DVD burner issues

January 29, 2005 9:58 AM

I have a Pioneer DVD-ROM drive and it was quite good at playing DVDs. I didn't use it for playing movies for a long while and eventually installed a DVD-burner (Pioneer too, actually). Now I can't play movies on my original DVD-ROM drive. It just spits them back out with an unceremonious "No Disc Detected". Data discs, even burned DVD-Rs work fine, as I use the drive for my main drive. Playing them on the burner works fine. Is this copy protection at work or just a strange coincidence? [MI]

Oddly, I don't even want to use the burner to copy DVDs. My old DVD player burned out and this forces me to play all of my DVDs on the burner, to which I'd like to give less of a workload. I've looked around the net and have seen a number of people with this problem, but it's never given a real answer, nor can I find any reference to a copy-protection scheme that works this way. But it's just a little convenient, y'know?

posted by ontic to Technology (10 answers total)

Have you tried setting the master/slave jumpers instead of using cable select? Changing the positions on the ide cable?
posted by stavrogin at 10:02 AM on January 29, 2005

Response by poster: I believe they are set up in master/slave right now. I could try switching them if I have time to get into the computer tonight. But that would mean it was some kind of copy-protection, right?
posted by ontic at 10:09 AM on January 29, 2005

No, not copy protection. Some drives just prefer to live in a particular spot on the cable or as a master. If they're jumpered as master/slave right now, you could also try changing it to cable select on both. Try a new cable. Upgrading the firmware (probably) wouldn't hurt.
posted by stavrogin at 10:24 AM on January 29, 2005

oh, wait, I completely misread the question. I'm not fully caffeinated. Maybe it is copy-protection. I thought the dvd-rom drive wasn't reading anything at all. ugh.
posted by stavrogin at 10:25 AM on January 29, 2005

Considering the fact that you can use the DVD drive at all I'd even say that it's unlikely to be a master/slave/cs issue.
posted by fvw at 11:51 AM on January 29, 2005

If it's a very old Pioneer drive, there are RPC jumpers on the back of it, which, if removed, are supposed to affect encoded DVD playback for the worse.

The problem is, once off, you can't put it back the way it was.

Try playing a movie without encryption on the drive (perhaps a backup of one of your movies). If that works, well, you probably have your answer. :-S
posted by shepd at 2:46 PM on January 29, 2005

It could be a Region Code issue. RCs set what "country", roughly speaking, the drive is in, and thus which RC-specific discs you can play.

Have you tried upgrading the firmware? There are tools for resetting the region code on DVD drives, as well. Google will help.
posted by AlexReynolds at 3:18 PM on January 29, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks for all the suggestions. Unfortunately I have no backups of movies. I did upgrade the firmware when this first happened and... no love. It would seem a little weird to be a form of copy protection, given that I'm assuming many, many people have both a DVD-ROM and a DVD-burner and can play movies on the former.
posted by ontic at 3:28 PM on January 29, 2005

FWIW I had the exact same thing happen when I installed my burner. I never did fix it and now have to use the burner for all my DVD needs (although the DVD rom works well with CDs). It is an old Gateway DVD rom, that I got with the system in 1999, and I don't believe it's a Pioneer. So I suspect is is not brand or model specific problem.
posted by MotorNeuron at 8:30 PM on January 29, 2005

If you have more than one IDE bus in your computer, try putting the two DVD drives on separate buses.
posted by kindall at 1:55 PM on January 30, 2005