Damage to DVD recorder firmware from copyguard?

Question

I have a stand-alone DVD recorder. I played a commercial

copy of a movie in it brought home from the local library. The

first time I tried to play it the machine locked up and I had to

unplug it and plug it back in to get it to function. Then it would

play the movie.

Thereafter the machine would no longer record anything on

single-use media (DVD+R). I know it sounds paranoid,

but I think the copyguard on the commercial movie release

may have damaged the firmware on my recorder. Has anyone

else had any similar experiences?

Answer 1

The DVD can't interfere with the firmware because all it is meant to do is keep it from getting recorded from another source, this is why, when DVDs came out, and we were still using VCRs, that if you connected a DVD player to a VCR, the DVD image would look bad on screen, it was meant to keep people from recording DVDs on VCR tapes

Now that VCRs are basically phased out and we all use DVDs, the same thing applies, but instead of giving us a brown/green blurry image, it says a message saying the source is write protected (I had this happen to me when I was trying to record a UMD from my PSP to a DVD in my DVD recorder)

Since there is no hard drive or anything to record the video from the commercial DVD, there is no way to store it to record it on a blank DVD, so by removing the commercial DVD, all the video information is gone, making it impossible to make a copy

Since it's impossible to copy that way, there is no reason for a commercial DVD's anti-copy protection to zap the firmware, if the DVD did zap the firmware of the DVD recorder, you would have the right to sue the company that stamped/wrote the DVD

Since you said that the recorder locked up, you may have a problem with the recorder itself and you may want to take it in to get it fixed, or see if you can reset the recorder

EDIT: Yes, a disc that contains data to overwrite the firmware will overwrite or corrupt the firmware, the anti-copy protection on a DVD is not coded to do so though

Like I said before, there is no reason to deliberately corrupt the firmware, so yes, in theory, you could buy a DVD Video that has firmware corruption software on it, but what is the point to do so?  If they are trying to protect their video from being copied, corrupting the firmware is just wasting their time

Their time would be better spent on creating a virus to infect a computer that would be used to copy the DVD, but that was attempted my Sony BMG on audio CDs with something called a root-kit, and look what happened to Sony

If something did corrupt your firmware, I would think it would be a firmware update CD, not a Video DVD

EDIT2: I got a DVD recorder as a replacement for an older DVD player that broke down (due to optical problems, would not read a disc), I personally haven't had any problems with my recorder myself, I did have a problem a little while back where it would ask me to pay for YesDVD, but I emailed the company that made the YesDVD software for it and they told me a way to bypass the program, after that, no problems

I don't think that all DVD recorders "suck", of course there are different brands that do, but being that not all DVD recorders are alike, the hardware/software/firmware on the recorder differs depending on brand, My DVD recorder is from Philips (I forgot the model and I can't find it online)