In Memoriam: When DVDs become coasters

Do I have bad luck? Bad karma from a past life?

The K-On Movie BD from Manga now freezes at the halfway point. I seem to remember a glitch there the last time I watched it. But now its a full on freeze.

Here’s the thing. It’s a nine year old check disc, with no obvious blemish on the playing surface, no label, kept in a Amaray thin pack with no sleeve, nothing to react chemically with, yet the disc still died.
 
Just Passing Through said:
Do I have bad luck? Bad karma from a past life?

The K-On Movie BD from Manga now freezes at the halfway point. I seem to remember a glitch there the last time I watched it. But now its a full on freeze.

Here’s the thing. It’s a nine year old check disc, with no obvious blemish on the playing surface, no label, kept in a Amaray thin pack with no sleeve, nothing to react chemically with, yet the disc still died.
Click to expand...
That sucks man. Hope you can get it sorted somehow.
 
Just Passing Through said:
Do I have bad luck? Bad karma from a past life?

The K-On Movie BD from Manga now freezes at the halfway point. I seem to remember a glitch there the last time I watched it. But now its a full on freeze.

Here’s the thing. It’s a nine year old check disc, with no obvious blemish on the playing surface, no label, kept in a Amaray thin pack with no sleeve, nothing to react chemically with, yet the disc still died.
Click to expand...
What a pain. Are check discs pressed from the glass master or just burned?
 
False alarm? False? The alarm is still there.

Anyway, looks less like disc rot and more like a player incompatibility. I didn't have a chance to investigate late last night, but I tried the disc in another two different players and it played that part through without glitching. The first time I watched it, it was my first home cinema player. Since then I've watched it on my second home cinema, which is why I guess I remember it glitching at that point last time.

It's an odd player incompatibility that makes it freeze and glitch at a certain point though. The most logical explanation I can think of is that the disc has some minor defect or damage at that point which defeats that player's error correction but not the others.

Anyway, I ordered a retail copy last night, so I'll figure it out next week, whether it is a disc defect, or a genuine player incompatibility.

It could be another Amaray case with a post it stuck on it to remind me which player to use.
 
This is borderline off-topic for this thread because it's nothing to do with a disc degrading, but in case it might make for an interesting anecdote for someone...

The oddest player compatibility I've encountered to date was with Kaze/Manga's DVD release of Samurai Girls and my old Sony DVP-M50 DVD player. There was a point in the last episode (found on disc 3) where the picture would break up into a scrambled mess of jagged blocks and random colours unless you interrupted the flow of the video at any prior point in the episode by either pausing and unpausing or by tapping rewind or fast forward — anything to interrupt the video. If you did any of those things, then that segment would play with no issues whatsoever. Skipping back a chapter right at the start didn't work as a fix the one time I tried it.

It's the strangest compatibility issue I've ever come across. Has anyone else encountered anything similar?
 
Neil.T said:
It's the strangest compatibility issue I've ever come across. Has anyone else encountered anything similar?
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This could've still been caused by a damaged or degraded disc. DVD players generally slow down when encountering areas that are 'hard to read', although some don't. In your case the pausing and unpausing might've caused the player to stop for a moment and while spinning up again read that area slower than it otherwise would, allowing it to succeed. It does take a couple seconds to fully spin up.

The weirdest thing I've encountered in that regard is the following. I used to use two DVD players regularly, and when playing back old/bad discs, one of them would practically always give read errors, while the other didn't. Mentally I considered one to be the 'good' player and the other the 'bad' player. Till one day I got a disc that refused to playback on the 'good' one halfway through, but played flawlessly on the 'bad' one...
 
Weirdest incompatibility that I can recall is the Perfect Blue Blu-ray, the first release from AL. it has the trailer encoded as 480p, a format I have never seen used before or since. On my player at the time, the trailer played back improperly, go into some weird split screen squashed mode, playing back the trailer twice side by side, before crashing the player requiring it to be turned off and on again at the power.

Then there is the T2 Skynet edition, which takes about twenty minutes to boot, almost as long to switch between menu options and has a whopping, variable sound sync problem during playback.
 
I have an old Pioneer/Geneon Sailor Moon S dvd that has a really odd problem-about 12 1/2 minutes into the 1st episode the picture goes all jaggy and rainbow colored blocks appear and after 2 seconds it goes back to normal. No surface defects are apparent, it does it on every player I've got including my Oppo DV983H-wierd to say the least.
 
IdiomaticLynx said:
This could've still been caused by a damaged or degraded disc. DVD players generally slow down when encountering areas that are 'hard to read', although some don't. In your case the pausing and unpausing might've caused the player to stop for a moment and while spinning up again read that area slower than it otherwise would, allowing it to succeed. It does take a couple seconds to fully spin up.

The weirdest thing I've encountered in that regard is the following. I used to use two DVD players regularly, and when playing back old/bad discs, one of them would practically always give read errors, while the other didn't. Mentally I considered one to be the 'good' player and the other the 'bad' player. Till one day I got a disc that refused to playback on the 'good' one halfway through, but played flawlessly on the 'bad' one...
Click to expand...
Do blu ray players stop spinning when paused? I dont think mine does, as it still sounds like it is spinning and doesn't sound like it slows down at all.
 
Wicker said:
Do blu ray players stop spinning when paused? I dont think mine does, as it still sounds like it is spinning and doesn't sound like it slows down at all.
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Good point, they generally don't spin down immediately. Unless it was paused for a minute or two, it might've been something else. Does make me wonder what it could be.
 
Neil.T said:
This is borderline off-topic for this thread because it's nothing to do with a disc degrading, but in case it might make for an interesting anecdote for someone...

The oddest player compatibility I've encountered to date was with Kaze/Manga's DVD release of Samurai Girls and my old Sony DVP-M50 DVD player. There was a point in the last episode (found on disc 3) where the picture would break up into a scrambled mess of jagged blocks and random colours unless you interrupted the flow of the video at any prior point in the episode by either pausing and unpausing or by tapping rewind or fast forward — anything to interrupt the video. If you did any of those things, then that segment would play with no issues whatsoever. Skipping back a chapter right at the start didn't work as a fix the one time I tried it.

It's the strangest compatibility issue I've ever come across. Has anyone else encountered anything similar?
Click to expand...
Best guess: Interrupting the flow will have reset the frame buffer. Maybe that player is slow at error-checking new frames once the buffer is full, and clearing it out meant it was running more efficiently (or had a different set of frames buffered) when it reached the corrupted part of the disc. Bear in mind this explanation is based on my half-arsed understanding of how optical drives work.
 
@Dai:

That's very interesting.

It always really interests me that, with an optical drive, it's not just a simple case of streaming the data from the disc and outputting the picture and audio as it goes along. My understanding of the exact process is basically non-existent. For example, I couldn't even explain to someone what a checksum is or how it works.
 
Just Passing Through said:
Anyway, I ordered a retail copy last night, so I'll figure it out next week, whether it is a disc defect, or a genuine player incompatibility.

It could be another Amaray case with a post it stuck on it to remind me which player to use.
Click to expand...

Got the retail copy, and it played just fine all the way through. The old disc just has a weird defect.

Of course Amazon sent the thing via Hermes so I was lucky to get pristine discs among a bucket of plastic shards where an Amaray case used to be, but that’s a whole other problem.
 
It really varies from player to player-my old Samsung DVDHD960 isn't very good at reading slightly glitched dvds but my Oppo DV983H is excellent but almost any bluray player does really good because of various factors like better tracking of the laser and more powerful chipsets compared to dvd players.
 
Neil.T said:
Samurai Girls
Click to expand...

Sorry, wildy off topic, but... I must know what you thought of this cultured series? 😛 I watched all of the first season and was very impressed by the background art but otherwise not a massive fan (I mean sure the boobs and whatnot were nice but I wish more of these shows didn't feel like they are going out of their way to insult my intelligence and be a bit creepy while they're at it.)
 
Dai said:
This is the scary thing about optical discs; you can keep them boxed in flawless condition, and after a couple of decades they just give up anyway. I don't know if it's the layers separating, oxidation, or the plastic trying to return to a liquid state, but so it goes. Ironically, vol. 6 was scratched to hell in transit when I first bought it, but that one still works (for now).
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On the plus side, Blu-rays (beyond some dodgier early discs) are in theory supposed to last a very long time. Not much of a consolation if you have a huge DVD collection as I know a lot of stuff isn't on Blu-ray, but at least more recent stuff should be less susceptible to the cruel ravages of time.
 
Check your discs!

It's so easy to buy something, and leave it in the cellophane for when you next have time. You can have unwatched discs stretching back years!

I bought the 20th Century Boys trilogy, telling myself I'll get around to watching it when I have time. And yesterday, got to movie three, and it died after the layer change. Freezing, chugging, pixellating and dying on all my players.

Now 4 Digital Asia, who released the boxset don't exist anymore, although4 Digital Media still does. I doubt they'll be offering any replacement discs, and neither will the store I bought it from... Play.com way back in 2010.
 
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