Just recently been bought a DVD player by my Wife (yes, she IS great!!)
Fine until I watched 'There's something about Mary'. Half way through, the picture completely blocked up - I mean ALL of the picture, it was like watching an infra-red camera or something.
Pressing reverse or forward search fixed it.
But lines of artefacting appeared sporadically thereafter and one more episode of total blocking.
Does this kind of thing happen often? Or is the disc or player faulty?
The Matrix, Bugs Life (what a great picture) and Wild Wild West have been fine so far.

What make is your player?

My 709 did the same on The Messenger, until i finally cleaned the disc and all was fine.

Alba 103.
Cleaned the disc (There's Something About Mary) when the errors occurred. My Wife watched it a couple of days later and it was fine apart from the odd, minor error.
Have to remember to clean my discs before viewing - hey its like LP's!

I can remember when CD's first came out and on tomorrows worl they coated them in marmalade and they still worked. What ever happened to them!!!! It would be nice to have powerfull enough lazer now to see through a couple of finger prints!

Christ, u must be as auld as me! I saw that! With Judith hand, she smeared jam or whatever on the label side and it still played!
Wouldnt recommend it at home though!
The only cd with Jam on it should be that one with Paul Weller's old band
CD's did sound a bit shite at first so I'd imagine DVD will become a bit more 'standard' and 'sorted' in due course.

hey Gizmo, the problem you report is a problem that last months "What DVD?" they rate your player very highly, but they do say that it has problems playing dirty and scrathed discs.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Arial, Helvetica">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by TVman:
hey Gizmo, the problem you report is a problem that last months "What DVD?" they rate your player very highly, but they do say that it has problems playing dirty and scrathed discs.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Yes, I'll just have to be more careful with my discs than my Brother is with his!
Despite the teething problems with DVD i'm happy with it - I put a film on VHS last night and I could have swore the VCR was ****ed it looked soo grainy! (And this is a 3month old Panasonic VCR here!)
Do u think the difficulties with certain discs and/or players firmware will settle down once the studios/manufactures are more experienced with the format?

I guess eventually DVD player manufacturers will develop the definivtive firmware, which all companies will agree on. From personal experience I think it's all a matter of profit over the customer. I think currently aslong as something works on a certain number of players they don't care about the other machines. As I said above I think one day there will be the "perfect" firmware, but due to inexperience and profit levels i don't think this will happen just yet!