Page 1 of Problems with LOTR

Just bought the extended version of the two towers. Now the film plays ok on all my players (grundig gdv230 and sanyo dvd-7201), however when i try to access the audio commentaries they dont play, no sound is heard even though you can see who is speaking. When i tested the discs in my computer, the commentaries worked, so the disc aint a problem. Does anybody know what could be wrong? any help would be appreciated

Try out some different selections on your player`s audio setup (but make a note of what the current settings are before you mess around with them!). Like you say, it sounds like the disc is fine so try out a few different audio options and hopefully the commentaries will be heard...

Dazza.

Brentworth - have you had any joy? I have precisely the same problem. See a copy of an email I sent to the manufacturer:

Our problems concern the commentaries, or rather lack of them. As a control we had our main DVD player play the commentaries from Fellowship Ext with no problem. When we try to play the Director commentary the captions (saying who is speaking) come up, but the letters are distorted, and there is no commentary, just the normal sound. Try to play any of the other commentaries and you get the same, except you always get the distorted Director commentary captions, no matter which commentary is selected. The same is true of all the commentaries on disk 2 (normal sound, no commentary, distorted Director captions), excpet for when the Director commentary is selected, in which case there is no sound at all. All this took place on a Limit DVD multi region player which has never had any problems previously.

To check, I put disk 1 into my Apple Mac G4 dual 800 which has a Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-103 in it. I can get the audio to work on each commentary, but no captions.

I`ve been through every sound setting, but as the setup I have works fine with every other dvd I suspect it might be a coding error. We are now on our fourth copy and are really getting desperate!

Just tested my copy and I can`t get any commentaries either. >:(
I can select the different options, for example on the cast commentary I get the caption for which actor is speaking, but I just get normal dialogue whatever audio setup I choose.
It would probably have taken me months to find out, I haven`t had time to watch the film through normally yet.
Anybody else? Everybody get testing - NOW!

Commentaries work ok on my copy, with appropriate titles (Tosh SD330).

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It might not help you, but I feel a little better knowing other people are having problems. Found some more last night - the same problem occurs in documentaries 6 and 7 on disk 4. OK, call me sad for going through all the disks already. Any more anyone?
I spoke to customer services at HMV head office yesterday and they are contacting the UK distributors (Entertainment in Video) to see if they can shed any light on this. I`ll let you know when they get back to me.
Ady

I am having very similar problems, when selecting the commentary, i get normal DD 5.1 sound wiht captions. However, using the audio mode on my remote I can get to them, but obviously without captions.

Anyone heard anything yet from the distributor / customer services?

The discs I received were quite badly scratched, although I doubt this has anythign to do with the commentaries as the movie plays fine in Dolby and DTS.

Going to go and check out the extras, see if there`s anything wrong there.

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Thanks Jim, used your trick and finally heard the commentaries without captions. Still good though. Talked to a helpful bloke at my local Richer Sounds who`d heard of a few problems mainly with older machines like mine. Reckoned that the current DVD encoding specs had changed ever so slightly which caused these problems and that there was no way round it.

I have the same problem with the two towers. fellowship works fine
What was the solution you tried?
From not having any DVD players to having 3 in our house within 8 months (as a result of the Fellowship being released) it is only the latest DVD player to our house (that of my 5 year old`s!!!!) and the PC that actually plays it correct! I`m not sure if knowing that there is this problem out there-not just mine- makes me feel better. One thing I must add -why didn`t Viggo do any commentary?
;) ? :( ?

This item was edited on Saturday, 31st January 2004, 17:10

By pure luck I managed to get the audio of the cast to play.
I pressed MENU on my remote when i meant to press ENTER (this was when the screen showed the 4 different Audio options and the indicator was on the cast audio link)
This may not help you but have a go at messing about with your buttons- it seems that DVD players are like humans each one has diferent buttons that get them going! :)