Well first, Happy 2021 to all

Next, i'm having a bit of an issue here trying to unearth a few Discovision dead sides. I've done this 4 or 5 times a while back (it's been about 6 or 7 years since I did it last), but i'm doing everything right...rubbing alcohol and scrubbing the hell out of it with cotton balls. Same thing I did in the past with success.

But now for some reason, i'm getting the sides to register in the player (Pioneer), but when I hit play I get the U1 error code on the blue screen and then it just ejects the disc. I referenced what U1 means in the Pioneer error codes sticky, and do not know what to do here to make these work. I'm trying to unearth 2 dead sides.

If anyone can give some advice on how to make this work, lemme know. I'm doing nothing different than I did in the past with these.

Not all dead sides can be played in normal LD players.
They have something about the GM programming and you need an industrial player, but I'm not sure if all industrial players will work on said discs.

You'll have to search it up, some of the industrial discs start from the center of the disc not the label.
Hope that helps and makes sense.

They would use all types of sides for the dead sides.
Also if its very mirror like then you won't get a playing side, has to have the look of CAV or CLV.

Thanks for the info...never knew this. What's strange though is i've been able to play industrial training videos that I unearthed from dead sides scrubbed in the past.

Like this Chevrolet training video (which I posted to Youtube 5 or 6 years ago when I unearthed it) :


The 2 dead sides i'm currently trying to unearth with the playing issues look like all the others with the frosty look before the scrub down. Then after the scrub down it has the mirror effect like the regular sides and the successful dead side unearthings I did in the past.

Can try putting player in test mode and starting playback further into disc.

The later batches of GM disks (and therefore dead sides) have Philips codes and can play on regular players. Amusingly model-year 1984 GM disks still had Discovision labels, quite a while after the plant was taken over by Pioneer and remodeled.

I would assume that they were using already printed labels or that they contractual obligation to manufacture was with the DiscoVision entity and they didn't bother resigning as Pioneer?

Julien

Does this really work? I only own one Discovision disc (never tried playing it, got it at a Hard Off for 100 yen for the heck of it), and the rot looks like mouse droppings embedded in the aluminum layer, so I don't think any amount of scrubbing is going to help:

That's a flat out damaged disc. The scrubbing to unearth dead sides on Discovision discs that have em is just for that...has nothing to do with removing or repairing rot, etc on main disc.

Dead sides = when the movie ends for instance on side 5 disc 3, and you have a blank side 6. The blank side is unplayable and wont even register in your LD player. It was made to do that. But if you scrub the hell out of that dead/blank side with rubbing alcohol and cotton cloth or cotton balls, it removes the lacquer that they sprayed onto it to make it unplayable to consumers,and reveals whatever they pressed on that side to cover it at the factory.

Sometimes you end up with some side of another Discovision release, you could end up also with training videos for different motor companies of the 70's and on the very rare occasion, unearth a side of a canceled LD release.

ahh, that makes more sense, thanks. I seem to remember reading something about that before but I totally forgot about it.