DVD not being recognized by Windows

[Haole Boy]

Aloha everyone. My customer is having problems playing a particular set of DVDs on his Win 7 machine. These are commercially produced DVDs, not something burned at home. When you load the DVD, the drive spins for a little while and then nothing happens. Looking at the DVD drive in Explorer it shows 0 (zero) bytes used on the drive. Trying to play the DVD using VLC, you get a message telling you to insert a disk.

Same thing happens on my Win 10 machine using both the internal DVD drive and an external USB-attached drive. The DVD plays just fine on my home DVD player attached to my TV.

Other commercially made DVDs play just fine on both the customer's machine and on mine. DVDs are clean no scratches or fingerprints.

Doing some internet searching I found lots of mentions about deleting the 'upper filter" and/or "lower filter" registry keys. On my machine I found only an upper filter key, and deleting it made no difference.

Any suggestions?

Mahalo,

Harry Z.

 

[Porthos]

Can you "explore" the DVD? Are there files on it?
If not the disks are probably bad.

 

[GTP]

Deleting upper and lower filter could break your OS's ability to read any disks, so I wouldn't do that -especially if the computer is reading other disks fine.

You could try DVDisaster from Linux. I think there's a Windows version as well.
It should let you at least see/copy the content to your hard drive so you can play with it.

VSOInspector, or Emsa Disk Check will give you insight about the disks file structure/errors etc.

 

[Haole Boy]

Can you "explore" the DVD? Are there files on it?
If not the disks are probably bad.

From my initial post: Looking at the DVD drive in Explorer it shows 0 (zero) bytes used on the drive.

 

[Haole Boy]

Deleting upper and lower filter could break your OS's ability to read any disks, so I wouldn't do that -especially if the computer is reading other disks fine.

You could try DVDisaster from Linux. I think there's a Windows version as well.
It should let you at least see/copy the content to your hard drive so you can play with it.

VSOInspector, or Emsa Disk Check will give you insight about the disks file structure/errors etc.

OK. Will check these out and let you know what I find.

 

[nerd2u]

Is it a DVD-RW? Sounds like copy protection trying to protect the disk

Sent from my SM-G870W using Tapatalk

 

[Haole Boy]

My apologies for not responding sooner. I tested the DVDs on various machines including a brand new Dell laptop right out of the box. They would not play consistently on all the machines, so I told the customer that the DVDs were bad. There were some scratches, but not deep or long enough that I thought they would interfere with playback.

Mahalo to all who responded.

Harry Z

 

[Moltuae]

Did the DVDs originate from a different country perhaps?

Sounds like region blocking:

https://www.top-password.com/blog/3-steps-to-change-dvd-region-in-windows/

 

[Haole Boy]

The DVDs used to play the customer's machine. Now, some of them would play on some machines and not on others. Some would not play at all on any machine. The customer was not real diligent about putting the DVDs back in the holder to keep them from being scratched so I concluded that the scratches (though not real deep or large) were interfering with the DVD players reading of the disk.

 

[coffee]

Spray the DVDs with pledge and buff them up. Then DD them to file. Reburn.