I bought it new, watched it all the way through fine, but a few months later, it skips and soon freezes on multiple software players in 2 DVD drives. There's a dark "burn" on part of the disc's underside. I don't know how it got there or if it was there when I bought it. What might it be and do you think that's the cause? No scratches or even dust on it. I treat my DVDs carefully. I know DVDs might degrade after years, but after a few months and it's only been played a couple times.
Where did you get the DVD? If it is a commercial DVD, it isn't burned. It is pressed, and it isn't going to degrade.
Your disc appears to be a burned disc and wad not burned with the optimal amount of laser energy (the semi solid gel was not truly converted to the solid state). Hence on playing, the reading laser corrupted the data, and now the disc is unreadable
I bought the DVD new from Amazon. It's a commercial DVD (1 DVD of a season box set) and did play fine when I checked it before the 30 day exchange window was up. This happened on another commercial DVD as well a year ago. I played it through fine when I got it, but 6 months later it froze around the same place on all the DVD players I tried it on. On that one there wasn't even a discoloration of any kind on the DVD.
commercial disc are pressed and silvery in color on the optical side. Should be very uniform in silver color.
I borrowed a friend's digital camera. It's uniform silver except for the brown bit. I don't remember if the brown bit was present when I bought it. I *think* I checked all the discs' undersides (I bought several TV series at once) for scratches etc., not just the one that froze on arrival (which I exchanged), but I'm not positive. By the way, thanks for responding. So far I haven't come across any grasp of what went wrong, but at least I'd like to prevent this from happening again.
Hollywood it seems is turning out more and more bad disc pressings as we speak. That is a shame. It appears that you received a poorly manufactured disc.
It may be that one of your DVD drives got hot enough to fry both of DVDs. It then would have a problem in any DVD drive. I don't know if that is possible, though. How do you store those DVDs?
Have you heard of that happening? Any symptoms besides the obvious and is there a diagnostic test or maintenance routine I can run on my drives? My main one is a year old Samsung SH-S182M WriteMaster DVD writer with lightscribe. They've played 1000s of DVDs, and I haven't heard or smelled anything unusual from my drives. Now that I think about it though, twice when a burn has gone bad, the *top*/label side of the disc has appeared uniformly darker, like it was lightscribed even though I've never used it. That's the only other unusual thing that's occurred. I store them in jewel cases like that, vertically like books on a clean wooden shelf. I keep the room cool and don't change the temperature quickly. They're nowhere near direct sunlight. No one smokes. Any other hazards I should be alert for? It's possible. It wouldn't have vexed me so much if it had demonstrated that in time for me to exchange it.
The brown spot is likely a chemical reaction of the evaporated aluminum layer to debris or an oil spot that was on the molded plastic before it went into the vacuum chamber or a piece of debris or oil in the chamber itself that got onto the disc before or during sputtering. It takes some time for these flaws to show up because the chemical reaction time is slow. Since the flaw is inside the disc and not on the outer side that a consumer can contact, its very presence is proof of a manufacturing flaw. That means that the store that sold it must take it back as a defective product.
