Having VERY bad luck with Warner HD-DVDs! - Page 5

I have owned hd-dvd players from the beginning and have never ever had a problem with any disc ever freezing, until now! I have an A1,A2 and A35. So far, Superman The Movie and Willy Wonka are both dead. I could do the red to blu trade on Superman but why should I have to pay when their hd-dvds are defective. This stinks! I am tired of buying formats over and over.

These are the defective Warner Bros discs I have found so far- Willy Wonka, Superman the movie, Superman Returns and my still shrinkwrapped copy of The Complete Matrix Trilogy. Except for Matrix, I have watched these movies without any problems in the past. The discs were all clean and tried on xbox 360,A1,A2 and A35 players. I tried backing up to hard drive but these discs all crashed.

These discs all worked and were backed up-

Full Metal Jacket
Blazing Saddles
300
The Road Warrior
The Departed
Casablanca
GoodFellas
2001
Blue Planet

Hi all.
Seems I might be having a problem also.
Started watching Ocean's 11 last night. About a third of the way in, it stopped, with an error code. I was able to get through it by starting over and skipping to the chapter where it froze. The rest of the movie played fine.
Was going to watch the second film, Ocean's 12, but it wouldn't load at all. Got the same error code (didn't write down the code number).
Haven't tried Ocean's 13 yet.
We've watched these several times over the years, with no problems.
Played on an XA2, which has been rock solid.
Will be checking more titles and report back if I find more.

It would be nice if Warner would replace the discs for free. But, I read another post where Warner asked for a receipt. Who keeps store receipts for five years? It would cost me about 100 dollars to do the red 2 blu program. They don't include Willy Wonka and it has become scarce, so I broke down and bought the blu-ray on ebay.
I hope this turns out to be a limited Warner disc problem and not a hd-dvd problem.

I've got an A1, A2 and A30. The only player that actually gives me trouble is the A1. All players are updated to 4.0 firmware... something tells me the A1 drive laser is just getting weak, and/or the drive was weak to begin with. Any idea what Toshiba would do for a warranty claim?

Those of us with page scanners keep (electronically) every receipt for every nickel we've ever spent!

Your comment actually made me think and check all my pdf files for online purchases.
Unfortunately, I must have bought these hd-dvds at Bestbuy.
Great idea about scanning those receipts. The thermal paper some of these retailers use fade pretty quickly.

On seeing yr post, I have these too so ripped all 3 to my PC, with zero errors and no retries even. So mine are all fine fwiw.


Yeah I have my days when I think that "disappearing receipt paper" is a ploy on their part! I learned long ago to scan those Home Depot receipts which are notorious for fading-to-illegibility. Gotta save these for the future in case of an IRS audit (home value).

I just discovered my UK import of The Island won't even load up, it tries and tries, and if left long enough, will get the this disc is not the proper format message. I have 3 A3 models and an A20, it won't load and play in any of them. Sad thing is, a couple months ago, I pulled it out and watched it and it worked fine. I wonder what the likelihood of getting Warner to replace an import disc would be? I haven't had issues with any other discs lately...

Just wanted to add myself to the list - and add a new twist to the mix. I'm in the US (VA), and have about 60 HD-DVDs. Last week I started on the effort of backing them up using my GGW-H20L/GGC-H20L drives, and noticed that four of them - all Warner, were completely unreadable.

For me, it was:

Goodfellas
Unforgiven
Blade Runner Collection Disc 5
Ocean's Thirteen

A couple of them DID have some visible marking towards the edge of the disc, like an uneven brown ring when held to the light.

So, here's the twist. A couple of weeks before I noticed this with the HD-DVDs, I posted this thread:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/newre...eply&t=1340990

This was about an earlier problem I was having (and still am having) with Warner DVD-Audio discs displaying almost the EXACT SAME behavior.

I know HD-DVD is not DVD-Audio, but I do know one of the sales points of HD-DVD to industry is that they could use conventional DVD production lines..

I have dozens of discs from other companies, and the ONLY problem I've had is with Warner.

I also don't think chapter-skipping is a good test. Some of these errors seem relatively small (but cause the player to freeze up). My 100% reliable test has been trying to make .ISO files with my PC drives.

I have not yet tried these on my XBox 360 USB HD-DVD drive, but I do have a couple of the Toshiba slim factor HD-DVD reader/writer drives coming next week - so I will try on those as well.

Perhaps some machines can read these discs? My HD-A30 and HD-A3 cannot.

Well, which is it?

If any of your discs are recoverable, IsoPuzzle 1.7b would be the tool to recover them. Didn't work on my HD DVD of Bullitt, but it did work with a Blu-ray that wouldn't otherwise rip for me. The cool thing about IsoPuzzle is that you can move your disc between drives (and even PCs) and it keeps trying to recover (only) those sectors that were unreadable on prior attempts.

In fact it's become my preferred ripping tool because if you do get any read errors, you can stop-and-clean-or-check-or-move-or-whatever and replace the disc and IsoPuzzle continues from before (without starting-over from scratch).

I have defective HD DVD's also but the only title I care about archiving is Willy Wonka. Like an idiot I had it backed up on my PC and tossed the file only to realize that DVD rot caught up to my disc. So I've been on the hunt to get one clean copy archived. I have like four of these titles two Aviators two Superman Returns yada yada yada...

Right now I'n in touch with a company that has a few cases of Willy Wonka and am trying to get like 20 copies at a rated price and told them I won't bother returning defective discs. Crazy isn't it? but I'm bent on getting this title back on my PC, if I ever do find a clean copy my mission with HD DVD will be finally over.

I'm working through my Warner HD DVD titles, backing them up for piece of mind. So far had success with: 300, 2001, Batman Begins, Blade Runner Final Cut, I Am Legend, even We Are Marshall, which would not play through on my HD DVD player because of a scratch, yet it ripped just fine. But now I am having issues with Forbidden Planet. Some EVO's are failing cyclic redundancy check...

I'm finding that Warner titles that I've discovered won't play on my XA2, will play on the LG BH200. Wonka is an example. In the Valley of Elah stopped play about halfway through on the XA2, but I was able finish it on the BH200.

Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix is not even recognized by my XBox360 drive connected to my PC, but it plays fine on my HD-A30. Very odd. So I can't back it up, and I don't expect it will continue to play for long. Guess I'll have to double dip on the blu...

I know it's not WB but My copy of Tokyo Drift, that always worked fine up until a week ago can be added to the list. When I looked closely at it, it had what looked like seperation of the chrome color layering from the plastic. It would freeze up and crash about half way through. wrote an email to Universal and was offered the DVD, I complained and they agreed to a one time swap out with the Blu-ray edition.

Good to know. Now I'll have to try these things on 2 different players!

I did the player reset trick on the XA2 (DISPLAY-7-0-1-DISPLAY) that xtraxsrule provided above, and now Wonka plays and In the Valley of Elah doesn't freeze anymore at the same spot halfway through. I don't know of any other WB titles I had trouble with, but I hope the player reset helps with any future problems.

For some reason Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix decided to load tonight on my xbox360 drive connected to my PC. Might be able to back it up now...

Can't find this.
Can you explain the procedure?
Thanks!

To reset the player, turn the player on and remove any discs from the player. Then press the DISPLAY button, followed by the numbers 7-0-1 (in that order). Then press DISPLAY again. The player should turn itself off, and when you turn it back on, it will be reset to the factory defaults. Hope it works for you!

I am a "late comer" to this thread. Still have alot of HDDVD in shrinkwrap. I thought I got screwed with a A35 from craigslist when I played "Payback" and it froze. I just watched "Posideon" last night and it got almost all the way to the end when it froze up (funny thing is the display on the player kept incrementing while the picture was still) Good news is the A35 plays all other ones fine.

I'll have to try that. Thanks!

This made me chuckle.

You do realize there are probably only a handful people left on the planet who know what you're talking about here!

Now Warner Germany has contacted a user in our forum and say that they cant replace the HD-DVDs because they dont produce HDs anymore and they want replace them because the warranty-time is over

Now we can see what they think of you as a customer. You can give them a lot of money but when you have problems with a high class medium you are alone and have no worth anymore.

THANKS WARNER FOR THE "HAZARDOUS WASTE"!
AND THANK YOU THAT A CUSTOMER HAS NO WORTH FOR YOU ANYMORE.

You don't understand - the entire industry is bent on pretending HD DVD never even existed. Look at how quickly support for playing HD DVD's was removed from WinDVD and PowerDVD software. Why remove a working feature? Because they want everyone to forget that HD DVD existed!

If they ever try to give me trouble for backing up my HD DVD's to blu-ray that is going to be my line of defense - they don't acknowledge that HD DVD existed!