Pioneer DV-343 DVD Player not working. Advice?

InfidelCastro

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Hi everyone, I received a Pioneer DV-343 DVD player from my sister about two years ago. She had originally purchased it in 2002 I believe. She didn't want it anymore because it was not working. It worked great at first, but after about 6-8 months it quit playing DVD's. It will still play audio CD's just fine, but when you put a DVD in you just get a black screen and it doesn't respond to the buttons on the remote or the front face at all, except for when you originally load it you can press play and it will attempt to play but nothing will show on the screen. You can hit stop and it will stop, but if you press play again it will not play. The only thing you can do then is remove it from the player.

It's basically been sitting on a shelf the past two years. I dug it out yesterday and decided to mess with it. It did have a problem almost since it was new with the door closing on it's own as soon as it came all the way open, but that now seems to have worked itself out after I took it apart and tinkered with it last night.

I've done some reading on this player and have heard that this is a common problem with them. Both they stop playing DVD's and the doors have problems. This unit is of course way beyond the one year warranty. I dispatched an email to Pioneer to see if they could help in any way. I've read it could be anything from bad RAM to a bad optical assembly.

When I put the DVD in I was expecting the light to turn from red to blue, but I did some research and found the lasers in current DVD players are still a red wavelength. So I'm not sure if that's what the problem is. And it does detect DVD's and CD-ROM's as what they are.

Anybody have any experience with these DVD players? Seems like they have a bad reputation for just dieing after a few months. My particuliar unit is manufactured in Malaysia. I understand they've been made in Japan, China and Malaysia and have read that the Chinese and Malaysian units have the most problems, which doesn't surprise me..

Any help is appreciated. :)
 
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eluminator

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All I know about DVD players is I bought a Symphonic WF104 on eBay for $11, plus $11 shipping. Best deal I ever made. It's very small and very light and it works. You probably can't get them quite that cheap anymore.
 

InfidelCastro

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You can get the 20-$30 players at the stores all the time, but I'd really like to fix this one rather than buy a new one. If I bought a new one it would around $70 because I don't like the uber-cheap units.
 

Lynx_Arc

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If it plays music CDs the laser is working in that mode, not working in dvd mode either means the firmware is fouled up or the optics is slightly out of alignment not enough to bother music CDs but enough to not allow dvds to be read as they have narrower tracks requiring more precision to read.
It could also be playing the dvds but the video output is fried, when you play dvd movies do you get any sound on them but no picture?
 

InfidelCastro

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Well, Pioneer "customer service" was totally unhelpful. I got zero answers from my questions and instead a form email from one of their trained chimps to take it to a local Pioneer service center on Broadway, which I already knew was there.

I used to be a huge fan of Pioneer products back in the day, but not for a long time, since they were bought out by some bunghole corporation several years ago. This was the last straw. As far as I'm concerned, their Chinese junk is just that now.

I'll probably end up keeping this unit as a garage CD player or something, as I see no point in sticking anymore time or any money in it.
 
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