DVD player behaving very strangely

[Attonine]

My machine is refusing to see any DVD-R, DVD-RW (both + and -) etc disc I put in my machine. The problem is with both blanks and ones with movies on. It is even refusing to see discs which I have previously used successfully. I have tried setting preferences to open DVD player automatically, ignore the disc etc. No luck.

I have tried using an external drive with limited success. Here the Mac sees the discs, but will not play them, the screen freezes constantly. All associated applications (DVD player, Handbrake, Mac The Ripper) freeze up and quit. The external also has problems burning from iDVD, it takes days, literally, if at all (I previously started another thread about this).

I have tried the discs on a colleagues G4 Powerbook and he has no probelms, I also tried with the external on his machine and this was fine too.

Now, oddly, original, commercial DVDs work with no problems at all on the internal DVD player.

Before anyone suggests it, I have repaired permissions. restarted, and I don't have VLC and at the moment can't download it.

I have searched and found I thread with someone who seemed to have an identicle problem, however his (her) problems seemed to fix themselves. Mine have persisted for over a week.

I am using 10.4.9

All suggestions welcome

 

[mad jew]

Very strange. Have you tried resetting your SMC? Is your optical drive being correctly recognised in System Profiler?

 

[Attonine]

I did a lot of searching yesterday and have discovered that the Matsushita optical drives used in MBPs are plagued with problems. On Apples's own support pages there are many people complaining about similar problems. Googling the drive also brings up pages of people complaiing about similar problmes with these drives in both MBPs and PCs.

I am back in the UK in a few weeks so will pop into the apple store and get the drive replaced. Many people have stated that their drives were replaced to Hitachi/LG ones which seem to be far more reliable.


Strangely Macrumors members do not appear to have experienced these optical drive problems to the extent that my searching yesterday would suggest it exists.