One case out of billions...nothing says anecdotal like that. No worries here.

I dont know what is going on in this case but I would not be at all surprised to find out in the future that DVD's have a much shorter life span than what most of us expect. Furthermore, the movie studios know about this and are counting on it to sell the same movies all over again.

Yes, then we'd all get government funding

Yeah, just call it DVDfluenza and try to get the Bush administration to give us all $7.1 billion to fix it.

Seriously though, I think God is doing you a favor by destroying your A.I. disc.

And also a lot of it has to do with how we store these things. I knew somebody who kept CDs in a cabin that he owned, and would leave them there while he was gone. Well, when he was gone, the heat and cold extremes that would get into the cabin while nobody was there to regulate the temperature ultimately damaged the CDs beyond playability. Most of us, I assume, keeps great care of their DVDs, and that will certainly expand their life span. I think that perhaps, since nobody else has reported a problem like this with AI, that maybe something happened to the DVD in storage? I am not saying the OP is responsible, who knows how it was stored before he got it? Maybe it sat in a box in a sweltering UPS truck for a few days before it got delivered to the store? Maybe it was stored improperly in the back room of the store before it was put out, just a rare occurance?

I am not worrying yet about DVDs crapping out on me. I have CDs 20 years old that play just fine still, so I believe my DVDs will mostly last me a while.

Which means it will be hatching soon.

That is really weird. How do you store your DVDs anyway? Is it damp/dry, hot/cold?

Once I bought a bag of Sour Cream & Onion potato chips, where the flavor powder had manifested into clumps at the bottom of the bag rather than being evenly coating the chips. I mailed that gross bag to the chip manufacturer. They had never seen or heard of such a thing, and every bag of chips I had experienced previously and afterwards never experienced that problem. All I'm saying is weird manufacturing defects happen on the rare occassion, and you should seek a replacement - and you might never run into a spotted disc again, because in all my years on the DVD forums, I've never heard of anything like this happening to others.

Whoa...I had that same thing happen to me with a bag of (already sort of nasty!) organic black bean tortilla chips. I bit onto a chip and there was a huge clump of spicy flavoring. I thought I was going to die.

Who knows...any crazy thing could happen during the manufacturing, as D-F said.

No reply from Warner Bros. Sigh...

Storage? Cupboard. Probably 29 ºC 50-60% humidity. So far, only this DVD has that problem.

A.I. is a Dreamworks disc.

I discovered a similar issue with my early "American Pie" DVD. There is what I can only describe as a stain within the disc and near the outter edge. The DVD plays mostly ok but the image gets pixelized near the end of the movie.

I've contacted Universal through their website and have received an email reply with instructions to return it for exchange

29 degree Celcius (around 83 F) is still on room temperature, so I guess that is the least of your problem. I use one of those dehumidifier inside my DVD cabinet. Fortunately I haven't got any of my DVDs damaged like that (I haven't checked some of them for quite some time), and I hope it won't happen to me.

I had a copy of Darren Aronofsky's Pi rented from a rental with me at the moment. The disc have a stain around the edge but it plays fine. Watched it, checked the extras, play the movie with commentary, it all runs without any glitch. I guess everyone's mileage does vary.

So, you mean to say you watched this film and only attributed this 'stain' to perhaps 'dvd rot' and not parallels to fibonacci or the golden ratio?

He's storing his DVDs in 50% humidity in 85 degrees? Yeah, definitely mold...

Its all DVD player dependent. My DVD/LD combi player pixelizes and freezes, while my newer universal player gets through, although the picture jitters a lot

But Warner Bros. is the distributor right?

Definitely not mold. Could have easily cleaned off the mold. I have seen this kinda pattern with metal oxidization.

"That mold has taste... it left all the good movies untouched!"

Maybe the robots are tired of living inside the disc..

It looks like Dreamworks to me. Besides "Dreamworks Home Entertainment" on the case, the Universal/Dreamworks grid for the specs is on the back. Dreamworks' address is also there.

Can't seems to find a contact customer service at DreamWorks' site. Sigh...

I found this which is quite interresting

http://www.opticaldisc-systems.com/2...Adhesive88.htm

Talks about adhesives and the "battery effect"

2nd page has some good pictues

That actually looks a lot like my friends Matrix disc a few years back (probably around 2002). All of a sudden it had spots all over it. No matter how hard we cleaned it, they wouldn't go away. The disc would not load at all. He wasn't a very big movie fan so I don't think he cared enough to call Warner Bros. We just concluded that he left it too close to the heater or something.