DVDs

No matter what anybody claims, DVD technology is still a bit shaky. Even so it is rare to find a DVD that cannot be played at all. A disk that will not play on one or two or three DVD player(s) will suddenly spring into life on another machine.
If you are ever upgrading a DVD player or burner hang on to the old machine if you can, you never know when it might be of service for this very purpose. Several reasons have been given for this phenomenon, such as slightly different head alignments and differences in read speed.
In reply to your question Joe (see - I do remember what I am replying to...sometimes), I have occasionally noticed that older DVDs are more forgiving; this could explain why it plays that disk. It is also possible that the machine downstairs is a player and the new one is a burner/player. For playback purposes, read-only heads do actually perform better than read/write heads.

Think there might be a problem with the DVD itself. I bought the Piccadilly Line DEV off Video125 and had to get a replacement copy. The 'chaptering' on the current one means theres a elongated pause between chapters.

All hail technology! ;D

I've had DVD drives in my PC that haven't played particular discs correctly. Coming into Harrow-on-the-Hill on the Video125 Met DVD and one drive just froze. Very strange!

There's a simple answer to this:

The more you pay for a DVD player, the better quality equipment you get. The downside is that the better quality means it's more choosey about which DVD's it will read.

Pay less and you'll get inferior equipment which reads inferior DVD's!!