Twice already today my DVD player has turned itself off for no reason, then is slow to react to turning it back on. Its a rather cheap Philips from Wal-Mart unlocked to be region free. Anyone have an idea to what it can be doing?

Edit- make it 3 times.

If it does not have a timer with a sleep feature it sounds like it is either defective or it is a heat buildup issue. Either way you might want to return it if possible or trash it before something bad happens.

I'm pretty sure it is a heat issue, so i'm going to look into it. Thanks for the reply

Maybe it's protecting you from bad movies. What were you trying to play?

Double feature of Gigli and Showgirls.

Return of the Living Dead 2, Phantasm

Hmm....proof for my theory is accruing at an alarming rate.

Sounds like you've got Paranormal Activity.

Is this a change from how it originally behaved?
I have a Philips DVP5990, and it is slow to "boot up" compared to other brands I have owned. 10-ish seconds is normal. Also it has sleep feature and auto-standby feature if left idle for too long. These features can be tweaked or disabled using the setup menu.

Phantasm is great, your theory is wrong

Yes. While it was slow to boot up normally, it simply doesn't respond to being turned on/opening the tray for a couple of minutes after powering itself off.

I'm a big fan of ROTLD 2 myself. Still pop it in the movie box every now and then for some laughs.

i have a Phillips 727 set to region free and it automatically shuts itself off after 15 minutes as a power save feature that you can't turn off, but never had the other problems after it turns off.

Yea, this one has shut itself off after 15 minutes on pause or stop but never in the middle of playing, and would boot up normally when I was ready to return to watching.

This one (philips 3962) just had its last strike earlier today, as I was trying to play a disc and it froze playing twice in the first 3 minutes then turned itself off and took forever to respond. I'll just have to deal with not watching my other region stuff for a month or so

If it's not eligible for warranty return or WalMart return/replace then you just have to experiment. Try leaving it unplugged for a long time, like overnight, to force a hard reset. You could also try updating the firmware; check out Philips website to see if they have something for your model. (Click on 'software and drivers' once you get to your model number page.) If neither works, it's a hardware problem which likely isn't worth the cost of having diagnosed.

Thanks, its worth a shot to try a firmware update. Its definitely not worth doing anything that would cost money since it was under $40 new and I'll be replacing it with an all region BD player shortly.