I have a 6 disc carousel DVD player, Onkyo brand.  It's about 5 years old if not older, and it plays my own movies perfectly.  It has fibre optic output, etc, and is mated to my Onkyo receiver.

Recently, I noticed it will freeze, pixellate, etc with my daughter's DVDs.  These movies play perfectly on her protable DVD and her Sony dvd upstairs.  At first, I chalked it up to food, fingerprints, etc on her discs, but yerterday I pulled a new movie out of the package and put it directly into the machine, it froze and pixellated almot immediately.  Same story, on the upstairs Sony, it plays fine.  

So, what's wrong, can it be fixed, and is it worth it to fix it?

Thanks.  

Sounds like the laser may be dirty.  Well, not the laser but the lense it shines through.  My Panasonic did that a while back.  I tried a lense cleaner but it didn't work.  So I opened the case up and cleaned the lense myself.

I was hoping that you were gonna say you had a cheap $30 cyberhome dvd player..

But I feel bad about your onkyo..

Bump for more info, less pity.

Quoted: I was hoping that you were gonna say you had a cheap $30 cyberhome dvd player.. But I feel bad about your onkyo..

Hey man, thats my exact DVD player.

It only gets tired after a couple of movies.

It's about 5 years old if not older

I'm guessing this has a lot to do with it. In December 1998 I picked up a Pioneer DVL-700, combo DVD and LD unit. Luckily I worked at Best Buy at the time, so I got a good discount on it's $999 price point. But, about eight months ago or so I noticed the same thing....I'd pop in certain DVDs, and things would just go downhill....it'd pixellate, chop, and eventually freeze the player. I have one disc where the player could not even load the main menu....

It could be a matter of the lens getting dirty, or it could simply be a matter of an older laser/firmware not handling newer and more tightly encoded DVDs. I don't think the issue is that uncommon with the first/early gen DVD players. My solution was to pick up a new set top unit (Pioneer A563 iirc)......

You can try to clean the laser yourself...that's most likely it.  Otherwise, there's not much you can do, and it will cost 3 times the price of a new one to try and get that one fixed.  

I have the same problem w/ a Pioneer DVD player...it was the first progressive scan one I got.  

I just picked up a nice Toshiba w/ HDMI out for $140.  You can get multi disc ones for that, but I really wanted the HDMI out.