anti-freeze feature

I have on several occasions gotten ticked when my DVD player freezes on one spot and falls flat on it's face due to the disk being dirty or worn out, requiring me to eject, clean, and re-insert the movie, then having to FF back to the area right after it, and sometimes the player will freeze up again because it got stuck on the messed up area during FF.

I think it's the way the player handles losing the signal from the disk. It seems as though it actually stops the laser moving and tries to re- establish focus on the same area that it can't read, ignoring your pressing of the FF or REW button, because once it "freezes" it stays frozen until you stop and/or remove the disk, reguardless of how long it sits, even if that's the only area of the disk that can't be read! If the laser were moving AT ALL it would eventually find some playable footage.

I don't mean to bash DVDs, but I remember VHS players being less picky about the playability of the tape. The only thing that would cause a tape player to stop dead in it's tracks is if

1. the tape actually ripped while it was playing

2. Some sort of malfunction, or a tape that has seen far better days, resulted in tape salad

3. someone unplugged it :D

Anything short of an "epic failure" such as tape salad would be ignored by the VHS player (but maybe not by you) and it would just keep on moving along

I think that if the player loses the signal, it should try to re-focus for a few seconds, then "bump" the laser ahead a smidge-about 30 seconds of video worth-and then try to re-focus there.

After all, as long as the disk is spinning at a constant speed, which it should be unless the player is broken, and there is anything "beyond" the anomaly that CAN be read, it should eventually be able to find it. If it is unable to find anything readable after about a minute of repeating the above routine, it will search for the next "chapter marker" and if it can't find any chapter markers anywhere beyond the "unplayable zone" which would realistically only happen if the disk had some pretty major damage or contamination, the TV screen will turn blue and say "The disk could not be read. Please clean the disk and try again." and the screen on the front of the player will say "dISC Err"

I believe that this would allow it to play very old, heavily used rental disks-even those from blockbuster-pretty much anything that hasn't been used as a frisbee or dropped in a pool