Optical drive nuttiness

Hardware and technical stuff
1

Is there any reason my Bluray internal drive should read Bluray movies and data DVD discs just fine, but not commercially manufactured DVD movie discs? I get the spinny disc icon on my cursor for a moment, and then nothing. According to Windows (7), the drive is empty. I would just chalk it up to bad hardware, but if it can read DVD data discs, it should be able to read other DVDs also, right?

I tried uninstalling/reinstalling the drive and updating the drivers but it hasn’t made a difference.

2

I think blu-ray and dvd operate on different wavelengths and use entirely different lasers. The dvd laser must have died.

3

Are you sure it’s all movie discs? My PS3 has issues with a few, specific DVDs, for reasons I could never figure out.

4

It’s probably one of these:

Try a firmware update if you haven’t yet (not the driver, the firmware).

5

Ignore windows explorer - what does a DVD player program show?