That one is probably dead. PDO UK had some serious quality control issues (not only with LD), so that is the result of extremely poor manufacturing.

Here is an example from my collection. You can see it is beginning to "fog" around the edges, and also have a black spot. This disc plays fine in the beginning, but halfway in, it is very distorted. Not something you would want to watch or listen to.

yeah, those discs are nasty looking!
nowadays every laserdisc from PDQ must be dead and unplayable?

Not every disc is unplayable or bad in general. Though, a lot of LDs and CDs from that factory do suffer from production issues. I'm fairly certain I do have a good PDO UK disc too.

Yes they were pretty poor & they had problems with almost every format (or was it every format?!?) produced at the PDO Blackburn plant over its lifetime - they did produce good discs on occasions though.

Their pressing (just as an example) of THX 1138 on the TARTAN VIDEO series number TVL 002 was a rather good issue with a very clear transfer & over the years I have had 5 or 6 of them pass through my hands & all the copies were very good indeed with no issues whatsoever, there are a few PDO UK titles that were good throughout the issues production run.

Sadly though more often than not PDO UK LDs (& anything else produced by them) are worth checking out first as some titles now are almost impossible to find playable copies of while others had problems with some discs from a production run with some discs from the same run having no playback issues at all - they never really ever had a good reputation as a disc producer.

Their discs, even some of the latter issued ones, can suffer the visual issue of going grey & blackening over time & I have some that show this "problem" that still play well while a couple of other similar discs will no longer play at all - a bit of a turkey shoot with so many of them now.

But you do all know that the laser reads from the inside out and not to the exact edge, about 1/2 an inch in.
so something like above would or should still play and the edge issues would not be an issue for poor or non playback.

It would be another issue.

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Yeah, the edge is just a symptom of the same problem.

I have others that have black death further into the disc. This was just the quickest example I could find in a hurry. Either way, the pictured disc is very distorted about halfway through. Plays fine in the beginning.

Really impressive how awful the manufacturing is on PDO UK stuff.

I have two British disc with a lot of spots on them. The spots are on all sufrace. Well, "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark" it's having a lot of squares movinng horizontaly on the image. The Elkie Brooks one haves some horizontal blue stripes for around 3 minutes at the begining of both sides. The sound isnt' affected.
Those dots are marks of laser rot or is something else?

I am lucky and only had problems with some old Discovision and PDO Laserdiscs, especially the movies distributed by LEO KIRCH:
"FÖRSTER IM SILBERWALD", "ELFRIEDE VON DER PFALZ". Ive bought them for my mother to impress her with the high quality of LDs.
( In the mid-90s, when DVD wasnt on sale yet ), but I was ashamed of the bad picture and even more audio quality.
Ive bought "FÖRSTER IM SILBERWALD" on VHS for one german mark, but the "PFALZ" movie was only for sale on LD.
( They released it a few years ago on DVD )

I have a copy of Gorky Park old Vestron video release, it's ok on the first disc but side 3 is a total rot fest, totally distorted audio and video.
Also my copy of Fargo has rot (DADC pressing)
I watched The Specialist recently (also DADC) and that had a fair amount of speckling on start of both sides but then got better towards the end.
Have some other speckled discs but by far the worst is the Gorky Park, my older player immediately locks up if I put it in.

Reading through this thread has really helped me determine what the hell rot actually is. Also I must be fortunate because I have a rot free copy of Air Force One which is apparently a notorious LD.

i've a copy of BLUE SEED vol.1 that's so badly rotted that it won't play more than a few minutes into the first side
before turning to total visual hash and crashing the player...

It took me awhile to replace my original copy of Air Force One but I did eventually find a rot free copy. Definitely like using this title as a demo for 5.1 (although the SuperBit DVD actually has the same DD mix).



Anyway, in respect to rot. I used to have more rotted titles early on simply because any new title one buys back in the day would be fresh off the pressing plant and thus I would discover the rot issue two months or more down the road (in most cases). Fast forward 20+ years later, every title one buys now is used and has been exposed to the environment. Thus, if a disc has rotted, it would be very obvious right off the bat and one can simply return it to the seller (I do this all the time with any seller I deal with).

My collection at the moment might have a rot percentage possibly in the 2% range but I haven't seen many of my titles in years so it could be higher. I guess I'll be disappointed when I play one of those discs one day.

My copy of Paul Simon: In Concert (1980) [PA-81-001] is so badly rotted, I can see through spots on the disc.

1st that's technically not rot, that's just messed up.
I've had discs like that in the past.

But how does it play???
Mine would play fine but that was about 8 years ago.

Man, I bought three discs from a German seller a while back, and the one disc in the lot I actually really wanted had severe rot on side 2, both audio tracks had audible helicoptering and visible noise, the one I pretty much only bought as filler was the only one without problems!

I've been fortunate in general so far but I have a lot of LDs in the mail right now. I don't think any of them are high risk rotters according to the database but a few of them are listings w/o much info.

I recently discovered that my copy of Amateur (1994) has moderate laser rot.

I'm going to have to capture this but on a disc I just got (Phantom Quest Corp) there have been a couple brief instances with a distorted looking line through a part of the image. It's black and white from what I can tell and the audio is fine when it happens so I'd lean towards it not being rot but idk.