DVD player says "This disc is not formatted for this region"

[AGJ]

I tried to find another thread where a member had a similar problem with a laptop that had a matshita drive in it but I am unable to find it. This member tried an external DVD drive and it finally worked for her so I figured I would mention that for you but the drives are not cheap just so you know and we can not guarantee that it will work for you as well

[GregiBoy]

Hi AGJ...

Did you mean this one?

[Keynes]

AGJ is totally correct. Laptop drives, especially matSHITa, have always been problematic and I too would recommend a good quality external burner.

From what I can remember of your problem, have you tried the discs in another set top player. If not, I would do this before purchasing another drive.

Tried the copies in another DVD player and all of them played. The player is 6-7 years old so I wouldn't mind getting another. However, is it odd that the copies do not play but the originals do? In other words, it doesn't appear that the player has completely failed but has just decided in the past week that it will play copies made in the past but not newly made copies.

[AGJ]

Nope it not that one as I think it was posted in the Transformers 2 thread but not too sure. Tried finding it but with all the posts from so many members in the same threads it hard to find something for referance

[AGJ]

Tried the copies in another DVD player and all of them played. The player is 6-7 years old so I wouldn't mind getting another. However, is it odd that the copies do not play but the originals do? In other words, it doesn't appear that the player has completely failed but has just decided in the past week that it will play copies made in the past but not newly made copies.

It has happened to me and I went out purchased a new DVD player and 6 months later the one that wouldn't work worked again.

[tli]

Tried the copies in another DVD player and all of them played. The player is 6-7 years old so I wouldn't mind getting another. However, is it odd that the copies do not play but the originals do? In other words, it doesn't appear that the player has completely failed but has just decided in the past week that it will play copies made in the past but not newly made copies.

It still may not be your player that's at fault. The DVD burner in your laptop could still be at issue as others have suggested. I had a DVD/CD combo drive that burnt playable DVDs and CDs when new. However, after about two months of operation burning several discs per week, the CD burner started flaking out with some intermittent burnt CD-Rs that would not play in certain players. Looking at the faulty burnt discs, it was obvious that the motor tracking mechanism for the CD burn laser was failing. The created tracks were no longer concentric--probably sometimes so bad that they're out of spec--so that certain players were simply unable to track and play the discs properly. This got worst over time until eventually all burnt CD-R were unreadable while burning of DVDs continued to work just fine. Long story short, it just goes to show that burners could go out of spec--especially when stressed and overheated. The original discs are typically manufactured and burnt under tighter specs. Just a thought to consider...