The VideoLAN Forums

VLC is suddenly refusing to play about half my DVDs.

Some play fine, but others simply won't play at all.

All my DVDs are in near mint condition. It's the same DVDs that are failing every time.

Seem to fall neatly into sci-fi (with the notable exception of Doctor Who) and .....ahem NSFW discs that won't play.

Failure by disc genre? New one on me....anyone got any ideas?

First, reboot your computer, then reset the preferences (the manual way) and try again:
https://wiki.videolan.org/VSG:ResetPrefs

Thanks. Already tried that.

Quick update...possibly a clue, although I can't see how.

I was going to have a Twilight Zone marathon today....lazy Sunday and all that, which was going fine until I got to the 1980's reboot.

Guess what? VLC refuses to play the discs. (I had to grab them from Upmovies in the end, all of which played fine).

So, as a test, even though, as said, all my discs are near mint, just to see if something ha happened to the discs that wasn't visible, I thought I'd buy one of the discs off Ebay.

Pretty much all copies were way expensive.

I checked out my other discs...he ones that play fine are cheap as chips, mostly around £2 from Music Magpie.

All the ones that don't are expensive, I'd often have to pay £20-£30.

100% correlation.

How is this possible? ...and what can I do to fix this?

Are these discs playing with another player ?
If not, then I guess you have done something wrong on your system, like fiddling too much with the region settings.

Ahhhh....you may be onto somethng.

I don't have another DVD player to test.

I have never done anything with the region settings on my PC - I've never had to. VLC has always played everything right off the bat...and I've always ignored DVD regions when buying DVDs on the basis that VLC will play all regions.

However, having checked the discs, the ones that won't play are region 1 discs mostly...some are region 4.

VLC used to play all these discs, so what could have changed? As said, I have never - ever - gone anywhere near the region settings on my PC....and whatever has changed, how do I change it back?

VLC just obey the OS and drive region settings. If you used many different regions discs then you may have used the maximum of allowed changes because there is a limit for region changes.
So you may need to find a way to reset this limit but we are not going to talk about that here because this is not legal.