Retro Tech and Movie Blog

It’s been buried on a shelf for a few years now, being put there ever since the disc loading tray refused to open and close without jamming. But, this evening, I was determined to do what I could to get it functional again. Turns out all this trouble was caused by one tiny little belt.

This Sony DVP-SR400P was one of the earlier DVD players I ever bought, back in 2009 or 2010. I think it was the third, after our very first DVD player (a Sylvania brand) and DVD recorder (a LiteOn brand). It worked quite well and was pretty reliable. But sometime around 2015 or so, it started having problems with the disc tray; getting stuck when trying to load or eject a DVD.

One day, I finally had enough of prying the disc try out and replaced it with an inexpensive DVD player from the local department store. It worked well enough, but didn’t last too long. A few months later, it would not read any DVDs that I put into the player. So, the search was on for yet another DVD player. The last one I ever bought was from Amazon. It was a more expensive player, but once again, just a month after purchase, the darn thing was skipping during playback of every DVD that was loaded into it. Thankfully Amazon took the thing back and refunded me my money.

After this, I went with the external USB DVD reader/writer with the Raspberry Pi, which as been performing just fine for the last couple of years. The only thing about this setup is, the Raspberry Pi uses HDMI for it’s video/audio out. Anything we watch via the DVD drive cannot be recorded with our Neuros OSD, which utilizes RCA video and audio jacks. So, any new DVDs we purchased these last couple of years have not yet been recorded to MP4, which we like to do for backup and convenience.

With Christmas approaching, I was thinking that there will probably be a couple more DVD boxed sets appearing under the Christmas tree again this year. So, it would be great if I could do something to be able to record, once again. I didn’t want to spend more money, yet again, on another DVD player that would probably fail on us, so tonight I decided to see what I could (if anything) to get the Sony DVD player working. Apart from the DVD tray issue, the player worked perfectly fine. There must be something I could do to get it working again.

I spent the next hour or so doing a complete tear-down of the disc tray mechanism. I knew that there was the potential of me breaking something or taking something apart that I would not be able to put back together again. But, I thought, the thing isn’t doing me any good like this anyway, so I won’t be in any worse shape if I broke something now. Amazingly, though, I didn’t break anything and I was able to “reverse engineer” the mechanics of the disc tray mechanism to understand enough about how it worked.

From all that I could see, there wasn’t anything out of place. Although everything about it (apart from the laser optics) was made of plastic, there were no broken gears or other gizmos that I could see. I was able to move the mechanisms by hand and they all seemed to work. So, my attention then turned to the little DC motor that made the gears go. It looked okay to me, but I noticed that there was a little belt which felt kind of rigid to me… it didn’t have much spring to it. And although it seemed to turn okay when I moved the assembly by hand, maybe there wasn’t enough tension in it to do the job when the motor spun.

Sure enough, when I tried pressing the eject button on the face plate lying on the table at the end of its ribbon cable, the belt was slipping and could not generate enough force to carry out the multi-step process of ejecting the disc platter. Eureka!

Luckily, I had a bag of assorted replacement belts, which I bought last year for potential repairs I might have to do for my other retro tech (like a turntable, cassette deck, VCR or LaserDisc player). I was able to find one that was close in size to the semi-petrified one in the DVD player and replaced it. Sure enough, with a new stretchy and rubbery belt, the disc tray opened and closed as it was designed to do.

After trying to remember where all the parts fit together, I got the DVD player re-assembled and tested out a few DVDs. I’m glad to say that the player is, once again, working perfectly! All of this trouble because of this simple little “rubber band”. Go figure. So, now it seems like I’ll finally be able to get some DVDs recorded to MP4s, after all this time!

It’s moments like this that makes me wonder how much other perfectly good/easily repairable electronics get thrown out into landfills every day when it wasn’t necessary. It’s such a shame that we got rid of the “repair man” and went for the throw out and replace culture instead. Sometimes, with just a little bit of determination, it is possible to fix something rather than replace it.

Now I’m wondering if there’s something I could do to get the cheap DVD player I bought to replace the Sony working again. That one was having disc reading problems. But, maybe it’s fixable, too!