DVD burner won't read retail DVDs (but no problem with DVD-Rs)

Question

I have DVD+RW drive (TSSD SH-S223L) that has stopped recognizing retail movie DVDs. Windows recognizes the drive, but says it is empty when I put in a movie DVD. It has no problem reading or writing to DVD-Rs or CD-Rs, or reading retail music CDs.

I hate to lose this drive, as it's been the best one I've ever owned, reading many disks other drives and players could not.

I'm wondering if it's a firmware issue with a recent software update, perhaps to Windows 10? Or perhaps laser now won't read double-layer discs?

Any thoughts appreciated.

Drive is in an Inspiron 620, running Win 10.0.19043, Core i5-2320, 6GB RAM, Bios A02.

Thanks,
Ed

DELL-Cares · Answer

We tried reaching you on a private message asking for the Service Tag number to ascertain the warranty but did not receive a response. Please feel free to reply to the private message whenever you are available.

XPS_Man · Answer

Windows 10 doesn't have software support for DVDs and requires additional software to play them.

Try a different software, For Dell customers its free.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/power-media-player-for-dell/9mvpx2nw3722?rtc=1&activetab=pivot:overviewtab

evigil · Answer

Thanks, but that's not really the issue. Windows 10 doesn't even recognize that there is a disk in the drive, so Power Media Player thinks there's nothing there to play. Same for every other player and software.

I see lots of search results where drives won't read burned DVDS, but read commercially produced ones. This is the opposite case, & I've been unable to find where others have reported this.

evigil · Answer

Well, I'm even more perplexed now. I moved the DVD burner to a different PC and it reads all disks fine. I then moved it back to the original PC and had the same problem - read DVD-Rs fine, but not commercial DVDs.

In the original PC where I had issues, I put a new DVD burner, and it reads everything fine. (There's also a 2nd burner in that PC that never had these issues, aside from reading and writing slower, and being much more finicky with scratched disks.)

I'm still befuddled as to why this happened, but at least found a workaround.

Thanks, all.
Ed

XPS_Man · Answer

Some Intel chipset /GPU limitation regarding content Protections may be ????    Reinstall OS

Storage, Drives & Media

DVD burner won't read retail DVDs (but no problem with DVD-Rs)

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