Universal, we might have a problem - Children of Men (pls. ignore posts before #22) (1 Viewer)

[Pete T C]

First, try updating your player to firmware v1.5

Also, I've read that washing the disc can help - some speculate that the surface of the disc got some filament on it during replication that is causing the issue, hence why its fixed when the disc is cleaned.

 

[Scott Kriefall]

I have an HD-A2 with firmware 1.5, and Children of Men will not play at all. It merely spins for about a minute while the player attempts to read the disc, then fails with a "cannot play disc" error. Seems to be a batch of faulty discs. The disc was ordered from Amazon and shipped a day or two after the release date.

 

[Sean Bryan]

I think I got lucky with this one. It played through without any problems, not even ant brief pauses or audio dropouts.

Played on the HD-A1 with 2.0 firmware.

A poll over at AVS shows approximately 50% of people reporting problems with this title. I believe Universal made a bad pressing. So there are good and bad discs out there. For those with problems, I'd recommend contacting Universal directly and requesting an exchange. If you exchange it with the store that sold it to you, they are likely to just have more from the same pressing/batch.

 

[Robert Crawford]

After two different discs failed to play, I'm just going to wait until it's released again sometime in the future. Not a good job on Universal's part.




Crawdaddy

 

[EricW]

are they actually doing this?

 

[TonyD]

watched tonight x-a1 ver 2.0 no problems at all/

 

[ppltd]

I have updated my XA2 to 1.5 and the disk is not recognised. Time to contact Universal as I am afraid that I will get a disk from the same batch if I just bring it back for an exchange.:frowning:

 

[Paul Arnette]

Last week I decided to try my luck and purchase a copy of Children of Men from Amazon. To my surprise, the disc played perfectly on my HD-XA2 (firmware revison 1.3). Pehaps there are new batches in the pipeline now that do not have the replication issue, or maybe I just got lucky.

I will say that, while the copy I received looked clean, the disc did have a lot of 'dust' on it. I say dust, but I'm not sure what it is really. A lot of HD DVDs have little bits of particals on them when I open them. I've taken to dedicating a can of compressed air to cleaning them off before use. This one was particular 'dusty'. Is that part of the problem? Who knows...

 

[dkny75]

Watched it last night on my HD-A1 w/2.0 firmware. Disc took forever and a day to load but once it did I had absolutely no problems with the movie or U-Control features.

 

[Andrew Bunk]

Just wanted to add my experiences here.

I have an A1 with FW 2.0, and my copy of CoM from Amaozn (and Good Shepherd) played fine - no glitches or freezes.

I just got an A20 and immediately updated to 1.5.

Neither of these discs play on the A20, but still play fine on the A1 ( I rechecked).

It appears some players read bad discs better than others....

I would not be surprised to see Hollywooodland, CoM, Good Shepherd and Smokin' Aces all re-released as HD-DVD only in the future, much like they're goign to do with Army of Darkness and Unleashed. Hell, they did this when the Casino DVD-18 had so many problems.

 

[Sean Bryan]

I've heard various people report on contacting Universal and being asked to send them their discs, so yes I believe they are doing this, as any studio should.

I know WB definitely exchanges problem discs for those that contact them.

 

[Jon Moss]

Hmm... I've been thinking for some time now that there's a general problem with the HD-DVD/DVD combo format discs.

I only have two combo discs in my collection (Superman Returns & Miami Vice), and both lock up randomly & display problems during playback. All my other regular HD-DVDs (30+) playback fine, apart from an occasional rare frame skip/sound dropout now & then. It seems more than a coincidence that only the combo discs have serious playback problems.

I also think someone at Universal knows there's a problem with the combo format discs too. Why else are they re-issuing several combo titles (Army of Darkness, Unleashed) as non combo discs? The lower price point may be more attractive to the consumer, but I think there's more to it than that.

I'll wait for the UK release of Children of Men which is the non combo HD-DVD format. I refuse to purchase any more of those dreaded combo discs.

 

[EricW]

it's probably a combination of players and discs. my friend has a 360 addon, and his CoM didn't work. he let me try it on my 360 addon and it worked flawlessly. i also have 5 other combos that never gave me trouble.

 

[Hayes Preston]

I posted earlier in this thread that I watched CoM on my XA1 (firmware 2.0) with no problems, and that was true until last night. I had a friend over to watch it (he had never seen it) and at first the diks took a lot longer to load than a "normal" HD DVD, and longer than I remember it taking to load the two time I watched it before. Once it loaded there seemed to be no problems, until the Cease Fire chapter (is that 17/18?) arguable one of the most tense and chilling portions of the whole movie and bam! the picture freezes and the player doesn't respond to any commands from the remote, so I try to power down using the hard button, no luck, so I unplug and reboot. Then once the disc is loaded again I select the same chapter thinking it was some sort of fluke, but no, at the exact same spot, same thing. So I unplug again and instead of just powering up I press the open button to wake up the player, hopefully I can get the player open before it crashes again. I get the disc out and wipe clean with a lens cloth. Then I select the beginning of the next chapter and rewind to just after the freeze up point and watch the rest of the movie with no glitches. After my friend left I tried to play the scene again where it froze and it played fine without even a stutter.

Do I exchange or keep the disc? Is Universal replacing discs, or should I take it back to BB and simply exchange it?

 

[Cees Alons]

Hayes,

May be cleaning was just what it needed.

Try playing the "offensive" chapters two or three times more. Perhaps even starting just before it. Also, see if it loads normally and starts playing the beginning.

If it does, I wonder if it's wise to exchange it for another one which may, or may not, be faultless.


Cees

 

[Robert Crawford]

I'm sending back my second Universal HD DVD back to Universal which is the title The Good Shephard. My player won't play it and says it's not even a dvd? Something bad is going on with Universal Combo HD DVD and the Toshiba players. Whatever the problem, it just started happening over the last month or so.





Crawdaddy

 

[ppltd]

Same problem here. Both COM and Good Shepard will not even load on my XA2 or my add-on. I have also had lockups on the new Video Essentials disk which is also a Combo.

 

[Chris S]

So is the moral of this story do not buy any combo discs right now? It seems like every HD-DVD/DVD released since CoM is having issues on some level.

 

[Yumbo]

It's either COMBO or certain BATCH of drives or both.
The fact that firmware is not the issue proves this.

I have 2 add-ons. The combo discs all play on one (serial 002xxxx) but not the other (serial 007xxxx) randomly.

 

[Juan C]

Three weeks ago I started a poll on AVS to gather information about the extent and severity of the problems with this title, and also the players more afflicted by them. It was an open poll to discourage partisan contamination.

Now over five hundred fellow forum members have responded. Thank you all. I'm putting the results up on this separate thread because otherwise the analysis would be lost in the previous thread. BTW if you still have your personal experiences to describe please post them on the other thread.

These are the results as of now:

First-gen player, no problems 107 21.31%
First-gen player, slight problems 50 9.96%
First-gen player, serious problems 32 6.37%
Second-gen player, no problems 55 10.96%
Second-gen player, slight problems 27 5.38%
Second-gen player, serious problems 71 14.14%
Xbox 360 add-on, no problems 81 16.14%
Xbox 360 add-on, slight problems 20 3.98%
Xbox 360 add-on, serious problems 59 11.75%

Voters: 502


Disaggregated by problem severity

48.4% had no problems
19.3% had slight problems
32.3% had serious problems

Less than half the voters have no problems with this title. Incidence of serious problems is nearly one third overall.

Disaggregated by player tipe

First-generation players: A total of 189 members responded.
56.6% had no problems
26.5% had slight problems
16.9% had serious problems

Second-generation players: A total of 153 members responded.
46.4% had serious problems
36.0% had no problems
17.6% had slight problems

Xbox 360 add-on: A total of 160 members responded.
50.6% had no problems
36.9% had serious problems
12.5% had slight problems

So it seems that the players that were best at playing Children of Men were the first-gen ones. Not only were they the likeliest to play without any problems, but also the incidence of serious problems was the lowest (they are the only player where serious problems were less frequent than slight ones).
On the other hand, the second-gen players have been the worst, both in flawless operation (just over a third!) and in problem severity incidence. This despite the fact that the problems were first reported and publicized with regard to the Xbox 360 add-on, which holds a second place.

In my opinion, Universal should recall this title and issue a replacement. In this connection, it might be mentioned that it is appears on amazon as "Currently Unavailable".