DVD drive won't recognize copyrighted DVD movies that I own

I've read through so many posts here about CD/DVD drives "disappearing", but, those solutions won't help my problem.

I love my Plextor 716a but recently (I don't know when or why or how this happened) it will not read or recognize paid-for movie DVDs anymore. It will recognize & play commercial music CDs, backed-up music CDs & backed up DVD movies & data CDs & DVDs.

I've exhaustively tried so many, many, many solutions I can't remember everything I've tried, but here's some:

updated the drive's firmware
uninstalled & reinstalled the drive and its IDE
installed new codecs
installed new DVD decoders, including the recommended free VCL one
nothing is helping!!!!

I thought I might have to buy another DVD burner, but, I was assured by Geek Squad (phone call) that it's a software issue - based upon my symptoms. He said something about the upper & lower filters.

Reading about those filters here, I don't have this key: ----HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} ----in my registry.

PLEASE! Can someone help me???
Thanks,
Sue

You have to go to Device manager and double click on the drive to see this setting.

Are you expecting to be able to insert a movie DVD and have it play automatically? If so, there may just be some problems with the file associations and auto-play options and it may not be a disk or drive problem at all. Try inserting the movie DVD into the drive and then manually running Windows Media Player (or whatever player you use) and see if you can get it to play the drive using it's play options.

I found my diagnostic tools for plextor and ran them. I don't know what I'm doing, but, on one screen there was something about "change book type" or something like that and it was unchecked, so I thought, "what've I got to lose?" and I checked it and then reloaded a movie and it automatically started playing. I dunno if this is a fluke or a fix. ... gonna re-boot & try again with another movie and see if it still works. I'll let you know.

4ryan6
unfortunatly (as so many others), Sue did not get back to state if that was infact the FIX.

And Yes I still have my 716A (in a backup computer) and a 755 in this one.

Sorry about not getting back to you sooner. The drive still 'works' occasionally, but I decided I'd better go ahead and get another drive.

I bought a Samsun external. I don't have the model number right now, but so far, I'm happy with it. Mostly I use the writer for backing up data files and very rarely, backing up a DVD movie.

Thanks again for all of your help!
Sue