Title pretty much sums it up, I just bought a DVD on ebay for TRON and the disc looks fine but it locks up for the first 25 minutes, it will play after I skip and the player catches it.

Does anybody else have any cases of major label DVDrotters?
Sort of bothersome as I know all these formats will eventually die quicker than the
1900 printing of the Fall of the Roman Empire I just acquired but this is sad to say the least.

This DVD is only from 2002 and its very sad, and there may be a bunch of DVDs on the market very soon

I wouldn’t consider it rot unless you had actually bought it in 2002 and saw it go from functioning to garbage over time. A 20 year old DVD from eBay could have shipped defective 20 years ago or been left in the sun for five years or who knows what before you got it. The early DVD era was full of weirdly defective releases that randomly wouldn’t play on random machines. DVDs are computer code and all sorts of wacky dumb crap can cause problems. It’s not like film or LD or VHS where the mechanical mechanism more or less just goes “forward” by default. Bad DVDs can be bad because they cause memory leaks that newer players are immune to. Some players suck at layer changes making some discs more challenging than others. I could be rot, but I wouldn’t assume so right away unless there is some crappy sites

Seems that its a 2 disc set and both discs are fubar'd
Won't get on to the menu, when it does only haft the time, very odd as I've owned a bunch of DVDs and never noticed this before.
Disc looks perfect, but yes I've bought those types of LDs that look perfect but the owners never even played them to then be the first to play
and they had flaws too.

I'm thinking its the release, seems like this release is in a thicker case, I'll try to get another one and see, it could be my player but I doubt, unless
its started to go today

Something I ran into recently is the first couple discs of Witch Hunter Robin have many copies that are dead now. Guessing there was some kind of pressing issue as it seems to impact the 2003 release but NOT 2004. Which do have different UPCs at least. Also notable that only the first two volumes saw immediate re-issues and have two listings for singles. 3-6 just had the one single release outside of collections and I didn't encounter any dead ones.

Can you back up the DVD on your PC to an MKV and play that back without any issues?

Haven't tried, it was only 7 bucks but it sucks, both discs actually freeze up, almost like what I've read and seen videos about HD DVD.

I've already bought another copy but will check this one on my upstairs DVD player.
Just very odd, but I sort of remember years ago when I first bought a DVD player that I had issues with the Disney Dumbo?
It may have been their first pressing plants used

The only time I've had a physical defect on a new DVD was the special edition of Mad Max which had this weird indent on one side where the plastic seemed slightly warped around it. Obviously it would not play past that part and I got a replacement. Still a weird thing to have.

I have had blu-ray discs go bad while owning them, the old Lion's Gate Rambo Trilogy box set played fine when I got it but when I re-watched them years later, none of them would play past the layer change and I noticed all the discs had turned this slightly bronze color.

I wonder if the cheapness of production of these formats are a reason they aren't being posted as much, I did a quick search but didn't find much, some but not much.
So it may be that they just get tossed since most of the DVDs are only a few bucks online and a buck or two at local thrift stores.

I do remember reading about an anime on DVD that all had flaws, I think it was Ariel, this is the LD Deluxe Ariel: The Beginning [PCLP-00124]
I've wanted to get the DVD but am worried about the flaws so I've stayed away thus far.

To add, I've only had this one DVD, maybe a flawed new DVD that I had to send back, I can't remember.
I have had more LDs in my collection and go through my hands than DVDs, but have been buying more DVDs recently since they are
still super cheap.

I distinctly remember an anime DVD…the exact title escapes me…something US released…maybe vol 2 of a series…that would not play on a PS2 as it shipped but it did play once the PS2 DVD software was updated. I remember this because it was the only DVD player in the house at the time. It may have been Gasaraki or FLCL…I can’t remember.

So if you had a player that didn’t like that disk and it wasn’t update-able like the PS2 was, then it would never play even now.

This is the kind of annoying crap that keeps me watching LD. Sure, LD has issues…lots of issues…but not that kind of random crap.


Another thing when it comes to defective anything previously owned…things can change hands several times before someone has the brains to throw the thing in the trash. I’ve seen the same bad copy of a rare game turn up in the hands of more than one person who starts to wonder if there is a plague of failure with this rare item when it fact they all owned the same defective copy of the game. I have DOA PC Engine flash cart that I eventually realized I was the third owner of.

I wonder if Tron has bad code, if it’s a bad pressing, or if it has rot. I also wonder how many people have been burned by the same copy of Tron you’re holding.

Deluxe Ariel is one of my only defective LDs and I’m pretty sure someone else mentioned theirs was bad. I hope the DVDs aren’t problematic as well.

Oh I heard it was the other way around, the DVD was bad but the LDs were fine. The anime looked interesting but that topic here steered me away.

Edit: Want to give an update without making the topic too long with multiple posts.

Tried the DVD on another player and it was worse, maybe that upstairs player is older? Or not as updated but they are cheaper
DVD players I own and can't be updated, well maybe the main one can be updated.

Bought a second copy and disc 1 was fine this time but disc 2 had a minor lockup on part of the specials.

So it seems that this title has started to fail somehow, unless these were all flawed and nobody went to play them like zeta had mentioned
earlier.

I've had a similar issue with some older DVDs I've picked up. I think it's just the nature of physical media over time. It might be worth looking into ways to preserve your DVDs if you're worried about them deteriorating further. I've started making digital copies of some of my favorites just to be safe.

Preserving DVDs, fortunately, is trivial. They're already digital, so nothing is lost upon simply copying it to a hard disc, ssd, dvd-r, whatever.

Yeah, it’s trivial. It’s also eternal. You have to keep copying those files over and over again onto new drives as time goes by. I’d put money on %90 of my discs being OK in another decade, no danger. But betting on two or three flash drives with 500 movies each? A lot of eggs in those little baskets…

Think about some random disc in your collection that was made in like…1989. Do you have any hard drives from 1989 still? Any from 1999 even? I sure don’t. The LDs and CDs and especially the LPs survive.

Yeah, my op wasn't about if I should start doing backups of stuff, it was asking if anybody else had this issue of DVD flawed playback on an LD forum.
So it seems that it may be this lonely DVD title that had a bad run, I haven't found any other official DVDs with issues.

Had some HK discs years ago and some smaller budget companies, so I know those were just junk discs but hadn't had this issue with official DVDs before.
So seems that its just Tron and only the 2 copies I bought, one was worse than the other, one was total trash, the other had a small issue on the extras disc.

I'm not going to spend time transferring about 60 DVDs to back them up when they cost me a buck at the thrift store.
If I need to back them up I will just buy another copy, its not like Tron was expensive, 5 and 6 bucks with free shipping.

Just wanted to know but thanks for the idea of backups that don't make sense.

This is an interesting one, found out I have another glitchy DVD, this time its Superman 4 disc set from around 2006.
Film stopped playing about halfway through.

Its a WB disc and this form seems to give info on poor WB and Fox DVDs.
https://www.nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?t=20399&start=30

Same issue that plagued the US HD DVDs. Same plant, same problems...

Julien

i cant say ive run into that yet, any that were vintage enough to have a chance to are probably scratched to oblivion..... however ive had multiple bad warner bros hd dvds over the years, just REALLY bad pressings they made.

I remember when the HD DVD format started, one announced "advantage" was that existing DVD-manufacturing equipment could be modified or adapted to make HD DVDs.

With that in mind, and the widespread failures of Warner Brothers HD DVDs, are/were there a large number of WB DVDs that have also failed? I see only the two items rein-o mentioned here, but do any of you know of other reported issues? (Once HD DVD and Blu-ray came out, I completely stopped buying DVDs, except for maybe five or six since then.)

Yes there are, see admin @ The Final Chapter (full collection rot review)

Julien