Anyone else finding just a few too many old DVDs just don't work any more?

6 ft under and Big Love were pressed at Cinram USA plant (old WEA Mfg/WAMO plant)
Gate of Flesh at Sony DADC USA
Veronica Mars - no idea since the code isn't the right one

Any idea how old these discs are? Generally speaking, the studios will replace your discs if you return them to them, if they still have the title. Good luck on customer service.

 

I've dug it out and it's not one of those. I'm in the UK and it's a cardboard slipcase round a cardboard inner with clear plastic trays. It's an MGM special edition from 2001. Just looked at the disc for the first time in a couple of years and some clouding round the edges back again.

 

All of them were bought when they first came out; within a day or two of release. I'm not a patient man and paying full retail price has never bothered me. Of course, the receipts are long gone.

The 'Veronica Mars' G000 code is the best I can estimate unless and until I can find a good magnifying glass.

 

No, doubt the Mars code is hard to read! Some of them require a microscope.

Not being familar with the titles, how old are they roughly?

 

My personal belief is that quality control dipped much sooner into DVD production's life cycle than it did with CD. Cost-cutting didn't seriously begin to start affecting CD quality until the 2000s, years after release. It occurred much sooner with DVD.

 

Fairly recent and (in a hopefully unrelated manner) pretty darned expensive!

Mars 3 - August 2006 ($69.98)
Gate Of Flesh - August 2005 ($49.98)
Big Love 1 - October 2006 ($99.98)
Six Feet Under 5 - March 2006 ($79.98)

 

So, roughly 7-8 years ago. Anyone else?

 

Sounds like the glue in the packaging as noted previously rather than a problem with the DVD disc itself.

 

I have been told that "fumes in the air" from packaging, inks, and even the center spindle clip can cause chemical reactions with the disc. This definitely happened with some boxed sets, where the booklet came in direct contact with the disc surface. So it's not always just the disc by itself; sometimes it has help when it goes bad.

 

I do know the cases from China smell bad!

 

the night stalker and brady bunch sets had those cases so if anyone has them switch out the jewel cases.check the play side of the discs and make sure they are ok.i've also noticed a lot of those clear thin plastic dvd cases seem a bit slimey.

 

No problem with mine for The Night Stalker. So far.

 

I remember seeing a some rack of the self-destruct "rental" DVD in some Canadian airports a couple years ago. Packaging sorta looks like phone cards with a plastic seal inside the cardboard "pocket".
https://www.google.ca/search?q=dvd+...96,d.cGE&fp=5437961f8fec9f18&biw=1440&bih=811

 

Disc 1 of Seinfeld Season 8 refused to play anymore. I tried to rip it and found chapters had bad spots all over. I hated to buy
another whole set, but when I found it for $8.99, it was easier to just buy it.

 

I am in possession of my older sister's DVD collection, and a few of them won't play. They look suspiciously like well-manufacturerd bootlegs.

 

Some of my Charlie's Angels DVD's are having trouble, Season 3 and 4. No problems with Season 1 or 2.

The Miami Vice double sided DVD's (rollseyes) always were troublesome, don't know what whiz thought that up.

 

Every day in every way! Just this week discovered several grey market DVD-R's I'd bought on ebay that would not play on my current player. Often, you can re-rip them to get a new copy that plays. But it's a dice roll. 3 of 5 discs i re-ripped played. But 2 kept giving messages that the discs had dust or scratches and would not copy. Yet the discs were clean and scratch free! have never had an equivalent problem with ANY of the many THOUSANDS of VHS tapes i have that are THIRTY plus years old. I'll NEVER copy my Vhs to DVd and discard them!

 

OK I just pulled out my copy of Anchors Aweigh out of its snapper case and IT WOULD NOT READ. Put it in the computer drive and the WB logo herked and jerked and got to the menu where it just shut down when you tried to play it. Now when looking at it in good light I can see a change in the disc in an irregular "bloom" eminating from the center. I had to look close, because it is also silver. It must be a flaw in the layers. Crud, now I gotta get another copy!

 

Damn it - I found another one that won't load.

David Bowie - Glass Spider DVD (IFPI L906 - or possibly 908)

 

I don't foresee DVDs being as reliable in the long-term as CDs proved to be. CDs had decades to work out the production kinks before the market forced them to drop production costs, but DVD manufacturers were already running scared from costs by 2004 or 2005. I see failure rates for DVDs in a few years being orders of magnitudes higher than our CD collections. We are even seeing problems in some of the early Blu-ray pressings.

 

Which ones on Blu?

 

Since someone mentioned some, I've said it before, but to my surprise I've never had a DVD-R fail on me yet and I've got discs going back to 2003. This includes a lot of super-cheap Ritek and other disreputable companies' discs. The lone exception is a couple of Memorex Dual-Layer discs, but even those will still play in some players and I was able to rip them with a PC - and the reason I only had two of those discs is because the entire rest of the 20-pack spindle was useless. Every single disc, except those two, failed at the layer break during the burning process. Given the rest of the pack, I'm honestly amazed that those two discs lasted a month, let alone six years.

 

Then there's the little known DVD-ROM type discs. I got a Panasonic dvd recorder that used them and recorded on them a LOT. The expensive discs were like individual hard-drives. You could edit ads out with ease and if you deleted anything, you could re-use the entire disc- unlike DVD+R. Loved the format so much, I got a 2nd panasonic unit. Ultimately, both DVD drives failed. Leaving me with stacks of DVD-ROM material that's near impossible to copy (easily) to regular DVD+R's. PLUS stacks of DVD+Rs that were "in progress" when the drives failed and not FINALIZED. This is another NIGHTMARE of DVD recording. It's seemingly impossible to FINALIZE discs recorded on one recorder on any other system! Bring back good old VHS!!!

 

Early pressings (2006-2008) from Lionsgate, Fox, and MGM are known to spontaneously go bad. They simply refuse to play, with no obvious indicators they've gone bad. At least it's not as bad as Warner's HD DVDs. Their HD DVD pressings have become very unreliable as they've aged and many of them now are coasters. If that format had won, WB would have had a nasty lawsuit on their hands.

 

just had 2 DVDs that will not play recently! What a drag!