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April 9, 2007

troubleshooting

DVD Player’s confused about DVD titles

Posted Apr. 9, ’07, 11:35 AM PT by Kate Marshall
Category | Troubleshooting

DVD Player fonts.jpgHere’s an odd problem: Stuck about 15-20 DVDs in my MacBook’s optical drive (not all at once) while DVD Player was open. For both The Prestige, and Pirates of the Caribbean 2, the title over the main menu window displayed the disc’s name in Asian characters, instead of saying some variation of “Dead Man’s Chest,” or “Disney owns Johnny Depp’s soul for life.” The Prestige is from my local library while POTC 2 was purchased at Best Buy a few months ago. As far as I know, they’re not secretly pirated discs from a street corner.

Before I start going through troubleshooting tips that may not actually work, I thought I’d put the question to you, good readers: what’s going on here and how do I fix it? (Okay, that’s 2 questions for the price of one.) I’ve already checked all the language/input options I could think of in System Preferences and DVD Player. I’ve previously used Monolingual to delete language files I didn’t use. A trip through my hard drive didn’t yield any references to a DVD player plist file that I could tinker with it but maybe I’m just not looking hard enough. It’s one of those “not really a problem but kind of annoying anyway” issues. Don’t you just hate those?


5 Comments

Paul Biba said:

This happened to me yesterday for the first time on my MacBook. I inserted a DVD of The Tick and got a screen just like yours. After the DVD got running everything reverted to normal. The odd thing was the this was a 2 DVD set. The first DVD came up just fine, but not the second. I hadn't used the machine between playings, so it couldn't have been a setting I changed. I putting it down to a disk problem.

April 9, 2007 12:41 PM
john said:

This could be the result of DRM inhibiting the players ability to read the disc properly. The worst offender would be Sony Pictures which purposely adds garbage data to there discs to prevent copying. This could also cause this type of thing to happen. Just my guess.

April 9, 2007 1:27 PM
Wondercow Author Profile Page said:

I noticed the same thing with all of the Gummi Bears DVDs. But, what I found stranger than the Asian text in DVD player's window, is that the Finder seems to ignore the desktop icon. If I created a new file or folder, or dropped a clipping, on the desktop the Finder would put it on top of the disc icon like it didn't exist (the finder uses the first available empty grid starting on the top right – working down then left).

April 9, 2007 4:37 PM
Link33 said:

I have seen it on my Intel iMac too.
I can't remember it being a problem before. I wonder if it's intel, or Tiger, or just a new feature of DVD player to display the disc title. I suspect it's a Tiger/DVD Player issue.

April 10, 2007 8:21 AM
Anthony said:

I had an issue like this, but not with a DVD. I downloaded a CD from iTunes and burned it to a CD. My wife wanted the music on her iPod, but if she connected her iPod to my iMac, it would erase all of her music. I tried to rip the music off of the CD and when I inserted the cd and launched the software it pulled up some weird name for the band name and it also has chinese writing. I had to manually enter the cd information in.

April 10, 2007 10:29 AM

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