How to fix your ailing Sony DVD player

The wife and I went to play a rented DVD the other night, and if you have rented movies lately you probably can understand why I hate doing this. The discs are just about always scratched up by some ignorant sod buster with pugil sticks for hands. Well, luckily this one was not, yet my Sony DVD player kept saying it was dirty. WTF? After a bit of fumbling around I found it to play just fine in my other Sony player in the kids toy room, so I decided to do a bit of sleuthing. Since this wasn't the first time I had run into this I was looking at two options really; either my DVD player is dirty and needs to be cleaned, or it damaged and in need of a good fixing – most likely Office Space style. Luckily, option 3 presented it self.

The offending error is C 13:00 error, which in some cases can be cleared up by calibrating the player back to Single Layer (SL) and Dual Layer (DL) discs through the diagnostics menu. What menu you say? Well, I'll show you.

From all that I have read, it is best to calibrate both disc types starting with a single layer disc first. You can identify disc type by color since  Dual layer DVD's have a gold tint to the data side and single layer DVD's have a silver tint. The other way is if you have any burned discs from your computer, I did and I just used one of those as the single layer disc.

Take the disc out, turn the DVD player Off to standby mode using the remote. Then press the following 3 buttons Title, Clear, then Power within a second of each other. This will open the diagnostics menu:

Test Mode Menu

0. System Diagnosis
1. Drive Auto Adjustment(Calibration)
2. Drive Manual Operation
3. Mecha Aging
4. Emergency History (has total hours of playtime)
5. Version Information
6. Video Level Adjustment

To perform the disc calibration press option 1 on the Test Mode Menu to enter the Drive Auto Adjustment menu.

Drive Auto Adjustment

0. All
1. DVD-SL
2. CD
3. DVD-DL
4. SACD

Exit: RETURN

From here selection option 1 to calibrate the single layer disc first. The drive bay will open, so insert the disc and proceed. Once it has completed the player spits the disc out and you can proceed to option 3 for the same series of steps. When everything is completed, just hit the power button and go from there.

Viola!

This worked like a champ for me, so hopefully I will get another 7 years out of my DVD player. I'm beginning to feel a bit like an AV tech since I have fixed my own TV too. Now if only I could find some BC's with tape on them….

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