Burns DVDs,  WON'T play commercial DVDs

So I seem to be having the REVERSE problem from everyone else. My iMac G4 (17", 1GHz processor, 512 MB RAM), which I just bought for a piddling $200, will play and burn CDs / CD-RWs just fine. It will also correctly identify blank DVDs that I stick in the drive. It will BURN DVDs. In a few hours, I'll be able to tell you if it will read data DVDs.
The ONLY THING it won't do is play COMMERCIAL DVDs. I pop in a video DVD, it spins up, tries to read it, then spits it back out. Now, I know the not playing DVDs problem is not a unique one, but in reading on these forums, that seems to always be a symptom of the DVD laser diode having gone bad, which is certainly NOT the case here (as it's merrily burning away).
My GUESS would be that--somehow--my installation is missing the CSS library necessary to decode commercial DVDs. I had a similar problem getting my iPod Touch to talk to iTunes. But is that even possible? And, if so, how do I go about rectifying this issue?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I FIXED IT!!!!!!
I read somewhere else on this forum about someone having a similar problem to mine. He took the iMac to a service depot, but when he got it there, they couldn't replicate the problem. He took it home, and HE couldn't replicate the problem. As in, it was now fixed. Turns out that just unplugging the unit gave the Superdrive a chance to "reset."
So I unplug my iMac to test this out, as well as to see if I can unscrew the access panel to determine how easy it'd be to upgrade its RAM. Well, I could only get one of the screws out, but when I plugged it back in, turned it back on and popped in the collector's edition of "2001: A Space Odyssey," DVD Player came up and began playing the disc! Never has "Thus Sprach Zarathustra" sounded so amazing!
So, thank you, John Westwood1! Thank you!

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