i agree, when you have a part of a combo go bad you toss the whole thing. or you can go pickup a 29.95 DVD player and plug it in teh AUX input. i had a JVC VCR a couple years ago would try to come on and then shut down. total cost of repair, including shipping was 100.00. i paid it the 1st time since this was a high end commercial grade unit that cost well over 500.00. the second time it did it i tossed it in teh garbage. if this had been and off the shelf unit, i would not even have thought about getting it fixed.

Some players are very finicky. I had to experiment with brands and format (R+, R-, RW+, RW-) before finding a surefire disk for my Toshiba player (several years old). Verbatim DVD-Rs for me, exclusively.

Perhaps you have turned the sound to OFF. Go through the setting on the menu or display, and see if the sound is ON or OFF. I have turned mine off before, and that's why I mentioned it to you.

There are a lot of movies that I watch more than once, and my collection of DVDs mostly contains fairly old movies or foreign ones. I don't particularly like to stream movies, even though we have fiber optic cable in L.A. I'm more likely to stream in Cathedral City, where we have cable, but it's not as fast as the service we have in L.A. One of the reasons I have not bought CDs recently is that there is very little new music that I like. Also, I've been buying single songs lately, but if I wanted an entire album, I would buy the CDs, as I did for Caro Emerald. I was checking on new music that I've listened to lately and decided to buy Acts of Rebellion by Ela Minus. It turns out to be cheaper to buy the CD than the MP3 album, and I would prefer to have the physical disc. I listen to most music as MP3s that I put on thumb drives, and then I can put the thumb drives into various players that I have, including DVD and Bluray players, as well as the sound system that we have for our TV in L.A. But I also have a boombox in the sewing room that plays CDs, and it does a better job with those than it does with the thumb drives.