So, I bought a new box set at Big Lots today.  Sci-Fi Serials: The Ultimate Collection.  Went to enter it in profiler (by UPC), but nothing came up.  Not unusual, added the UPC and went on to create the parent profile.

Since the 6 discs do not have separate UPCs, I inserted the first one in my drive to create the child profiles by disc ID as normal.  And here arrives the problem.

The drive would not read the disc ID.  Tried another disc in the set -> same problem.

Added the profile manually for the first disc and tried to add the disc ID it in the Discs section.  Got a message that said the disc was unable to be read or was not a DVD.

The discs would not play in PowerDVD either.

I thought maybe I had bought a dud, that the discs were manufacturers errors.  But, I put them in my DVD player in the living room, and they play there just fine.

Other discs are read just fine by both Profiler and PowerDVD (such as the discs for the set of Wanted: Dead or Alive, whose child profiles I've been working on) so my drive isn't bad.

Any ideas on anything I can do to read these discs with my computer?  Or why they won't read?  If I can't get them to read I won't be able to add the child profiles as anything other than manuals. 

That's an interesting idea.  Let's see what we get.

Going to My Computer. 

First, a known good disc.  Disc 6 of Wanted Dead or Alive shows up as being present, and when double-clicked on, goes straight to playing in PowerDVD.

Now, the first disc of the new set.  Hmm.  Now it reads just fine.

Stranger and stranger.

The only thing I've done is restart my computer.  Maybe that did the trick.

*shakes head*

Oh, well, problem solved - however in the heck it did it.  This can be closed. 

*shakes head some more*

Glad it sorted itself (computers are weird sometimes!) - you weren't 'accidentally' running any 'Make any region of disc work in my DVD drive' software at the time were you? I know this disables the Disc-ID identification feature as the software can mess up the correct reading.

Quoting Voltaire53:

Quote:
Glad it sorted itself (computers are weird sometimes!) - you weren't 'accidentally' running any 'Make any region of disc work in my DVD drive' software at the time were you? I know this disables the Disc-ID identification feature as the software can mess up the correct reading.

It does not, at least not with AnyDVD, can't speak for any other programs.

Quoting Voltaire53:

Quote:
Glad it sorted itself (computers are weird sometimes!) - you weren't 'accidentally' running any 'Make any region of disc work in my DVD drive' software at the time were you? I know this disables the Disc-ID identification feature as the software can mess up the correct reading.

What I'm running is Itunes, PowerDVD, Profiler and Foxfire.  I've never had that problem before.

Quoting Voltaire53:

Quote:
I use AnyDVD and it certainly stops me adding the Disc IDs whilst it's running.

Then something must be broken since it's designed to work with Profiler. It will always pass the original disc ID to the program. There was a time, must be a couple of years ago now, when it would modify the disc ID and because of that Profiler refused to read the disc ID when AnyDVD was active. But that was then, not so anymore.