Page 1 of Daewoo DV-500 ES Problems playing certain discs

Bit of a long shot, but someone might know why. My friends have this DVD player and have experienced problems with it playing some discs that are given away free in the newspapers - like last week`s Guardian give-away. There`s picture but no audio.

It can`t be a multi-region problem as these discs are region 2 and I can`t see them being in NTSC rather than PAL for the same reason. Only thing I can think of is that somehow some discs trigger the settings to be played on a home cinema / sound system and its outputting as if there are lots of surround sound speakers and not outputting anything to the tv`s inbuilt speakers?

Any other ideas for me to tell them to trouble shoot? I saw the posting about the multi-region hack and will pass that onto them anyway but don`t think that will solve their problem. They are an older couple and don`t play home written discs or anything like that - this is just some commerically released discs...

http://www.freewebs.com/sbowler579/index.htm

I have a pioneer player in the loft and a sony dvd recorder in the lounge and sometimes one machine will play one disc and not the other.Have you tried the disc in any other player?

Hi,
Thanks for the reply. Yes, they`ve tried the discs in question in a friend`s dvd player and they work fine. They just asked me if I could figure out why it was happening and whether I could solve it.

Some drives are far less forgiving than others. This problem is discussed many times on forums around the world!

The free DVDs given away in magazines and newspapers are very low quality, obviously, and some players will happily play them but others struggle and many refuse to load them at all.

Same goes for the free CDs that papers give away. They are very poor quality, and if you play them on the move, they are far more likely to jump and fail than a shop-bought or home-recorded disc.

As regards the sound issue, it has nothing to do with digital audio at all. These discs are usually either Dolby Digital 1.0 (monaural) or Dolby Digital 2.0 (stereo) - both of which will downgrade to analogue perfectly well. The only digital audio that is silent when selected on an analogue audio system is DTS, which is never on free discs.