Yeah, I have this issue with an old discovision, thought it was the disc that gave up the ghost but after I looked at it again
I saw it was warped, so I need to put it into the shelf of discs in the center to make it flatten, I hope since its the box set.

I have a Ford dealership disc where parts of it are unplayable due to rot.

Other than that, my copy of Awakenings is pretty bad for the first 10 minutes per side, but still watchable.

I've been lucky in that I've been able to largely avoid badly rotted ones.

Me too, I've had over 1200 discs go through my collection, hands or when I used to buy lots and sell what I didn't want and less than 2% were rotted.

I would say that in my collection now I only have 1 or 2 rotters and they are some rare anime which I can't replace or I have tried but they all seem
to have some type of rot or production flaw.

That's a very good ratio and a healthy sample size! I'd say at least 5% of my 270 discs have some sort of rot, but on almost all it's so minor you can hardly notice.

I try to get Kuraray or Pioneer USA/Japan prints whenever possible to minimize the odds.

HOWEVER... I have a copy of Starship Troopers on the way to me, so yeah we'll see how that one goes.

Noob here (In fact im so new I only have 2 LDs) I recently bought a copy of Burn Up W! #1: Skin Dive (1995) [CAVBW/001], and it also exhibits behavior that I think could be rot. Having never handled or played a laserdisc, Im not familiar with what exactly rot looks like, however it does look like some the of video examples. I fast forwarded in places to show some more severe examples, as well as some garbled audio.

The beginning looks like rot, yeah. This was an ADV disc, right? I have one if their discs and its also rotted.

Btw, you’re playing a 4:3 show in 16:9.

Its a rather bare bones hand me down HDTV I don't even have the remote for. I was also testing this player, as I had no idea if it even worked. I need a remote for this player as well. And yes the disc is ADV.

Welcome!

As signofzeta said, it looks rotted.

What player are you running?

Pioneer CLD-1070.

Can keep a lookout for CU-CLD017 which will give you control over the audio tracks.

So are you just getting an LD player and 2 discs to flip or enjoy the format????

I'm not flipping these. I got into this because I like odd or obsolete formats and technology. Ive also always wanted to have laserdisc since I came across a player in high school. (Why a school had one, In 2007, I don't know.) Also, anime.

2007's pretty late for a school to still have a laserdisc player, but I know there were discs made specifically for classrooms. They'd come with a booklet of barcodes so the teacher could scan them and jump to still pictures as part of a lesson. That's how I first encountered laserdisc (though I wouldn't learn the name for years later) at least as late as 2000.

I have CLD-V2600s manufactured in 2001.

Schools don’t dump a format they spent $50,000 on just because “it’s time”. The consumer market on the other hand is endlessly hood wink-able.

I mean, by 2007 schools started getting projectors that you could connect to a computer, which cover all of the use cases that the classroom LDs met and then some. Also, those old discs are more likely to use vocabulary and definitions that curricula are moving on from, like how many planets there are. When this happens you start weighing the continued worth of a laserdisc player against the space it takes up. Otherwise you're falling for the sunk-cost fallacy.

It's definitely laserrot and you can even tell from it it's a CAV disc because the dots/artefacts remain stable around the same areas.
For CLV they would move up/down.

Julien

My USA copy of Starship-Troopers looks and has incredible AC-3 sounds until side B which has minor horizontal dashes but nothing crazy but the Dolby AC-3 its completely shot, any technical reason for why the AC-3 is first to go?
The Analog seemed ok, didnt check PCM.
My Dantes peak USA is just white ash unwatchable at all.

Well, a good reason is compression.

Remember, AC3 is compressed audio unlike PCM & analog audio which is uncompressed. Since compression means there is less data to begin with, losing even a little bit of it is going to foul up the decoder's ability to perform and what you get is more break up that can eventually lead to the decoder just simply giving up and muting the audio. With PCM, you can lose some data and the error correction for the most part can still compensate to fill in some of the missing data (but too much lost data and it will become unplayable as well).

It is just the same with the video rot we see on LD manifesting itself as drop outs. The player can deal with most video rot since it's uncompressed analog and thus will play fine but the picture is going to look like crap. When a DVD (which is compressed MPEG video) rots, for the most part the picture always looks great until it gets to the point when there is so much data loss that the disc just simply won't play anymore.

My worst case by far is a concert - Go Go's: Live at the Greek. The lovely ladies are barely visible through the rot blizzard, from the beginning of the disc until the very end. The analog sound was also choppy and distorted throughout. Bummer.

Happy ending, I suppose - the mess motivated me to seek out the later, digital reissue of Live at the Greek, which I'm happy to say has pristine A/V quality. The rotter became wall decor.