Double-sided DVD?

[Bella]

I just purchased a five-disc set of Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes (whoopee!) and when I got it home and opened it up, I found that disc one was double-sided. When I popped it in my DVD player, the picture that came up as all wonky. It was about three or four minutes behind the sound, and the picture itself looked like blocks in a Tetris game.

Can people normally play two-sided DVDs in their home players? Or do I need a special player? Or is this DVD just fucked up?

[Godless Dave]

two-sided DVDs work fine in my player. Could be a defective disk.

[livius drusus]

They work fine for me too, although they annoy the crap out of me because I got a changer specifically to watch series without having to switch stuff out. :bull:

[The Lone Ranger]

Have you had any trouble with disks before, or is this the first time? If this is the first one that has ever given you trouble, it's probably a bad disk.

I ask because I have a cheap dvd player that's somewhat quirky. Usually, it'll play a dvd with no trouble, but it occasionally gets into a "mood" where it simply will not play a disk properly. Sometimes it takes 3 or 4 tries before it'll finally relent and play the disk.

Cheers,

Michael

[Scotty]

I would suspect the disc, or a player problem. There have been issues with specific DVD's not working in some players. It is normally a function of the menus and such, not with just playing the disc (although that does happen sometimes).

Flip it over and try the other side, if it works fine, then I suspect a bad disc. That is pretty unusual, but I suppose there could be a bad batch.

(sometimes inexpensive players have issues too, but they have gotten pretty darn good over the years, compaired to the first player I bought even before they had DVD's out, I just played the demo disc for two weeks).

-Scott

[Ymir's blood]

Double sided discs work fine in my player, but there has been at least one DVD that acted as you described. It was returned and the replacement did just fine.

[Bella]

Thanks, everyone :) - I'm kind of dumb when it comes to this kind of stuff, and I appreciate your help. Discs 2-5 work just fine, with the tail-end of disc 5 having a split-second problem with the picture (more of those blocky things across the middle of the screen). So I figure it's a problem with a disc.

[seebs]

Ooh, cool-sounding.

FWIW, I have a lot of DVDs with various problems. I can't watch one of the Transformers episodes in my laptop, and my wife's DVD player can't play the last disc of Princess Nine.