Bought it at a pawn shop. Was working in pawn shop without an issue. Now we have it at home and playing a dvd, its at the movie menu and try to hit play but won't start movie. Plus can't program my universal remote to it cause there is no code. Now how do you watch a movie on this darn thing? Hitting play shows a circle symbol with a line in the circle.

You'll have to bring it to a repair shop

Your DVD player is faulty and probably has a faulty LCD or backlight. Return it to the shop.

Those discs have a very strong copy protection mechanism to avoid making digital copies on PC systems but some DVD players won't play them because of that, if you have the original movie, download a copy from the internet, burn it to a dvd-r disc and play it. It's perfectly legal because you already bought the movie. The downloaded copies have no copy protection and will play better than the original.
The PHILIPS DVD-Home theater players are specially picky about non-standar disk like the one you're trying to watch.

you cant unless you have the old one try 0000

You can bypass all that. Here's how:

This will work without having to do anything to the pink wire - just tape it and leave it alone. But the next time you unhook your battery cable you will have to put the code in again.

Put in DVD
When the blue screen comes up, hit STOP twice on the remote
punch in 1,2,6, and 4
hit DOWN 1 time
hit PLAY/ENTER (although you can't see it, this turns off the parking brake bypass security feature)

**at this point the display became visible and you will now see the menu which makes it much easier.
hit DOWN one more time to change macrovision
hit PLAY/ENTER
hit SYS SETUP twice to save and exit menu

From now on, you can just put in a movie and it'll start - no more grounding or toggle switch procedure, and you don't have to use the e-brake.

try pressing stop while at the menu. then stop again. then hit play. that works for most dvd players

try to find an original remote in a pawn shop, sometimes they have extra remotes because broken dvd players, or other reasons they only know.

Same problems with my unit.  But, try this... I think it worked.  First, you can not get to the setup screen for the unit with a DVD in the player.  So, remove the DVD first:  Unplug the unit, wait a few seconds, plug it back in.  Then hit the DVD open button and remove DVD in player. 

 

I think the issue with not reading certain DVDs is a problem with the "parental control" on the unit. Without setting parental control there were a few DVDs I could not play and sometimes (not always) I was asked about parental control before a movie would play.  At the Sony Blue DVD screen, select Setup on the remote control.  Select DVD setup and get to Parental control.  Set a password.  This will then take you to a "rating" screen.  By setting the rating very high (I set mine for #8) any movie should play without needing the password.  With no password set, you can not change the "rating" and hence mine was set at #1 (kids).  It seems to have worked for now anyway.  Good luck.

The factory default password is ?8-8-8-8?. If you reset to the factory defaults this should work.