DVD player 'ageism'?

ambro25

Asking the Home Entertainment Luminaries™ residing in this here Forum

I've recently noticed that my DVD player (several years-old Pioneer 525 or 530 - can't remember for sure) refuses to play (well it sorta 'freezes') some recent DVDs.

2 primes examples: Nany McPhee this past week-end, and the Noel Edmond's 'TV Addicts' Interactive DVD around Xmas.

Nany McPhee - rental: first attempt, plays DVD copyright notice / "nasty pirates" video/ all trailers with no problems whatsoever, then when going onto the movie menu screen (animated 'Pan' shot) it just freezes and that's it (even before displaying the actual menu). Same at second attempt.

Me goes back to X-travision (after checking DVD which looks brand new and fault/scratch-less) and get a second replacement disc. Exact same story. Menu however (intermittently) displays this time, but as soon as I press 'select' (say for playing the movie or selecting sound options) - freezes again.

The same thing (symptoms) with the TV Addicts DVD, which are the two most recent DVDs I've put in (well, 'recent' as in recently-released).

BUT it plays all of my library with no problems at all, including 'recent' ones - Nov'05 or thereabout. That's R1 or R2 DVDs (player has an extra hardware PCB & hardware manual switch for R1).

So after that long intro, a short and sweet question: have they recently introduced some sort of new DVD copy protection or whatnot that my old player firmware can't cope with?

GrumPy

Yes, i have this problem with some of the newer dvds, on both my xbox, ps2 and one of the stand alone dvd players has difficulty, seems the discs are getting a bit to advanced for the older players.