Problem with pioneer DVD-RW DVR-116D

This I bought at newegg.com about a month a half ago. I only used it until now to record cds and play them. But yesterday and today I have recorded dvds and tried to play them on this compuer (Dell Dimension 800, 512 mb ram, windows xp home, windows media player and real player, 60 gb hard drive). The dvds don't play either on this computer or on an external dvd player or even on Mac G4 (but they do play on Mac Book Pro). After reading on the net some more, I found that neither this drive nor the other NEC DVD-rom drive play dvds any more (I don't if they ever did after redid the computer from scrach from a total crash -- a previous hard drive failed), not even commercial dvds. I do get on real player a mesage saying that "Key exchange for DVD copy protection failed." I don't have a clue about what this is about and how to fix this. It's good optical drive; I am hoping I can fix the problem and use it. It did record and play cds a day or two ago.

 

Thank you so much, Tony, for your help. I have installed WinDVD (which I had with the original computer before I renovated it) and it enabled me to play the videos in all three players -- WinDvd, Real Player and Windows Media Player -- flawlessly.

I tried to install the newer firmware on the drive but it said I already had the latest firmware.

The dvd's however, cannot be played on an standalone dvd player attached to my tv. I used to be able to do that with previous dvd-r drive. Is there anything I can do to help that?

So far, this is already an adequate solution to my problem.

Thank you again.

 

Will the original DVD's play on the stand alone player?

It could be a case that the recorded DVD's were not finalized (DVD Video) for play on all players.

 

These were backed up dvds from DVD shrink. And they played as they were recorded before.