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So I just bought a used Panasonic blu ray/dvd player for 5 bucks at a garage sale. It did not come with a remote. The seller told me that the unit does work so I came home and immediately tried it out. DVDs work fine but blu rays have a problem. My unit will read the disc but when I press play using the buttons on the unit, it won’t play. I was wondering if the buttons on this player were only for dvds and the remote was for blu rays? Is the latter true or is my player just broken? Also the discs are not the problem because they work on my PS4 and I have been using component as my output.

I don't know the answer to your specific questions, but I think combo DVD and bluray players use different lenses for the DVD and the bluray, so it could be that the DVD components work fine but the bluray components are broken or need to be cleaned.

Thanks for the information. I’m gonna take it to Best Buy and ask some questions about it.

This is actually a very common failure of Blu-Ray players in general, the Blu-Ray laser hardware is very prone to failures which will render the player only able to playback CDs and DVDs. The fix for this would have been better engineering, but Sony controls the Blu-Ray technology as they literally own it, and they'd much prefer your player be substandard for quality so you'll be forced to purchase a new one every year or two than to have a quality product that might outlive the commercial viability of the media format.

JC34 wrote:So I just bought a used Panasonic blu ray/dvd player for 5 bucks at a garage sale. It did not come with a remote. The seller told me that the unit does work so I came home and immediately tried it out. DVDs work fine but blu rays have a problem. My unit will read the disc but when I press play using the buttons on the unit, it won’t play. I was wondering if the buttons on this player were only for dvds and the remote was for blu rays? Is the latter true or is my player just broken? Also the discs are not the problem because they work on my PS4 and I have been using component as my output.

I know this is an old topic, but I'll respond for other users...
I had the same problem as the TC. DVDs play with the play button, but not Blu-ray discs...annoying. Try to find a universal remote, like for a TV cable box, and program it according to instructions. Why Sony would make the Play button on the Blu-ray player work only for DVDs is beyond me. The laser could always be a problem, too, but more than likely, he is using the Blu-ray player Play button, not the remote Play button, which only works to play DVDs.

Update, I found out my regular TV remote works with the player. So I don’t actually need a universal remote. Thank you to all the people who responded though.