DVD quality and freezing up

[iceman]

Does anyone else suffer the same frustrations as I do when watching rented DVD's these days?

They're always scratched and dirty and they just lock up and freeze up while watching them, sometimes for minutes at a time and then when it eventually comes back, you've missed several minutes of the show.

I struggled through 2 hours of "Enemy at the Gates" last night, as it froze up about a dozen times. it was the most frustrating 2 hours i've spent in a long time.

With VHS tapes, if the tape was a bit mangled, the VCR would just keep going past it and you'd get a fuzzy picture for a bit. With DVD's and digital technology though, it just locks up and it can't get past it.

If you go back to the video store and complain, they usually give you a free credit and they put the DVD through one of their cleaning machines, but that's only going to get fingerprints off - it's not gonna fix scratches.

I just can't see how it's going to get better, either. More and more DVD's are doing it these days, as they're getting older and more broken. I don't know what plans the DVD rental shops have going forward to address this issue.

Can the DVD players themselves have their technology improved to be able to better handle a bad quality disc, instead of just freezing up?

[vindictive666]

not really mike the only way is to educate people to take more care
with someone else's stuff most just dont care its not theirs ect ect you know the story :(

other way is to check the dvd before and after, damaged after charge them for a new one ?

price of dvd's these days are they that expensive ?

regards john

[RB]

Does it only happen with rentals or also on any you own?
If it happens on your's too it may be your player, it may need a clean using a DVD cleaner.

[janoskiss]

More expensive players cope better with scratched disks.

I have a Denon player (one of their cheapest, few years old, probably around $200-300 today) and rarely if ever have a problem - cannot remember the last time a rented disk would not read all the way through. Some disks with thick greasy fingerprints do need a clean first though. But scratches don't seem to be a problem.

On the cheaper player we used to have before, we had rented disks freezing up and skipping regularly and cleaning would not help.

[Garyh]

We have that problem all the time especially with getting movies for the young ones here. They are usually scratched to buggery and have dirty little fingers and sometimes food on them. Some look like the kids have used them as place matts!
Our player is one of Sonys top of the line for its time and when it stops reading and freezes up the only way it will do anything again is by pulling out the plug from the wall...Real frustrating!

[MrB]

Yes, I have the same problem even with a pretty good player. It seems some people think that rental DVD's make good frisbee's :/
Some rental stores used to have their disks fixed, but doesn't seem to happen anymore, must be too expensive.

As mentioned, some players cope better than others, a reviewer for EA magazine(RIP) from the CD days used the Wedge Test.
He had a CD with an opaque wedge on it, thin at centre of disk, thick at edge.
When played the music would start skipping at a certain point, and stop altogether at another point, with repeatable results. Same disk different machines, a good comparative test :)

[TrevorW]

I have 4 DVD players 2 are $50 cheapies the other a Sony and one a Phillips the only one that causes similar problems is the expensive Sony. These freezing errors are generally due to the sensitivity of the laser to scratches on a DVD.

[Karls48]

Try to run such a DVD on your computer CD-DVD burner. It usually works OK.

[matt]

The only time I've ever had trouble like this I used a bulb blower inside to shift a little dust ..and it seemed to fix it.

Dust!

[Glenhuon]

Yes, rental DVD's are treated very poorly by some people. Seems to be a prevalent attitude "Its not mine so why look after it". Teenagers are the worst, watch one, chuck the disk on the table (play side down) put another one in and back to the couch. Seen some that looked like they had been shuffled like a pack of cards, and another with ring marks on it from a drink container :rolleyes: One shop I used to go to specifically told customers playing in playstation type machines was Verboten, as the disk is vertical and gets damage during insertion and removal and they would be charged extra if it was.
I have a couple of players here, the cheapy balks at anything just not spotless but my old Akai will play anything short of Vinyl :)

Bill

[bmitchell82]

Ahhh iceman. :D

I used to be a manager of a EB Games store and yes i have frustrations with scrached disks! (cant understand how you can go home come back within a hour saying the disk wont work on inspection it looks like the little bub has used it to slide around on concrete!) the thing is where the scratches occur it doesn't really matter, if you can buff them away (very fine sand paper) and so that substrate is still resonably clear the laser penetrates though to the silver membrane that lays under the pretty picture on the top thats where the information is! just like a telescope really, if you have a scratch on the mirror the light rays don't all come back to the same point, well neither does the returned laser beam sending back the 100101110110101 10101... thats your skip! so yes the vid stores buffer machine does work, they just have to do it a few times for those extra useless people that have put deep scratches in!

Brendan

[iceman]

Thanks for sharing my frustration.

Happened again on the weekend to "Saving Private Ryan", locked up at least 6-8 times during the movie. Soooo frustrating.

Spoke to the manager of the local Video Ezy.. I was just asking the same types of questions I was posing here.. he seemed to take it a bit personally but anyway.

He said people just treat them badly.
He said he's got a $10,000 cleaning machine that he has to spend $300 every fortnight to buy new pads for. He said they clean 75% of the disks every week.
He said they haven't put prices up in 7 years, and unless he hires more staff to clean more DVD's, or replaces DVD's, then there's nothing they can do except put prices up.

He said apparently blu ray disks are supposed to have a hard coating on them but they still get scratched too.

He reckoned his $30 player at home plays almost anything but his expensive player and PS2 player both lock up on bad discs.

So really, I don't think anything can be done.

In future, digital TV will simply take over and people will just download the movies they want to watch. I know you can do that now on foxtel etc, but they just don't have a back catalogue - just recent releases.
Once you can download ANY movie digitally, then DVD stores will go out of business.

I know you can get movies off torrent sites etc now, but half of them are horrible quality or full of viruses and trojans. Plus, my ADSL at home is too darn slow.

[TrevorW]

Mike

As a final suggestion buy another DVD player and secondly if you can change your DVD store or if you are game the DVD has a potentiometre in them that adjusts the laser pickup if you find it a very tiny tweak of this somethings fixe's the problem

[AdrianF]

I have a TEAC Home Theatre 5 stacker DVD here that plays up all the time on rented DVD's works great if I buy new DVD's, but my $37 Crazy Clarks DVD plays all rented DVD's without much fuss. Only had one DVD that wouldnt play all the way through.

Adrian

[Jen]

Yes Mike it is very frustrating :mad2: it depends on the DVD player i think :screwy:sometimes when i get a bad dvd that keeps freezing on my expensive DVD player i then play it in the playstation 2 and it plays perfectly :screwy::screwy::screwy:

[gman]

I have 7 DVD players around the house.
The cheapest chinese import plays anything all the time although the quality of sound and video reproduction is not so good.
The expensive unit connected to the home theatre needs good quality discs all the time.

Here are two things I do with purchased DVD's
1. I create back ups of my purchased discs
2. If they get scratched, I use a little brasso on a clean lint free cloth to finely clean the DVD's

If the brasso trick wont work, I create another backup from the original

[Tandum]

Rip and convert to Divx works for me. Fixes them all.

[jjjnettie]

We have numerous DVD players here at home that we regularly go though trying to find one that will play a dodgy disc.
Worst is when it freezes during the last 5 or 10 minutes, you miss out on the punch line of the movie.
I might try the "Brasso" on my Hitchikers TV series disc. It was given the stand and twist treatment, on concrete a few DAYS after I bought it. Blasted teenagers, they don't give a hoot about anything that isn't their's.

[MrB]

Some people have noted that cheap DVD players rarely skip, and some people have noted that PC DVD drives rarely skip...
Many of the cheap dvd players use PC components because they're manufactured in huge numbers and therefore much cheaper than designing and manufacturing a unique product, I've seen some with a PC DVD-ROM drive (with front removed to fit their custom box) and even PC video card chipsets. Open one up and there's a good chance you'll see an IDE cable!

Also, expect the scratch problem to be worse for Bluray players. The reason the disks have such huge capacities is because a blue laser beam can be focused to a smaller spot than longer wavelengths(Red for DVD and InfraRed for CD), the smaller laser spot allows tighter packing of the pits on the disc which also makes the finer scratches that would be ignored by DVD and CD players a problem for BluRay. :(

[tornado33]

Although not technically legal, the best way to deal with scratched DVDs is to copy them onto the HDD using DVD Shrink, then burn the copy onto a DVDRW disc, watch the movie on your DVD player then (doing the right thing) erase the disc. DVD Shrink will eliminate errors as it backs up the DVD onto the hard drive.

With Blu Ray,as MrB says scratched discs would be causing even more problems, as the tracks are much finer.

There was a plan to make DVDs out of a tiughened glass rather then plastic. Thats a great idia as they are virtually scratch proof. As long as you dont bend them, they should last forever.

[AdrianF]

I am pretty sure under copyright laws you are entitled to make 1 backup CD/DVD for your own use provided you own the original disk. That does not help with scratched hire movies though.

Adrian

[RB]

No I don't believe that's the case Adrian.

[MrB]

I think thats a US law? Not applicable to Oz.
Not saying that with any certainty.

[AdrianF]

I think you are right. I misinterpreted the advice I was given. You can "format shift" videos to DVD, you can copy music files to MP3 format for your own use but you cannot backup DVD's even for your own use.
Appologies.

Adrian

[Glenhuon]

I think you'll find that any sort of copying, reverse engineering (Reauthoring, shrinking etc), format changing, is technically illegal for all copyrighted material. It's just that home backups have been "tolerated" as long as you have purchased the original and do not pass it on to a third party.

[AdrianF]

The following was taken directly from the Aust copyright site at http://www.copyright.org.au/filmKey points
• It is now legal for a person to copy a videotape he or she owns onto a DVD for private and domestic use.
• The new provision does not apply an infringing videotape.

Adrian

[Glenhuon]

I stand corrected, didn't know they had made that provision.

Bill