dumb luck

So I was looking around the menus on my Panasonic DVD recorder. I have a DMR-ES20. I accidentally put the dvd player into progressive mode, 480p, which my poor old tv can't deal with.

The problem is that then I couldn't see the menus to set things right.

I remembered reading about a set of buttons to push to restore factory defaults, so I had my brother look it up online. While he was doing that I guessed and pressed and held stop and play at the same time. This resolved it.

I'm pretty sure this information isn't published on Panasonic's website, but I'll go doublecheck tomorrow. The buttons combo they suggest to restore factory defaults, involves pushing the up channel button. They either mean on the remote or they are mixed up, because there are no channel buttons on the console.

I'm going to test the unit out and see if it's stable. I was having trouble with erratic behaviour, a strange insistence on both being in the correct time zone (pst) and having the wrong time (+3 hours) and having trouble recording (which may have been an effect of the previous problem) and needing to do a power cycle to get back control of the unit (it would freeze and be unresponsive to remote control codes as well as buttons on the unit.)