Several months ago I found out a person that I corresponded with had a copy of a television special that I had seen in the 1970s and never again. I had an audio copy of the special, but not a video copy. She very kindly offered to make a copy for me sometime and today I received it, along with a couple of other things she thought I'd enjoy on two other DVDs.

Excitedly, I put one of the DVDs in my DVD drive of my computer. It didn't autostart, but homemade DVDs often don't. When I went to click the play button, the computer was frozen.

#$^$#@$!@!$# Windows! I pressed the button to eject the disk...and it wouldn't eject. I had to wait until I rebooted and then eject.

To make a long story short, I tried all three DVDs, several times, and it completely locked up my computer every time.

When James installed new hardware during the upgrade of my computer, he installed a program with the sound card that overrode my DVD settings, making this piece of software the default for DVDs. My DVD player came with Power DVD, which I prefer, so I went into preferences in this new DVD software and disabled the autostart for DVDs. I figured that perhaps the disks weren't playing because I had done this and this new DVD software was causing some type of play problem.

So I put one of the disks into my DVD recorder instead. The disc was a DVD-R and my unit records at -R, so I anticipated no trouble.

Instead, the disk completely locked up the DVD recorder, too, and I couldn't eject the disk, even following the instructions in the manual. I went crazy for about ten minutes, envisioning having to drag the unit to a repair shop to get the disk removed! Finally I managed to get the "gate" down and the eject button finally worked.

James agreed to try it on his computer and, after his DVD player wouldn't work because of the Windows 2000 upgrade, he downloaded new ActiveX files and the DVD finally played.

I still don't understand why the DVDs my friend made will not play on my machine nor on my DVD recorder. We have other "home burned" DVDs that play perfectly well on both.

Oh, the really bizarre thing that happened because these DVDs locked up? It erased every single one of my Firefox browser bookmarks! Zap, all gone. Thankfully I had duplicates of the important ones in Internet Explorer.

I have no idea how a DVD that won't play has any influence on your internet browser. Talk about one for the books.

----------------------------------------------------------------
. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 9:55:00 PM

Comments: Post a Comment