DVD drives failing all around!
I have seen quite a few DVD drives fail recently - 3 to be exact: One (a 6X) on a PIII Gateway notebook, one (a 5X) on a 466 Celeron e-Machines desktop, and another one (a 5X) on a PII custom built machine with Win2K. Here's the deal: All of them work fine with regular data CDs. The first one plays sound but has no video. The other two don't recognize DVD discs at all, well, not anymore, but they used to. The one on the eMachines played about 4 DVDs before it gave out. They have the proper DVD playing software installed on all of them, as well as the drivers for the drives.
I know that drives in the US are set to play Region 1 discs by default, and I've read somewhere that most drives let you play discs from other regions but once you do that, the drive is permanently locked to only play discs from the same region as the last one the drive had played. Now I dunno if these drives had indeed been "locked" or whatever.
Now, I know the people who own these drives only play region one discs, except this one guy (the PII dude) told me he played a porno disc made in Sweden on his drive. He doesn't remember if that was the last disc he played. So my guess for his drive is that it was indeed locked to whatever Sweden's region is (2 I think).
Some tech also told me of a Windows patch or something, like a text file that needs to be placed in a system folder to tell Windows of DVD encoding specifications. I dunno...
Anyway, it's not a big concern to me at the moment, they aren't my drives anyway, and it's no real emergency, except maybe for the Swedish porno guy! But I'm really curious as to what's going on. Maybe the DVD experts here can shed some light. Thanks!
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I cry when people diss Packard Bell...
