This Is Why I Can’t Have Nice Things
This week had started out so well, too.
This past weekend the Puffy singles and book (!) I ordered from YesAsia came in — sweet. Later this week, if all goes according to plan, my two Puffy CDs from CDJapan will ship. And this morning, what should come in the mail but the Puffy DVDs I ordered some time ago. As I said, things were looking pretty sweet for me.
Then I tried to play the DVDs.
No, this problem has nothing to do with the fact that I thought I could play region 2 DVDs in my regular region 1 player (I’m not that stupid). The problem is (and my friends can back me up on this) that I have historically lousy luck when it comes to computers. From my “horror” Gateway all the way to the insane lockups/restarts my ATI Radeon 9500 have given me (which may partially stem from the fact that the video card doesn’t quite fit properly into my motherboard’s AGP slot), PCs just do not like me. Today just proves that my computer luck remains as bad as ever.
Some time ago, Chief Oddball gave me a DVD drive for my computer to play Silent Hill 4 with, as the game only came on a DVD (and this was before I had gotten an Xbox or PS/2). The region was already set to region 2. Hooray. Then later, he gave me another DVD drive as a Christmas present. Again, hooray. I recently downloaded the ATI DVD decoders for my video card, then set about ordering me some DVDs — planning to use the DVD player already set to region 2 to watch the discs (until I can afford an all-region DVD player, that is).
Well, to put it bluntly, the first DVD drive couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t want to read the disc. Oh boy, here we go. Luckily, I thought, I had the second DVD drive, which I promptly set to region 2. Hey! It reads the discs! Success!
Then my PC locked up. Over…and over…and over…while trying to playback the discs. Hoo boy.
Then, as a final slap in the face, it turns out that one of the DVDs I imported was — wait for it — mistakenly labeled, and is in fact a copy of another of the discs I bought. Seriously, what are the odds of that happening? It’s just like the time I received the DVD box set of the first season of Sailor Moon on DVD, and found that the set had no disc one — instead it had two copies of another disc in the set (compounding that, when I returned the set, the set I was getting in return had the exact same problem…though luckily this was discovered on site and I ended up getting a third set, which had all the correct discs in it).
Honestly, do the technology gods hate me? Do they want me to go back to typewriters and pads of paper? Maybe reel-to-reel projector movies for home entertainment? Hungry Hungry Hippos to get my gaming fix? I wish I knew.
Categorized as Computers, Rants
Wow, d00d, that’s seriously messed up. I wonder if you have a big EM field over your house or something? Of course, that’s the excuse I trot out every time somebody starts having “ghost in the machine” problems, like at Apple’s former workplace. I swear that place ate computers for lunch. A brand new computer developed dozens of bad sectors on its hard drive within a month of being there — prior to that, I hadn’t even seen a drive with bad sectors since the ’80s.
The unbelievably mislabeled DVD is as shitty as luck gets, but I truly don’t understand what could be the issue with the Asus (region-free) DVD drive. The first thing I’d do is try playing the DVDs with different software. Poke around online for some DVD software like PowerDVD, WinDVD, or a variety of other freebies out there and see if any of them work.
If the sum’bitch just won’t work, you can go for the last resort: rip the DVDs to your hard drive, which will eradicate the region coding and copy protection. Use this super nifty little program to do it. After that, you can either watch the DVD off your hard drive with a program like PowerDVD, or burn it back to a DVD+R and watch it in a regular region 1 DVD player. The only problem with burning to DVD+R is, if your source disc is dual-layer, DVDShrink will need to compress the picture to fit and it might not look as good after that. (In my experience, though, the difference will be practically undetectable if you choose all the maximum quality options.)
Let me know if you need any help finding a copy of DVDShrink. The author can’t “legally” offer it for download on his site, but I can shoot you a copy if you need it.
Well, we always used to joke about the “schlock rays”, remember — maybe I’m the source of the schlock rays that hit my computers. =P
Yeah, the mislabeled DVD is a bitch. What happened was, I ordered the DVDs that have Puffy’s music videos on them, one of which is Jet DVD, with videos from said album, as well as a few others. Another disc I got was Run! Puffy! Run!, which details Puffy’s first trip to America, and also has their first music videos on it. Unfortunately, when I placed the Jet DVD (even labeled as such) into the player, the program that ran was Run! Puffy! Run! I’m probably not going to bother trying to return the disc; it’d probably be cheaper to buy a new copy (which I’ll probably do eventually, though the disc is like $40) than to ship it all the way back to Japan.
Strangely enough, I don’t think the playback software (in this case plain ol’ Media Player) is the problem — I think it’s the drives themselves. The Asus won’t even read the discs at all — yet it’ll boot up (and play) other DVDs I place in there (Region 1 or Region free, naturally). The NEC (the burner) is acting strangely, too — aside from having my PC lock up when I’m playing DVDs in it, I mean. For example, it won’t read CDs anymore, and it doesn’t seem to want to burn anything either. Though I don’t really use that drive normally (actually, I don’t use either drive that much, since I don’t really play PC games anymore, and I use an exterior player for CDs), so it’s never really been a problem until now.
Initially, I figured the problem might have to do with overheating — the first time playback stopped my machine rebooted itself, which is usually indicative of overheating (at least it seems). So I took the side of the case off, but after that the stupid thing just began locking up, so I dunno. It might be a combination of a wacky DVD drive and that stupid Radeon that has given me nothing but grief over the years.
Incidentally, did you happen to get the mail I sent a week or two back soliciting advice about region-free DVD players? I’d still really like to pick one up one of these years, and I trust your opinion far more than some anonymous schlep whose opinion I’d find online somewhere.
Oh yes, I remember the “schlock rays!” Hahahaha, that was great. At first we thought the Grateway was putting out its own “schlock rays” and falling ill as a result of its own poison. Who knows, though. I hate that kind of problem; it’s impossibly hard to solve.
So, did both drives start acting funky around the same time? I wonder if you’ve got a bad (or loose, heh heh) IDE cable connecting those things to the motherboard? Might as well check that the cable is snug on all three connection points (motherboard, drive 1 and drive 2). Perhaps Forster has a spare IDE cable you could borrow, put in place of the existing one and see if things improve? It sounds retarded that a cable could be the problem, but that was actually an issue I had once with a CD-ROM drive failing. And believe me, back in college, I had CD-ROM drives failing practically every five minutes. Optical drives sucked back then.
It sounds like ATI (or at least your particular ATI card) requires separate drivers for DVD decoding. Sounds weird to me, and of course we all know of ATI’s storied lack of driver quality, so you could be right about that being a problem. Your card is definitely more than capable of simple DVD playback, so perhaps the drivers are corrupt. If you’re feeling brave you could run Driver Cleaner and Cab Cleaner, wipe out all existing ATI drivers and then reinstall.
The eventual master course of action along that line of thinking would be to reinstall Windows, but of course that’s never a pleasant proposition — especially when you get done with it and find out that your problem still isn’t fixed.
Oh yeah, I got your email about the region-free DVD player. Been a long while since I picked mine up (it’s still going strong!), but I got it from here: CodeFreeDVD.com. Hilariously, the website actually looks exactly the same as it did in 1999, but I had no trouble with them at the time. They have a few that are pretty affordable, like between $150 and $230. When I got my region-free Pioneer DV-525 from them, the sucker was over $400.
Looking at their site, what’s really cool is that their modified players do internal conversion from PAL to NTSC. You don’t need to care about that, because Japan uses NTSC like we do, but that means you can also play European and Australian DVDs on your TV set. In the old days, the players would play and output PAL but you’d have to have a PAL-compatible TV, which basically nobody does here in the U.S.
No, the drives didn’t go wonky at the same time; the NEC has been wonky for a while now, whereas I haven’t had any problems with the Asus until I tried playing my Region 2 Puffy DVDs today. Then again, I don’t use my DVD drives to watch DVDs (especially considering I have my regular DVD player, the Xbox, the Xbox 360, and the PS/2 all hooked up to my TV and with DVD playback capability), so who knows how long the Asus has been finicky about DVDs. But like I said, other non-Region 2 discs I have play fine.
I suppose I can try a new IDE cable; I actually have a spare one (one of those “space saving” ones) lying around here somewhere; the only reason it’s not in my machine now is the last time I tried putting it in (with Forster’s help) my system jacked up (big surprise there, eh?)…which may have been a result of something not being plugged in all the way or something.
I guess reinstalling drivers or Windows would be a definite last resort — it’s not something I really relish thinking about.
Thanks for the info about the DVD players; maybe once I get some more money (from our upcoming job, perhaps) I can look into buying a region-free player; those prices are pretty good, especially considering they’re region free.
Again, thanks for the help!
No problem; wish I could discern with more certainty what was going on.
I still suggest trying DVDShrink; perhaps the drives will have an easier time of ripping the discs than playing them, and then you can watch ‘em from the hard drive or burn them to a disc you can play in a regular player. Just Google for it and you should find a downloadable link on the first page of results; that’s what I did.
As to that job, it’s still coming…I would have sent you some material already, but we (read: the boss and I) decided to change the style I developed and go more “next gen” with the look of the map icons we’re making. As soon as I nail down a style he likes, I’ll send stuff your way. I have a 7-page list of icons that needs building, so some help would certainly be welcome…
Well, I downloaded DVDShrink; interestingly, I was able to watch one of the DVDs through the program’s playback option without any PC issues (and I didn’t even rip the disc, either; it was a straight disc playback). Maybe there was an issue with Media Player after all. Or maybe I just caught the PC during a moment where it didn’t feel like acting up. I dunno. Still, that’s good news.
But wait, there’s more good news! Apparently whatever drug I was under the influence of earlier has subsided — just for giggles, I input my Jet DVD into the drive…and lo and behold, it was the correct DVD! Now, whatever diety you worship, I swear to it that, when I put the Jet DVD in the drive earlier today, it played Run! Puffy! Run!. I swear. I even took the disc out of the drive and inspected it. But now…it appears that I have no mislabeled disc after all.
What a day.
Also, whenever you’re ready to make icons, so am I. Money is always a good thing.