This has been driving me crazy: Every stand-alone DVD player I own reports in the user's manual that you can disable auto-repeating the movie (or title or whatever) when it reaches the end, but every single one of them LIES! (at least regarding DVDs which were apparently authored (?) to auto-repeat, as opposed to manually enabling auto-repeat yourself). The DVDs that appear to have been authored with auto-repeat automatically enabled are official Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVDs from Rhino and also their new distributor or whatever named "SHOUT!". But there may be many others which are also authored this way. Why do I want to do this? Because I'm a severe insomniac who has learned over the years that I need to fall asleep while watching and listening to dialog which is complex enough to distract my attention from my own internal monologue. If the dialog is funny, too, that works best of all. But all that is for naught when the damn things keep repeating all night & morning long! That wakes me up and forces me to manually shut if off, but when I do that, I can't fall asleep again! One pass through is perfect, two or more is a nightmare. Each of my standalone DVD players insists on the OSD that I've successfully disabled auto-repeat, but when one of these MST3K DVDs reaches the end, it auto-repeats anyway! The only player that's a bit different is my Sony BDP-S300 Blu-Ray player, which not even Sony tech support has been able to tell me how to disable auto-repeat, the morons! Why do I call them morons? Because when I phone them, email them, or chat with them online, they always insist that they've never heard of such a thing. "Auto-repeat? What's that?" When in reply I direct them to the exact page and paragraph in their own user's manual (page X in section Y and paragraph Z) where it tells the user what button to press to bring you to the auto-repeat control stage, they reply: "Oh, you've got to press the button to bring you to the auto-repeat control stage, as described on page X in section Y and paragraph Z". In other words, all they ever do and did is repeat back to me the exact same thing I just told them!!! Surely the word "moron" is exceedingly apt in these cases. What actually happens with that Sony Blu-Ray player is that when you get to the OSD page that says "Title Auto-Repeat", that's all it says. Neither it nor the manual tells you what to do next to actually disable auto-repeat. I've tried every single button on the entire remote, and the only buttons that do anything are either to press "Display" again (or whatever it's called) which then shows "Off" -- which accomplishes nothing whatsoever -- and "Power" so you can turn the damn thing off in a fit of rage vowing never to turn it on again! Bottom line: Not one of my 7 standalone DVD players is capable of preventing a MST3K DVD or equivalent type from auto-repeating under any circumstances whatsoever. So I've performed some more research and developed the following hypothesis as a result: If the engineer who authored the original DVD sets the "automatically repeat title" bit (or whatever it's called), then it is impossible for any of my 7 players to prevent it from repeating, no matter what! I learned that if I author a DVD myself from scratch, I can turn off the "automatically repeat title" bit and the resulting DVD will actually not auto-repeat, even without any other manual intervention on the DVD player. All 7 of them will stop the DVD at the end, just as you'd expect it to. But I'm sure as hell not going to re-author every single one of my MST3K DVDs!! Sorry for all that verbiage, but I felt that if I hadn't laid all that out ahead of time, people would not fully grasp exactly what I'm now going to ask, to wit: What standalone DVD players will allow me to actually force an MST3K or similarly-authored DVD to STOP playing at the end, no matter what? Obviously, this cannot be determined from reading the product literature / user's manual, because all of the players I already own either insist that it can do that or don't mention the possibility at all. I think that means that you'll have to have direct experience achieving this goal yourself rather than relying on a user's manual. Here is a list of the manufacturers of all the standalone DVD players that do NOT allow me to accomplish that: Apex Hitachi Philips RCA Sony (x 2) Toshiba One last thing: I'd prefer the ability for the player to upconvert standard DVDs to 1080i HDMI output, as many new standalone DVD players can do. The RCA I listed above is their model DRC286 which performed that upconversion rather well for $50 (if still imperfectly as I saw a few color glitches every once in a while). But again, it would NOT let me over-ride the auto-repeat bit for MST3K DVDs, so back to the store it went... Please help me get some sleep!
Your TV doesn't have a sleep timer? My last 5 DVD players were JVC. All my DVDs go back to the main menu when they are complete, including episodic cartoons that my son falls to sleep with. I have an S300 and I don't recall that it repeats the disc after finishing. I will try it tonight. I don't know that I have any DVDs that have auto repeat turned on, so I cannot guarantee that my results will be meaningful.
First, dailun, I wish to thank you most emphatically for the simple courtesy you've shown me here with your gracious reply. On other forums the responses to the same question included insults, haughty condescension, lecturing, and even medical "diagnoses" and psychiatric treatment recommendations from someone who may know a lot about DVD players, but has a great deal to learn about civility and the practice of medicine. Astonishing, yes? Indeed it does, but there are complicating factors. The first is that the timer turns off the TV, but not the external DVD player and also not the pre-amplifier, amplifier, and speakers. I wish some oft-changing combination of those last 3 items to be left on, but I'd prefer not to delve further into my personal life and sleep habits, which was clearly a mistake on my part for even bringing up in the first place. I'll just add that, for reasons beyond my control, there is little regularity to my daily pattern such that all the various timers I've tried or investigated -- some of which are quite flexible in their abilities -- caused more problems than they solved. That's very good to know, because it indicates that my problem is not limited so such a small set of DVDs as others elsewhere mocked me for caring about. Nevertheless, I repeat that I am very grateful for your ideas, your suggestions, and your willingness to investigate further into my issue -- and doing so while treating me with dignity and respect. To my mind, that speaks well indeed of you as a person. Thank you.
Well, the way that I would test it is to create a short DVD and have the authoring program turn auto-repeat on. After I get a chance to test it I will post my results here. As far as the sleep timer, I guess there's no way around that one. I'll let you know as soon as I get a chance to set up a test. It may take a couple of days though.
