Some dvd drives don't read some movies

[TinheadNed]

I'm having issues with my various computers at home. Two have dvd readers, one has a dvd writer. There's also some spare dvdrom drives floating about my house.

I'm having a problem in that I can't find a dvd drive that will play all my dvds. It's not the software, as all machines are running Gentoo and are kept up to date. My nice vaio laptop plays all dvds. The dvd writer (it's been in a few machines) doesn't play dvd films at all. It doesn't even read the disc!

I have two drives that read some dvds, and I have one drive that reads all discs. Until two days ago where now it appears to refuse to seek past a certain sector on the disc, as films stop about an hour and a half in.

Now, one or two drives I can cope with just being duff, but the dvd writer is barely a year old and has NEVER played dvds properly at all. The rest of my drives appear to be degrading.

This is a problem with brand new discs, straight out of packaging and with no scratches. I can only see two solutions: buy a new drive, or buy some lens cleaner disc job for the drives. I've had bought one of the cleaner discs before and not seen any improvement.

Thus, I beseech the mighty forum to offer me better advice!

NB. As stated I'm pretty sure this is not a software problem as it flows across xine and mplayer, but not across drives. But if anyone asks me to test in Windows, I don't actually have it on anything but the laptop, and that already plays all my dvds.