Yee-Ming
Senior HTF Member
Oddly, I get the impression that it's the cheapo DVD players that will play badly scratched up discs. My Pioneer 969 (Elite 59 in USA) would freeze on some crappy discs, but the DVD player of the LG HDD recorder would somehow manage. And this follows from anecdotal evidence that cheapo Shinco players (the $29 players you'd get from Wal-Mart) play anything you care to throw at it, including *ahem* "budget" discs from China.drobbins said:I also think the playability of a DVD depends on the DVD player. When CDs first came out I went to check it out at the local music store. For the demo, he dropped the CD on the floor and ground it under his heel. He showed me the CD and I could tell it was not the first time he did this to show someone how great the new system was. He then played it in the CD player with out issue. I used that player for many years and never found a CD that it wouldn't play. CDs that wouldn't work on new players always worked on it. Finally it bit the dust when the drawer stopped opening.
The same holds true for many of the DVDs that I get from BB. There are many DVDs that won't play on my 1080 up converting DVD player that my first generation PS2 has no troubles with. I thought way back when CDs and DVDs first came out, one of their big selling points was how they could be abused and still work. I guess lowering the cost of manufacturing also effected the quality of the player.
My theory on that is that higher end players 'try harder' to read the bits accurately, so on troublesome discs they keep getting errors, try to recover the error, and then get stuck. Cheapo discs just spit out whatever they managed (or not) to read first-time, even if the image comes out pixellated or has obvious gaps in the information (e.g. big green blocks).
I seem to recall back in the earlier days of CDs that better CD players were always said to have 4X or 8X 'oversampling', which I was told meant they read the information 4 (or 8) times to get an accurate read, before sending the bits to the DAC. Was that correct? If so, assuming higher end DVD players do the same, I can see how a higher end player would get stuck if it read a disc 4 times and got different info each time, whereas the cheapo player would read once and just output whatever it had read.