Salvaging discs burned to defective DVDs

[johnneumann]

A few years ago, I burned some precious footage to DVD and didn't bother to check the burn after completing the project. Now, years later, I'm finding out that the DVDs were burned to badly defective discs. Skips and freezes everywhere.

The Kron won't read the discs and my one DVD ripping software that I own on my Mac doesn't want to scan the whole disc either.

Does anyone have any software suggestions or any other strategies for getting a bad disc back into memory so that it can be reburned on a new DVD. I understand the new DVD would still have glitches, but I'm hoping they would be slightly less of an impact visually as they would be when played from the completely defective disc. I would be happy if the discs just played through, glitches and all, without freezing.

[JPaul]

John, I assume you did not back them up to any other media i.e. dv tape. You could try different players as some will deal with errors better than others. Assuming you can find a player that will play the disk, input via rca/s-video cables. Once in the unit, you could work with it possibly removing some of the worse footage or using NOP to make the area more readable. You may have to input in stages. It sometimes helps to unplug the dvd player after it has encountered numerous errors and give it a "refresh" so it can start from a new location. For some reason, I have found the errors can have a cumulative effect on playability. Good luck!

[johnneumann]

Thank you for replying, JPaul.

What is NOP? You referred to that for making footage more readable. I've never heard of it.

-JOHN

[JPaul]

Follow this link: viewtopic.php?f=14&t=65&p=703&hilit=nop#p296 and read the 6th post on how to use NOP. Thanks to Tim for this info.

[RonaldPawlak]

I found at one time when I would print the labels and attach them to the DVD and being sure they were concentric, after a period of time when I tried to play them they would do the same thing. I had to remove the paper label and it play fine. Then I put them in the DVD tray and use the Ksebara program and put them in the system and redone them using the lastest 4.0 Arabesk which was nice because I got to use the latest chapter creation method.

[TimKennelly]

Are there scratches on the DVDs?

How do you know the media is badly defective, because they are playing bad now?

There have been discussions about DVD durability for the last couple of years and perhaps you are running into that issue.

The consensus was to use one of the major brand names that have had solid reputations such as Taiyo Yuden blanks.

What was the brand of these blanks.

My personal experience is my duplicator is the most forgiving and actually can create a less glitchless, more compatible copy than the original.

If you would want to send me one of these "defective" DVDs to try making a copy in my duplicator to see if it fixes or at least improves playability I would give it a try.

[BobFoster]

I had some DVD masters that I thought were on quality media. After a couple of years they began to display pixelization and other problems. I Kesabrad them into a prestige and ran a new copy. Still had problems. Then I ran the defective DVD masters through my duplicator and the internal correction software gave me a new master on a better quality disc that were problem free.
YMMV
Bob Foster

[JPaul]

I'm in the process now of redoing my older dvds burned on my Kron Pioneer AO3. Evidently, it did not handle the burning process well. I've replaced the burner with a new one. Fortunately, I had saved everything to mini dv tapes so I am relying on those to load the video into my Kron+. The problematic disks are the ones that contain footage that was other than digital, i.e. video 8 or H8. I test them by running the old disks on my laptop which is much more sensitive to errors. The disks that are made from original digital footage don't have a problem. My old disks were primarily Optodisks. My replacements are Tayaio Yuden.

In sum, I may have had a combination of poor error handling on the Kron, a weak burner and perhaps disk quality.

[JPaul]

I've gone one step farther. I've found that using DVD Cloner or DVDFab (copy software) that my disks are even more compatible. Check it out on Top Ten Reviews here: http://dvd-copy-software-review.toptenreviews.com/

I actually tried the above mentioned programs when my laptop failed on an Arabesk produced disk. For each program (Cloner & Fab) I used the same disk that hung up and downloaded to my PC, then burned to a disk. They both worked where the original would not!!!