Philips DVD player DVP642/37 - freezes up

Does it simply stop playing at that point (but can be persuaded to continue playing if you fast-forward/chapter-skip)?

Or, does it freeze up entirely, and have to be power-cycled to start working again?

It will not fast forward or do anything within the current file, but I can make it skip to the next file and start playing it.

It may be that there's something wrong with the files. I'm working on that possibility. I hope that's it.

Original firmware? I have a DVP5990 with modified firmware. Occassional it acts up. Unplugging the power for a few minutes has restored functions.

On Fri, 6 Jan 2012 18:54:41 -0500, Peabody wrote (in article ):

I have the same problem, but only with DVRs which have been ripped by someone else. I haven't pursued it, but I suspect errors in the encoding rather than physical media errors.

One longshot possibility, on those, there are one or two electrolytics in the power supply that are very common to go bad.

Normally the failure causes the unit not to turn on or shut itself off after it's on and loading the disc (current draw from the tray motor).

If the unit never had them replaced, it's a cheap and easy fix.

It might help. Google for like "dvp642 capacitor".

-bruce snipped-for-privacy@ripco.com

Thanks for the responses.

I re-rendered two of the files that were causing problems, and the new renders seem to play fine. It's not clear what may have been wrong with the original files, particulalry since they didn't freeze at the same point on each play, but if this works for a few more files, then I'm going to chalk it up to unknown encoding structure errors. But actually, I think that's the best answer I could get. At least is suggests the player is ok.

But I'm going to check on those capacitors, just in case.

That's distinctly possible. MPEG-2 and similar video-encoding standards allow for a *lot* of flexibility in the encoding... but most playback devices aren't designed to copy with the full range of possible encodings.

Commercial-DVD encoding is usually done with well-tuned encoders, designed to stay well within the envelope of encoding ranges that DVD players can handle. DivX and other home-encoded recordings, not so much.

I've seen some MPEG-2 decoder chips which would choke (badly) on some borderline or out-of-spec MPEG data streams... sometimes so badly that a hard reset was required to get them to decode again properly.

Well worth doing.

I was able to restore a Cyberhome DVD player to usable condition, a couple of years ago, by doing a capacitor replacement... several were bulging, and a couple of the others showed a high ESR when I measured them. Replaced 'em all and the player started working again.

A capacitor ESR tester is a very useful piece of kit these days. They're available commercially, and you can home-brew one without too much difficulty. I built one based on the following: