I agree with Rein-O.

While you may want to play a rotted disc really really bad, rotters are defective discs and unless you have a spare player for the purpose it’s just plain dumb to make adjustments trying to play junk discs. It will only eventually harm its ability to play good discs. Calibrating to play garbage is mis-calibration.

Some players have a reputation for playing better through rot but IMHO there is almost no way to do this on purpose. No player was ever designed to play through garbage discs, it’s just luck. It depends on the exact rot you have and the random physicality of the player. Substance personally put to bed the idea than an HLD deck plays through rot better by buying one and trying it but thousands of people still believe they could play their copy of Eraser if they had an X-0.

I understand.

But how about the seller who talks that Alien plays fine on his Philips?
Is he lying?
Because on my Pioneer it is unwatchable trash! Screen and sound.

(this LD edition is very important for me, I have my own criterias)

They were very likely lying. Rot should be apparent on any player. I have more experience with this now that I have encountered some rotten discs and have 4 players.

Or you don't know what rot is

Please post a picture or video of what issues you are having, and do you have multiple players to test the disc?

gypsy, thank you very much. That is all I need to know.
rein-o, dont worry. I perfectly understand what laser rot is.

It’s possible for a rotted disc to play way better in one player versus another. The player it plays well in might not even be a good deck, it may play pretty well in a total piece of garbage M series but not track in an Elite. It’s probably not “perfect” in any player though if it has any level of rot.

In all likelihood the seller didn’t test it or didn’t do it recently or throughly. This assumes you do indeed have rot which I can’t say without seeing it live.

I would imagine that the only place where you'd see any improvement is one of those old top-loaders with a helium-neon laser with a slightly higher (lower?) bandwidth than more modern machines, which makes them less sensitive to problems in the disc, but even then you're stuck with just analog audio. It still wouldn't make your disc not rotten.

Well then this is your call to contact the seller to find out if they are lying.

Out of my 40 or so discs I have problems with maybe 3 of them.

Only one I can actually think of is Beauty and the Beast Work in Progress Edition, it's CAV so out of the 6 sides only one has an issue, the other sides are fine. The disc looks just fine, and it's entirely watchable, so not the end of the world.
I can't recall what the other movies are, but I do remember it was just a pocket of it for them, and they weren't very long, maybe a couple minutes of it.

So I'd say my experience have been pretty minimal.

Barring the two titles that I got with the player (because the seller probably figured he wasn't getting rid of those two otherwise), I've got a ratio of 2/12...the other of which, while slightly distracting, is still watchable as far as I can tell. Only one is rotten enough to be considered unwatchable.

I've reported 4 cases of rot though I think I was mistaken with Braveheart, wish I could remove that. Dirty Dancing was REALLY bad but I did trooper through it. Had to do analog audio.

I thought you could. I swear I did that myself a while back.

You deffo can remove or amend the rot reports, just click your rot reports & they can be changed from that.

Cheers

I figured it out. Just had to hover over the title and then click the trash can in case anyone else is wondering.

I've had multiple copies of this over the years, and they've all had a moderate amount of noise (especially, IIRC, on side two), but no actual rot. So I write this up as just a bad pressing.

Still, it's considerably better than the US-released DVD, which I regard as unwatchable.

If you have a region-free DVD or BD player, go for the UK Artificial Eye release, which is the best one around. I have my fingers crossed for a proper US release someday.

What a mess, especially for a movie from a big studio.

Is there a Japanese LD? I couldn't find one doing a quick search on here.

Really? I'll have to check the LD again, and see if I've mistaken noise for rot. What's wrong with the US DVD?

Out of my 400 or so discs only 1 has rot I think.

Deep, The (1977) [VLD 3120]

almost unwatchable snow the whole way through

It's likely just really crappy as is the case with a lot of early DVDs in particular. This movie appears to only have one DVD release which doesn't help matters at all. The LD appears to have better audio and aspect ratio.

Decided to give Computer Animation Festival #1 [72333-80037-6] another spin since I was fiddling with my player's load belt after it refused to read a disc even on repeated inserts, and I noticed that the digital track sounds even worse on my new audio setup, while the distortion on the analog track in the other hand comes out so muted that it's almost watchable.