well, well -- if i didn't see it with my own eyes i wouldn't have believed it. this works!! over the weekend, i tried this process on two separate dvds that always pixilated/skips at specific parts. when done, i tried the discs on several players at those parts, and they played thru without a hitch. those discs are no longer unwanted stepchildren -- it's like new copies!

thanks, OP! btw, my gf came into the kitchen that day and saw me working over a boiling pot of water. she was elated to see me making something, and when she peeked over, she rolled her eyes and asked what i was doing and i replied, "dvd soup". she couldn't believe what i was doing, but after showing her the fruits of my labor, she was amazed somebody had the bright idea of boiling dvds.

I'd really like to know who the hell figured this out. Everytime a thread like this comes up I am just amazed.

I wish the boiling method worked for more things that weren't functioning correctly. My cd player in the car is not working very well at the moment. If I could pull it out and dump it in boiling water to get it working that would be great.

This is truly amazing. So people around the country are boiling their DVDs b/c this thread? Wild. I guess there is nothing to lose. No cases of melted discs? The only thing I've ever fixed with boiling water is hard pasta. Softens it right up.

yeah, just make sure you turn the flame off before putting the disc into the water.

I always keep the stove roaring full blast and I've never had a problem of any sort.

Hot water to clean something? I don't think there's a patent or anything. When did we discover fire? Couple million years ago according to scientists, 6000 according to Christians. Either way.....

What, never eggs?

212 degrees is less than 400. I suppose if someone left it on the stove for half an hour to boil off the water and fry the disc there would be a little melting going on.

It's like the invention of violin strings, which I heard were created from dried cat guts. Who comes up with any of this wild stuff???

But we aren't simply talking about hot water here, are we? This isn't just a case of turning your hot water on in your sink and letting it run over the DVD. Somebody came up with BOILING it and for a specific amount of time to boot. That's a horse of a different color, if you ask me.

So, red wine or white with our DVDs?

I had never heard of this idea until I read this thread a couple weeks ago. Just now, I remember I have an Xbox game that would constantly freeze up my system. I'd given up on it and just put it in storage, but now there is hope! I can play tennis with Anna Kournikova again!

I don't think boiling water will get hot enough to melt it for the amount of time its in there. Once water is boiling its reached its max temperature and I don't think its anywhere hot enough to melt these.

You people just aren't interested in facts or reality. I give up.

i'm guessing a Brit thought this up

Does that really matter? If you can't watch the DVD because it skips, at least you'd get one more decent viewing out of it. Otherwise if you can't play it, isn't it more or less a drink coaster?

Technically it's not boiling if you've turned the flame off already, no?

Well, that's only because he couldn't try the toothpaste trick.

naa it was prob a meth cooker. I mean who else would do this the first time?

I can't believe that many of you have either never heard of this or don't believe it works. This technique has been around since optical media first came out. Let me try to explain the basic theory.

Skipping in a dvd occurs because the thin layer of plastic that covers the physical grooves on a cd or dvd has become scratched.

Basically the laser will have problems reading the groove because the odd shapes make the laser bounce back at bad angles which means they either are considered corrupted bits or they are unreadable (the light does not return to the laser). It is not the actual groove (bit) that is messed up it is the layer above the bit that is causing the problem.

It is not the water that does anything when boiling a disk, it is the heat. When you heat a crayon it melts into a puddle. This puddle will reform as a thin evenly dispersed disk (if there was enough heat on the crayon). The same thoery applies to DVD's. The heat applied by the boiling water serves to "melt" this layer. This layer redistributes evenly. The water only serves one purpose: to evenly disperse the heat along the entire dvd, otherwise you would cause more harm.

Obviously if the scratch is deep enough to actually reach the data layer then boiling will not help because the bit itself is corrupted.

Try googling dvd construction or materials. There's so much wrong with your theory, it's hilarious.

Reality, people. Try to get some.

You meant you didn't know the melting point of the polycarbonate resin is few times higher than the boiling point of water?

Those who are curious can SEARCH the forum on the terms: BOILING or CLEANING.

There are many DVDTalkers who have tried this and found that it works. Just because they're all not participating in this thread does NOT mean that this method does not work.

When I was a kid, I did not believe Coca Cola removed RUST until my Grandfather SHOWED me.

What I had always heard was that the boiling loosened up really small particulates of "gunk" that got caught in scratches. It didn't really do anything about the scratches, but without the stuff in them, the laser had a better chance of reading the data through it.

Well, I gave this a try on three different bad disks that I own - a bum Universal DVD-18, another disk that has no visible flaw but breaks up quite a bit in one particular chapter, and another disk with a mild scratch that causes brief pixelation. Unfortunately, it didn't make a bit of a difference on any of the three.

I'm not saying it might not work in some cases, but based in my experience, it's not a miracle panacea for flawed disks either.

Well said sir!

I'm going to try this on a couple of DVDs tonight and report back on what I find. I think the rest of you should do the same so we can get some type of real evidence and more importantly: what type of corrupt DVDs does this work with?

I'm sure that this fix only works with scratched DVDs and not the one's that have corrupted layers or oxidization.

It's a great idea but I'd also like to know the origins and how it was discovered.

Personally, I just go to the local used game shop and have my pixelating DVDs professionally resurfaced. Of course that can get expensive also.