Windows Vista drops support for old DVD drives
 

Raymond Chen has let slip that Windows Vista will be somewhat choosey with regards to which DVD drives it supports. Chen, who has worked on Windows development since joining Microsoft in 1992 and specializes in backwards compatibility issues, has warned that older DVD drives will not function fully in Windows Vista.

When DVD drives for the PC first launched in 1998, they lacked support for region encoding—the DVD "lockdown" feature aimed at restricting media playback by geographical region (a feature that we think is pretty lame). To be in compliance with the entire DVD specification, the operating system was left to enforce region encoding itself. According to Chen, this created a number of problems.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060102-5874.html

I'm not surprised.