Why do some discs just stop working?
 

So I was watching Reservoir Dogs 10th Anniversary Edition last night and the player couldn't read the 11th and 12th chapters at all. I tried it on another player and it could read the 11th, but not the 12th. The disc used to play perfectly and is looks flawless. Whats up with this? It really makes me worry about what other discs might not work anymore.

I hate when shit like that happens. I was trying to watch the 10th Anniversary release of Mallrats a couple of weeks ago and it all went fine up until there was about 20 minutes left where it was skipping non-stop. I had only watched it once, maybe twice, before that.

This should be a worry for everyone that collects DVD's. The problem is (usually) attributable to delamination, which is basically when the two layers making up an RSDL disk start to separate, presumably because the glue that holds them together is no longer doing its job. When that happens, the laser that reads the disks can no longer focus at the proper depth to read the data, which results in skips and read failures. Hence, that why most of these problems are noticed at occurring around the disk's layer change (as with jmu878's Reservoir Dogs disk).

Since this can happen at any time during a disk's life, it is very likely that there could be several disks in anyone's collection that might go bad at any time. Probably most people may not notice it unless they happen to be re-watching a disk that they already had watched through one or more times without a problem. If it happens on a newer disk, most people just attribute it as defective, and exchange it for another copy. I think there's a good chance that it's a more common phenomena than most people want to believe, and given the relatively short usage history of DVD's up to now, we may find that this crops up even more frequently as time goes on.

Well, it's always refreshing to hear good news.

hmmm. Well it seems my computer's DVD drive can read it just fine. WTF? I guess it all depends on the player's abilities.

No doubt...thanks for the laugh!

Have you considered that it could be your player starting to go bad or out of alignment, and not the DVD that is going bad?

I've had a DVD player since 1998 and have never had a disc "rot" on me. There was a problem with a handful of discs years ago, as well as with certain DVD-18s, but I think, in general, DVDs suddenly delaminating isn't an issue.

I suspect that the prevalence of poorly-made sub-$50 DVD players is more an issue than delamination.

I have a huge problem. I recently sold a sealed copy of FM, produced by Anchor Bay. The guy I sold it to, tells me the DVD doesn't play. Is there any way that Anchor Bay would replace this OOP DVD?

I doubt that Anchor Bay would replace a DVD that presumably played when it was originally purchased. :shrug:

I've never had disc rot either, but I've definitely had a DVD "quit" on me.

The first copy of the Matrix I purchased back in 1999 worked fine for about 2 years and then simply stopped working... and I was using the same DVD player I had been using for years!

It turns out I wasn't the only one this happened to. Numerous other DVDTalk members also had the same problem.

Is there a list of DVDs that could suddenly stop working? I know several early WB, HBO, Image, Anchor Bay and Universal titles stopped working without any DVD rot. Also Criterion's A Night to Remember has a similar problem.

It still could be a DVD player problem. A friend of mine has an older Sony DVD player that began having problems with the occasional disc. Using tips I found in the hardware area here, I accessed the player's service menu and did an auto-alignment. He hasn't had any problems since.

I'm not saying DVDs don't go bad. But I suspect players are responsible for more than a few of the problems.

a lot of those were defective, and the only way to tell was to try to play it. its too late for an anchor bay replacement since its long oop. good luck working it out with your buyer :|

Of course I did try it on numerous DVD players before paying for a new copy.

It's my understanding that the Matrix was one of the first DVDs to make use of the extra capacity of dual-layer discs and that manufacturing errors caused the discs to eventually experience loading problems.

If I remember correctly the silver layers were much too thin (or something like that). There a big thread on it somewhere here on DVDTalk, but I can't find it.

I had problems with certain DVDS on my older DVD player. What I did after deciding, there wasn't something wrong with the disks, was to wipe the laser in the player free off dust. Not it works as it if were new :-)

Could be a tip for everybody, open it up and clean it out.