DVD's made for set-top boxes only?

[Blarg]

Do many of you find many incompatibilities of DVD movies with your desktops DVD players? Especially with DVD's that play fine on your home entertainment center or stand-alone type DVD players?

In the past couple of weeks, I've been getting some DVD rentals that don't play on my desktop, but will play on my portable DVD players. The desktop DVD is a Lite-On DVD reader/writer and the portables are a Cyberhome and a new Toshiba player.

One disk didn't read at all, one only played through all the gawdawful promotional crap and got up to the movie itself(past the intro movie studio splash screens and such), but then pooped out without playing the movie. The latter was House of Flying Daggers(up to the movie but then poop), the other was Operation Condor(no read at all). It struck me that both were Chinese pictures, but one was made by Sony and one by Universal.

I guess I'm not used to incompatibilities, since my last computer never had any out of hundreds of DVD's played, and I've played over a hundred on this computer without any problem. And now I get two in a week or so.

Oh, I got another one a couple weeks ago that I forgot to mention. Shaolin Soccer. Again a Chinese one. I had to play it in my portable.

[swede123]

I'd contribute this to scratched up/fingerprinted up DVDs rather than incompatibility issues. The set-top boxes are made specifically for playing DVDs, nothing more and nothing else. Meanwhile computer DVD players are meant to play movies, read data and often times record data all in one.

It's kind of similar to car CD players vs. home CD players. Often times I find that my car unit will have skipping issues with certain discs that play just fine on my home system.

Swede

[Blarg]

Hmm. Thing is, I did check for scratches, etc. The DVD's seemed fine. I cleaned them myself after they didn't play, just to be sure.