nateman

i don't know if this has been done before so please don't give me a really hard time if it has but i thought since some dvds (mostly universal titles) had had some problems with glitchs or other problems.
include:
-name of title
-studio that makes it
-& the problem

if you have had the dvd for 3 years and it worked when you bought it but now after borrowing to people and using it a million times and not being careful with it, it won't work properly that doesn't count. im talking about opening it strait out of the package and it not work right.

im thinking instead of making individual threads about different problems everyone can check into this one for the lastest dvd and the problem it might have.
if not this thread will disapear.

Mike Adams

No idea if this will turn out to be viable, but I applaud your efforts. It's important for people who may have owned a title for years not realizing there was a corrected version available to have a reference for that kind of thing. I've tried to keep on top of most of them, but have only recently heard about the replacement program for the "STAR WARS" disc from the 2004 trilogy box. I foolishly kept my original when I bought the 2-disc limited editions, not thinking about the screwed-up audio. Once I get my surround system set back up, I'm sure that's gonna be annoying.

Premise

Pretty much any disc that's double sided with the name Universal on the packaging.

renaldow

This is a good idea, but I don't there can ever be an accurate list like this. A lot of the "problem" discs don't cause the problem for everybody; much of the issues seem to have to do with what kind of player you have. I've never had a problem with any of the so-called "problematic" DVDs from Universal. I say "so-called 'problematic'" because as far as I'm concerned there is no problem. BUT there are lots of people who experience the same problems with those same discs. So, where does the problem lie? Are certain people lucky while others are unlucky? Or has it got to do with equipment an the way it reads the DVD?

Another example would be, some AB discs used to freeze up in my CH 500 when I had one. If I had only one player, I'd think the disc was bad. But, they played fine in the other players I had at the time. Turns out the CH 500 had an issue with decoding the soundtrack on the AB logo at the beginning of some discs. I also had a player that would get caught in a loop with some Sony (I think it was Sony) at the very beginning when it would state, "The views expressed in the commentary..." then switch to French. It would just alternate between those two screens forever. Again, it was a player issue, not a disc issue.

This isn't meant to be argumentative, just illustrative, and also food for thought. Unless a disc is physically damaged or bad, it's hard to say whether or not it's a player or a disc issue. When you take into account that one manufacturer may make 5 or so different name brand players, and they all run off the same or similar hardware and software, it's hard to pinpoint the problem.

Mike Adams

Good point, but if you're thinking of the "BTTF" and "Meaning of Life" situations, those were encoding goofs, not manufacturing defects. As for the "YMMV" situation regarding player brands, that's true, but it doesn't mean a disc doesn't have a problem if it plays okay in some players. Some players are better at "reading ahead" or reading a segment multiple times before trying to display the data. A manufacturing defect that requires a second pass to read the data accurately can stop some players in their tracks, whereas other players might not skip a beat.

Again, I'm no expert on DVD players, but I do know that ... my computer will re-read problematic sections until it has all the data, but if I try to play the disc in real-time (i.e., it has to keep spitting the data back out instead of getting many chances to read and re-read), there can be pretty major glitches.