I'm having problems with two of the new movies that came for Christmas.

The first disc to show a problem was Harry Potter 3 which I bought for my daughter. Upon playing in my main DVD player, a Toshiba SD-3900, it was skipping from the very start. Becoming unwatchable about 2 minutes into it. I was set to take it back to the store, but then tried it in my old 5 year + ProScan DVD player (I believe this was manufactured by Pioneer for Circuit City's Divx format) and the movie plays fine. So I swapped this player out to my main TV and all was well for a few days.

Then last night, I tried watching Disc 1 of The Return of the King extended edition. At 56:00 minutes, it started to skip, then stopped completely. Trying jump around to different chapters and finally came to one that worked, about 45 minutes later in the movie.

I then tried the ROTK in the Toshiba player, and of course it played fine - that is until the very end of the movie and it started to skip again - but still played. When I turned off the player and back on again, it played these scenes fine. Go figure. I've watched both Special Feature discs of the ROTK on the Toshiba player with no problems.

I've tried swapping both movies between both players multipul times with various setups, but I get the problems every time. There are no visual defects on the discs and in all instances it was the first time playing them.

I've gotten bad discs in the past and have just exchanged them. But I've never had the problem of a movie working in one player but not the other and vice versa.

If anybody could offer advice or point me to a place on the web that might offer some good information, I would greatly appreciate it. I've posted this on a DVD site already, and have only gotten smart-ass replies so far.

I haven't gotten around to watching my Bourne Supremecy DVD yet, hopefully that will work fine. It's already been exchanged once - my wife bought the full-screen version. When will she learn??

Thanks,

I did a search on the internet for your Toshiba player and found these.

I have not really have issue with my players - they are all Sony.<ul><li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/B00008BO8Z/ref=cm_rev_sort/104-6560970-7575108?customer-reviews.sort_by=%2BOverallRating&amp;me=standard&amp;x=9&amp;y =5">Review</a></li></ul>

I got it "free" by using my AMEX rewards points and have been fairly happy with it until now. Don't recall when I got it, but I think it's been almost a year now.

Is there a way to "clean" a DVD player to see if that would make a difference?

But there is nothing touching the optical heads so they should not get dirty - It is more likely the discs are dirty than a player. I have had a few rental DVDs that I was able to fix by washing them at the sink with dish soap and rinsing well and then towel drying carefully.

I cleaned the Harry Potter disc with Mequires Clear Plastic Cleaner, which is what I clean all of my CD &amp; DVD's with. Tried the disc back in the Toshiba player which it wouldn't work in earlier, and it plays just fine now.

Tried the same thing with the ROTK disc, but it still got hung up at the same place on the ProScan player - but works fine in the Toshiba.

So I put the Toshiba player back on the main TV and I think all will be well now.

When I did clean the Harry Potter disc, there appeared to be some sort of residue on it which made the cleaner get "sticky"? I've never had the cleaner get sticky like that before when cleaning discs.

Ivory soap and water -

Looks like I was right about the DVDs being more likely the soruce for problems than players.

Glad you found the problem

I could not play the last four tracks of disc two, nor could I access any of the extras on disc two. I thought I had heard of some issues with the Denon 3910 and since I just got a 2910 I thought that might be it. But I pulled out my old Panasonic DVD player and it had the same problem. I exchanged the DVD and the new one works perfectly. This is the first time I've ever had a problem with a CD/DVD. Fresh out of the box the DVD's looked somewhat dirty, scratched and seemed thinner than other DVD's I own. I do not believe from the packaging that this was a returned set, so perhaps quality/quality control is suffering these days in the interest of cutting costs.