player just reading information? What would set one player apart from another if they are both using the same industry standard?

Usually both the DVD player and the DVD are too blame. They both stretch the DVD specs or try and cut a couple of corners. The information on a DVD can be written with a variety of flags and codes that us users never have to worry about. Luckily these errors are fairly rare.