defective dvd question

[melancholymecha]

so Ive been rewatching a lot of my older Disney dvds & I decided to watch Lilo & Stitch tonight. Well i couldnt finish the film b/c halfway through the film the disc would start skipping until it would no longer even play. I tried to use the scene selections to access later scenes in the film after the skip & it wont even work. I take the disc out & I notice that on one side there is this large cloudy rough spot(I tried wiping it with a cloth but it wont go away). I assume thats whats causing the dvd to not work, but how did that even happen? Ive only watched this L & S dvd once before & it worked fine & this was on an older dvd player. How did it get damage from just sitting in its case?

does anyone know if there's a fix for this sort of defect or do I have to buy a new dvd?

 

[Small White Car]

If it's cloudy (not scratches) then it's the glue separating from the disk.

Nothing you can do, toss it.

Now, it may have been a manufacturing default or perhaps you left it on a sunny window one day. No way to know, but it doesn't matter. It's only going to get worse. All the 'fix-it' techniques out there are fixes for scratches, so they won't help here.

Sorry...great movie!

 

[Geckothan]

It's delaminating. This isn't uncommon with early DVDs. There isn't really any way to fix it, so you'll probably have to buy a new DVD, yes.

 

[Spot's Meow]

And so it begins. I wonder what the true length of life for a DVD is. At work people ask us why we don't digitize more of our historic records and it is because newer technologies just cannot be trusted yet. Even something as "old" as DVDs can create issues. Paper and microfilm are the longest lasting mediums we have.

Of course that won't help with movies!

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I've also seen a defect where a milky coloured film covers the surface of the disc -- perhaps a reaction in the plasticiser due to exposure to light. I found that I could remove the film using washing-up liquid and warm water.

 

[Haggis and tatties]

It's delaminating. This isn't uncommon with early DVDs. There isn't really any way to fix it, so you'll probably have to buy a new DVD, yes.

Oh i like that, Delaminating, it just rolls off the tongue.

 

[Rii]

And so it begins. I wonder what the true length of life for a DVD is. At work people ask us why we don't digitize more of our historic records and it is because newer technologies just cannot be trusted yet. Even something as "old" as DVDs can create issues. Paper and microfilm are the longest lasting mediums we have.

The point of digitisation is that there shouldn't be a single point of failure. You can have the material on DVD, on tape, on a flash drive, on a local hard drive, on another hard drive on the other side of the world. It can be in a dozen forms in a thousand places at once such that nothing short of the apocalypse will destroy it.

 

[Jim Steele]

I don't think a few examples of glue separation = DIGITAL STORAGE CANNOT BE TRUSTED.

I have CDs that are 20 years old and still work perfectly. A friend of mine has a laserdisc collection which were notorious for "laser rot", which still plays perfectly. Optical storage isn't flawless but generally, shit lasts a bloody long time.

 

[Geckothan]

It's only early DVDs that really have these problems, especially early dual layer ones. However, I haven't had any go bad yet. I've had a few that were already delaminating from the factory, but that's more of a manufacturing defect than deterioration. I've got some CDs from before I was born that are flawless and tons of early DVDs that are still doing ok. The only ones that have gone bad are from when I was too lazy to put them back in the box and just left them stacked on top of my DVD player, which used to be in front of a window that got loads of sun, but despite the fact they're going brown around the edges, most of them still play ok.

Optical media usually holds up fine if you take care of it. Just keep discs in cases with good, non-stressing hubs and they will probably last for decades. It's a lot more robust than vinyl (one pass in a machine with a bad stylus will destroy it), tape (especially with cassettes, everyone remembers having to wind them back up or having to stick them together after they've been chewed up after a pass in a bad machine right?) and hard drives especially (keeping all of your data on a mechanical device that has zero tolerance for any kind of failure is a silly idea). Even solid-state storage like flash is pretty risky if you treat it as reusable.

 

[Captain Ice]

And so it begins. I wonder what the true length of life for a DVD is. At work people ask us why we don't digitize more of our historic records and it is because newer technologies just cannot be trusted yet. Even something as "old" as DVDs can create issues. Paper and microfilm are the longest lasting mediums we have.

The point of digitisation is that there shouldn't be a single point of failure. You can have the material on DVD, on tape, on a flash drive, on a local hard drive, on another hard drive on the other side of the world. It can be in a dozen forms in a thousand places at once such that nothing short of the apocalypse will destroy it.

This is quite true. The museum I did my internship in last fall is in the process of digitally cataloging their collection. They are using a hard drive, a flash drive, and DVDs as backups with the DVDs and external hard drive stored in an off campus location. Digital mediums do fail, but they also allow for storage in multiple forms and locations. They're not all going to fail at once.

 

[exodus]

And so it begins. I wonder what the true length of life for a DVD is. At work people ask us why we don't digitize more of our historic records and it is because newer technologies just cannot be trusted yet. Even something as "old" as DVDs can create issues. Paper and microfilm are the longest lasting mediums we have.

Of course that won't help with movies!

No, it just sounds like Disney tried to cut costs by using a cheaper quality DVD to print Lilo & Stitch on.

 

[Spot's Meow]

I don't think a few examples of glue separation = DIGITAL STORAGE CANNOT BE TRUSTED.

I have CDs that are 20 years old and still work perfectly. A friend of mine has a laserdisc collection which were notorious for "laser rot", which still plays perfectly. Optical storage isn't flawless but generally, shit lasts a bloody long time.

When I say that it can't be trusted I don't mean just that the media itself will deteriorate but that we don't know if in 100 years we will have the technology to still read these things. For example we have several items in the archives just from the mid twentieth century that can no longer be read or would be extremely expensive to get the necessary technology, such as dictabelts and these huge floppy disks (like 2 feet wide) that we cannot read. If we had infinite money then maybe we could digitize everything because every few years or decades, when the old medium becomes outdated, you would have to have it moved to the new medium. This just isn't cost effective. It's far cheaper and more efficient to microfilm, which last about 300 years and we still have the technology around to read and create, or just keep the paper form, because technology for that is not even required. The only real use we have for digitizing is to put certain collections on the web for people to access from home, but even that is VERY expensive and time consuming when you consider we have tens of thousands of cubic feet of records. Things like CDs or DVDs, there is no point in even using them because they may be gone in a few years, but paper will still be around.

By the way this has nothing to do with movies and current items that we use daily, for our lifetimes things like CDs and DVDs are just fine. I am talking about historic records hundreds of years old.

 

[melancholymecha]

aww that sucks! well it must be a manu defect b/c the dvd has never been in the sun & the dvd release isnt that old(the movie came out what- 2005?)

Disney is currently rereleasing all there animated classics on blueray with an added dvd copy so Ill probably just wait & buy it again when it eventually gets that release.

Great, now I feel like going through my whole dvd collection to see if any others have similar defects.