DVDs becoming defective overnight?
 

About a year ago, I bought a copy of the Kino on Video version of "The Thief of Bagdad" on DVD. Upon close inspection of the bottom side of the DVD, I noticed a barely visible 4 mm horizontal (i.e. non-radial) crack / scratch located about 2 mm from the outer edge of the disc. Concerned that the small blemish might make certain parts of the movie unreadable, I tried it on my DVD player and it played perfectly from start to finish. Two months ago, I decided to watch "The Thief of Bagdad" again and SURPRISE! About 30 min into the movie, the picture started to freeze, skip and pixelate every 2 seconds or so, making the film virtually unwatchable. I tried it on my computer and the same problem occurred - the picture kept freezing and breaking up into pixels. The glitch continued to occur throughout the rest of the film. I have since bought a replacement copy, but I would still like to know: what could have caused the defect? The crack didn't seem any bigger than it was when I first observed it and the DVD was in otherwise perfect condition. In fact, I probably would never have noticed the crack (or scratch - it's hard to tell) if I hadn't bothered to inspect the disc so meticulously. I own several other DVDs that had similar cracks / scratches at the moment of purchase and play fine on both my standard and HD DVD players (e.g. Disney's "The Chronicles of Narnia", "Retro Puppet Master", disc 2 of the 2nd volume of the "Looney Tunes" collection, etc.) Should I be worried? Will they eventually become defective as well? Should I buy replacements for all of them for fear that they might eventually suffer the same fate as "The Thief of Bagdad"?

I'd back 'em up, if you can do that, but generally I think this isn't a problem. I have a few DVDs like this that play fine after years.

I would have taken it back to the store for a replacement when I noticed a crack on a brand-new DVD. But I'm funny that way.

Never had one go bad like that. I've had an occasional disc that I was sure had a manufacturing flaw that would skip or hiccup at a certain point (not the layer change either) even though there was nothing visibly wrong with the disc. Returned them. I've also rented discs that looked like they were cleaned with a Brillo pad that played fine. Did you try boiling it?

Looks like Criterion is going to release that soon anyway. Their disc will be much better than Kino. Kino sucks.

Maybe dvd rot creeped into that crack over time? I wouldn't worry too much about the other stuff, it's pretty rare that dvds go all bad like that. I'd just deal with them individually if they ever do have that problem instead of buying multiple backups now. And if you can backup yourself, that'll give you peace of mind.

I'm not sure about DVDs, but all HD DVDs apparently stopped working on February 20th. :)