Got a WAC (Warner Archives) order today. The good part is WAC used to use blank discs with the manufacturer's id hidden; they are now using Verbatim mcc03rg20's.

The bad part is the quality scan (see below) is atrocious. I hope I can rip it; it appears to be damaged.

Which title is it?

It was Smilin' Through; though the movie title really doesn't matter as they are burned individually, not mass produced.

What are we looking at here? Where is the damage?

I was think of trying one of these discs, they just put out a bluray of Doc Hollywood. One of my favorite Michael J Fox movies.

I'd also be a little annoyed if that disk arrived for me, but I wouldn't call it damaged, just a bit out of spec. I'm sure it will play fine. I have DVD's that scan 10x worse and still (to the best of my knowledge) play okay. Are you able to re-scan just the area with increased PIF levels at 1x...which is how your DVD player will read it? The errors will either 1) appear worse, 2) diminish or disappear, or 3) not change much at all. I've seen all three.

BTW, if you don't recall from previous threads, your occasional posts like this prompted me to start scanning my collection several years ago. I'm still hundreds of disks in the hole but catch up a little more each month.

Warner Archive's Blu-Rays are all pressed, so buy with confidence. The first batch of their DVD's occasionally get pressed as well, particularly for multi-disk sets that Warner expects to sell in large quantities. The recent "Porky Pig 101" set is an example.

I consider an acceptable score to be 95 with no more than 300 PI Failures.

WAC's, never hit that; but those red lines are major errors that many players won't play at all, & would definitely deteriorate quickly.

The moral of the story is always back up any burned disc you buy as soon as you get it.

This refers to dvd-r; I don't know much about burned blu-ray's. I believe the jury is still out on longevity.

Agreed. That's why I bought 1st editions of the entire Forbidden Hollywood set.

Grapevine does sell burned blu's; I personally wouldn't take that risk.

I can't scan at 1x. I have had a number of discs go bad over the years, which is why I'm so fanatical about this. Since CMC bought Tayio Yuden, their are no blank discs that I trust at this time. Fortunately I stocked up on the JVC TY's (still not as good as the originals) & should have a lifetime supply (I'm 60) barring fire, flood, deterioration from sitting unused on the shelf, etc.

I'm surprised to hear most Warner Bros. Archive Blu-ray titles are pressed discs.

It's another hurdle that Blu-ray was never able to clear was the fact that small-runs of titles were incredibly expensive due to all of the flat-rate, front-loaded licensing fees that made pressing anything under 5,000 units prohibitively expensive.

DVDs could be pressed for so much cheaper even on quantities as low as 500, which makes me wonder why so many DVD Warner Archive titles were burned DVD-Rs and not pressed.

Warner did not want to keep inventory, that is why Archive went to DVD-R for every release. It's a decision made by accountants.

Pressing Blu-ray Archival Titles = Much higher per unit price + having to press a larger volume of each title than DVD.

yep.

I came across this thread when I tried to back up a Warner Archive burned DVD. Looking around online I see where they seem to do something that supposedly makes them accessible to playback devices only. But in fact my software DVD players could play it so it's not something that the drive cannot handle. So is there a freeware solution for ripping these? I can always use existing software to burn the actual backup. Hopefully by now a solution is available. The usual suspects were unable to deal with the second .vob file of the main title on this particular one.

^Have you tried MakeMKV Beta? It's frequently updated. https://www.videohelp.com/software/MakeMKV

I've never had issue backing them up. You MAY need to purchase copy guard breaking software (any dvd, dvdfab, etc). They often use low quality blanks, so the first thing I ALWAYS do is re-burn to a T-Y disc & save both original & copy

^MakeMKV has decrypted everything I have thrown at it, though I have never tried a Warner Archive disc.

--This is a really old thread, but what is a Pressed disc exactly? What is a non-Pressed disc?

Most discs are pressed. Non-pressed discs are burned onto blank discs.