Spartacus DVD (Universal edition) just quit working.
 

I bought the old Universal release of Spartacus about 6 years ago used; watched it and it worked fine.

Went to watch it last night and my Toshiba HD-D3 said it was a bad disc; tried it on my mac and it wouldn't recognize it at all; tired it a final time on a regular Toshiba DVD player and got a 'bad disc message.'

The disc itself looks fine aside from tiny circular scratches that were present when I bought it.

I seem to recall a lot of Universal DVDs from 98-00 were going wonky back in 02-03. I checked the other discs I had from that time frame (U571, Gladiator, Brazil, and Galaxy Quest) and all play fine.

I've heard of DVD rot, but this doesn't have any of the physical symptoms.

I'm not really pissed since it gives me an excuse to upgrade to the Criterion, but it makes me nervous about older discs from other companies (Columbia, Warner, Fox, etc).

Should I worry about other older discs doing this, or just chalk this up to Universal's poor track record of quality?

I've had issues with a couple of discs in the past month or so. I've had to replace The Sixth Sense and The Crow: Salvation, both Buena Vista titles because they just stopped working. They both played fine for an hour or so and then just conked out. Both wouldn't even register in either of my dvd players by the time I had given up.

Some early Universal titles, like Psycho, had similar symptoms. It didn't happened to all of them, but there were many cases reported. The same thing may have happened to you with Spartacus. Recommendations:

1- contact Universal for replacement. they will probably send you the re-release that has better picture.

2- get the HD DVD. It's only $13.95 at Amazon.com.

1.) Universal charges $8 per title to replace faulty DVDs. (This would be ok if it was something like a box set, which they count as one title in this case). $8 is actually more than I paid for the disc anyway.

2.) The Criterion set is a lot better, IMO, than the HD-DVD.