For those of you who have had DVD recorders, how can you tell when they stop working?

I have a Panasonic DMRE30 that I bought about 4 years ago. I use it A LOT and the past few times, the door has taken forever to open. Today, the player is unable to read blank discs or already burned discs.

I tried playing a retail store DVD and that seems to work. But, I don't want to buy a whole new system if mine still works. I can't figure out why it's able to read retail DVDs but not those that are burned.

I tried playing the same burned DVDs in a regular dvd player that I have and they worked fine (so it's not the disc).

I am just worried my recorder is going... Is there a way to tell or is this it?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your recorder is going. It starts with how the recorder has a hard time opening/closing, then it goes to where it won't read dvds. This has happened to both my recorders after three years of heavy use, the same process.

It seems (at least for me) it is the lasers inside the drive that read the dvd that go. A CD will play fine, as well as everything else (tv tuner) except the whole DVD recording part.

What I did was go quickly to all the nearby stores looking for the remoteless store display models for sale and get a good look at their prices. One of them usually has the same unit only for sale at a very low price, and I already had the remote and power cord if that wasn't there as well. There's also ebay and always a lot of those type of deals on there.

Thank you for your help! I just wanted to confirm that was the problem.
I am going to get a new recorder. They are a lot cheaper now than when I first bought one.


Again, thank you! :)

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e368/willpower8/tosh2.jpgAnytime. I think that a DVD uses 3 lasers and a CD uses 1, hence why a DVD won't work. I dunno.

I got this at best buy for 80 bucks. It's got an 80GB (I think) hard drive in it, I downloaded the instructions, and I was nice so the kid ordered me the remote for free. It's just kinda missing a front cover in the middle that ejects.