WB Offers Replacements, Not Refunds, for Hundreds of Rotting DVDs (arstechnica.com) 65
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment has confirmed widespread issues affecting DVDs manufactured between 2006-2008 that are experiencing premature disc rot. The company is offering replacements for affected titles but no refunds, even when replacements aren't possible.
The problem manifests in various ways: complete disc failure, freezing midway through playback, or menu issues. Movie critic Chris Bumbray recently discovered several of his classic film DVDs had deteriorated, including titles not available digitally. DVD collectors have documented this issue for years via YouTube and forums, with speculation that a Pennsylvania manufacturing plant used subpar materials.
The problem manifests in various ways: complete disc failure, freezing midway through playback, or menu issues. Movie critic Chris Bumbray recently discovered several of his classic film DVDs had deteriorated, including titles not available digitally. DVD collectors have documented this issue for years via YouTube and forums, with speculation that a Pennsylvania manufacturing plant used subpar materials.
Rip all your media (Score:3)
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It's a nice idea, but it's illegal due to the DMCA.
In fact, Warner Brohers is one of the key players behind the CCA who developed the Content Scrambling System for DVD and thus caused it to become illegal to rip and backup your DVDs.
Re:Rip all your media (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a nice idea, but it's illegal due to the DMCA.
As if anyone cares. Stupid laws tend to be widely ignored, and rightly so. This is a prime example.
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or just copy to an ISO file and archive that (Home burned DVD's can have a short life)
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It's a nice idea, but it's illegal due to the DMCA.
In fact, Warner Brohers is one of the key players behind the CCA who developed the Content Scrambling System for DVD and thus caused it to become illegal to rip and backup your DVDs.
Which is a reason why so many people stopped buying them and just started sailing the high seas, DMCA be damned. This is just another reason.
Fuck the MPAA! [youtu.be]
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It may be illegal to rip them, but it's not illegal to copy them. Copying a disc doesn't require "descrambling" the content. Make a copy before it's too late! Dual-layer DVDs are still pretty cheap.
Re:Rip all your media (Score:4, Interesting)
It may be illegal to rip them, but it's not illegal to copy them. Copying a disc doesn't require "descrambling" the content. Make a copy before it's too late! Dual-layer DVDs are still pretty cheap.
Too bad dual-layer DVDs, at least consumer grade ones, tend to have lifespans on the order of 5-10 years. And the rest of consumer-grade recordable video media doesn't do a lot better.
"Just stream it," the kids say. Streaming is garbage, you have to jump through hoops to get the content you want to pay for in the quality you want, and good luck if you wish to watch it on an airplane, and your access can be revoked on the whims of the studios or streaming services.
If you're going to buy and pay for physical media with the intention of having access to it forever, rip it. Encode it in the highest quality format you can, store it on reliable storage and keep backups, because hard drives die too.
In the eyes of some backward countries, that makes you a criminal. Which is why there are many who say if you're going to give me the jacket, I may as well wear it, and just proceed directly to the high seas.
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Decent quality consumer recordable DVDs are still going strong. Taiyo Yuden and the like. Archival grade Bluray seems to be pretty robust in my experience too. Unfortunately production is winding down and there is only one manufacturer now. Prices are getting silly.
Fortunately there is always The Pirate Bay. It's barely even worth ripping your own discs now, when you can get a nice rip that someone else has encoded and checked. Being semi-pro piracy groups they have high standards and you can be fairly conf
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The tools to rip DVDs and Blu-Ray discs are technically prohibited by the DMCA, but it's not really enforced. I'm not sure what the current state of the DMCA exemption for backing up your legally purchased media is, either (the exemption expires every three years and has to be re-requested each time).
Regardless of legality, the tool is here. [makemkv.com] The bigger issues are that modern PCs typically don't include optical drives anymore, and we're in the post-PC era, so some people aren't going to be keen on the conc
Re:Rip all your media (Score:5, Insightful)
... (remind me again why we thought phasing out optical media was a good idea?) ...
We mostly didn't. People who don't like the idea of us paying for a thing once and enjoying it forever, at home or in the car or on an airplane, did. And people who like to sell dysfunctional garbage software and make it market-worthy in the updates.
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Now factor in the fact that the people who didn't want you to enjoy things forever were getting a cut from the sales of blank media.
Now, tell me why they would throw away free money like that?
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The reason why blank media disappeared is because demand evaporated. 800 Megabytes? 5 Gigabytes? Really? No one wants storage that small any more.
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It's a nice idea, but it's illegal due to the DMCA.
It is only "illegal" in the U.S., the DMCA does not apply to the rest of the world. Also, unless Warner Bro has someone coming into my home and checking my computer, they have no way of knowing what I am doing, and as long as I don't do something stupid -- like posting my rips online -- it is impossible for them to know.
The advice stands. Rip everything and store it on a good quality hard drive and then back that up to another hard drive.
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DMCA is only in the US, fortunately. In the UK it's technically civil copyright infringement, but since there would be zero monetary loss nobody is ever sued for it.
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In the UK it's technically civil copyright infringement,
That's all the movie companies have needed to get all the ripping options shut down. They'll typically pursue vicarious liability claims against anyone found making tools or devices available to rip or play back ripped DVDs. Heise in Germany got sued for merely mentioning the website of a copying tool.
By the way, anyDVD got shut down and one of its authors severely fined and brought up on criminal charges for their vicarious copyright infringement t
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It's a nice idea, but it's illegal due to the DMCA.
So what? No one's going to get sued for it.
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At this point it may be illegal but as the content providers aren't really holding up their side of the bargain either it's entirely legitimate.
Many would draw the line at distributing copies to people who never paid for it in the first place, but ripping for personal use is 100% moral, even if it's technically illegal. If the law is immoral, ignoring it isn't.
You can generally rip in one pass with mplayer as long as you've installed the relevant CSS libraries, use:
mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile filename.ts
Re:Rip all your media (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes.
Years ago, we were thinking of having a custom cabinet built for our TV that would fit nicely in the corner where we had it because everything we found was designed for the middle of a wall, not a corner. Then I realized that what we were really spending money on was storage for DVDs. So instead I spent the money on a file server and ripped all our DVDs to .iso files, and we play them from the HTPC that we already had (running MythTV). It's a much better solution.
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And.......not subject to disc rot :):)
I've been doing the home media server thing since the days of Xbox Media Player (the predecessor of Kodi). Hard drives do fail, so you've still got to back up your backups of your movie collection.
While I'm personally not a fan of cloud-based media purchasing, I can certainly see the appeal for people who have no interest in running their own mini home IT department. (And yeah, before someone else says it, I know you can still end up losing your purchased movies due to the company going out of business, o
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It's a lot easier to backup 1000 movie files than 1000 DVDs, though.
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That's a valid point. If I were starting this today, I would just buy a Synology NAS instead of my roll-your-own NAS4Free (now XigmaNAS). But I did build something for under the budget for the media center we would have built with 2+1 RAID. I recently upgraded to much larger drives for a 1+1 RAID (mirrored).
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I have a raspberry pi 3b+ setup with two 1tb SSDs set inside a self powered usb3 enclosure. One drive stores all my files and the other drive mirrors that with a small script I wrote. I have it scheduled to run daily. It's a nice setup and with Jellyfin I'm pretty much able to watch my media on a large array of devices and if I wanted, could even allow people outside of my local network access. I tend to keep it local only.
It's a nice little setup. No idea how well it would scale but I imagine a pi4 would b
Re: whats a dvd? (Score:2)
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There surely can't be a better time to misspell "illiterate" than when you're dressing someone down for punctuation, spelling, or grammar.
>"... Illierate ..."
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Illierate gen-z people...
An illiterate grammer nazi, that's a new one for me. Maybe after all these replies you'll realize how annoying you are.
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Tell me you don't know what 'boomer' means other than it being a bad word ...
Re: whats a dvd? (Score:3)
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I beg to differ. The defining feature of Gen X is that we had to program the VCR for our boomer parents who didn't understand all that tech stuff. ;-)
Why isn't this fraud? (Score:3)
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In many cases the company itself no longer exists either...
Re: Why isn't this fraud? (Score:2)
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When a company promises something will last X years, why isn't it fraud when that turns out to be untrue?
Because the official warranty has long since expired by the time it fails. Your LED lightbulbs may promise 50,000 hours, but the actual warranty on that unit is only 1 year or so. Once it's out of warranty the manufacturer is off the hook for any claims - it was only warranted to be free from defects for a limited time period.
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Rotting DVDs/CDs, LED lightbulbs that don't last, there are probably others. When a company promises something will last X years, why isn't it fraud when that turns out to be untrue?
Because the government makes the laws, and the corporations own the government. (LIterally).
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It's not fraud as long as it's covered in the fine print. Usually companies cover their asses in the fine print. If not, they find someone along the chain to blame it on, like this manufacturer in PA that used to make DVDs but is probably long out of business. It helps if you can blame your issues on a company that no longer exists.
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The only promise that matters is the warranty period.
No, wait... even that doesn't matter. I forgot how modern licensing works.
A private business cut corners? (Score:4, Interesting)
speculation that a Pennsylvania manufacturing plant used subpar materials.
Oh I would never, the *free market* should have simply corrected for this! Surely their competition will clean up in light of this new (17 year out of date) information.
Ok i'll stop being cheeky but right here is an example of why certain regulations and consumer protections are necessary in capitalism. What are consumers to do here? Were they all supposed to have the relevant knowledge to materials check the discs before purchasing? Should a years long and protracted class action lawsuit be the first, best and only recourse?
If it's me this is where someone like say the CFPB or FTC should have the authority to sue WB on our behalf then go in and tell them "full refunds or we start charging and jailing executives"
Re: A private business cut corners? (Score:3)
I don't know that refunds are necessary for everything. In particular, you have no idea how much people paid for any of it.
I think a blueray replacement could be acceptable. Or a downloadable mp4. Or access for the movie o YT vod. Or things of that sort.
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You raise a good point in that restitution can take many forms but in this case, really, my response is "fuck em" in particular for this because there is no actual competition, I don't even have a choice to legally buy a Warner movie on DVD from anyone but Warner or who they decide to contract through.
I would say it's almost acceptable if they spin up the factory to re-print the out of circulation discs and replace them for the customers but anything else feels like they "got away with it" and the customers
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Oh I would never, the *free market* should have simply corrected for this! Surely their competition will clean up in light of this new (17 year out of date) information.
Yes - I took Economics 101 long ago, too. For some reason it didn't explain that the process works equally well in reverse - where the companies simply agree to stick to a given standard of high price, poor quality, and rotten service.
But, I hear you cry, what about anti-trust laws and suchlike that forbid "cartels" and conspiracies against the customer?
They are, if possible, even less enforceable than the laws against ripping DVDs. And breaking them is much, much more lucrative.
"The proposal of any new law
It's a good start... (Score:1)
Now do laserdiscs!
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I bought one about six years ago. An HP model, which still works perfectly. I recommend Exact Audio Copy and ImgBurn, both free and craftsmanlike.
Not surprising if true (Score:2)
with speculation that a Pennsylvania manufacturing plant used subpar materials.
This same company probably uses the same subpar materials when it moonlights paving Pennsylvania roads.
Ads (Score:3)
Of COURSE they're gonna re-issue the discs.
Now, will they contain updated non-skippable advertisements to offset the production run? let's just wait and see
failed media (Score:5, Interesting)
My dad had one DVD fail. Not a scratch on it.
What was so bizarre is the way it failed. The defective DVD obviously would not play, but it also would not eject from his DVD player. The drive didn't think that it had a disk in it, but the eject button would not work either. I had to go over there and partially disassemble the player because there was no supplied eject disk hole to use in his player. The player itself could have been bricked because you needed to actually open the drive first in order to disassemble it correctly. But I wasn't going to let a little detail like that stop me.
I brought the DVD home to analyze it and it was toast. I could only extract one low-res video track from it and everything else was completely unreadable
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What was so bizarre is the way it failed. The defective DVD obviously would not play, but it also would not eject from his DVD player.
I've seen that failure mode. I think the data on the disk is not corrupt enough that it can't be read, but corrupt enough it crashes the player's microcontroller. A different player couldn't play the disk, but the controller was different enough that it didn't fall over. I seem to remember that same disk crashing a laptop as well, but it's too long ago to be sure.
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Asking for a friend:
Did you then give the disk to a cherished 'friend' or an ex?
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Speculation: the damage was on the CSS keys track/sectors and that isolated bit of single-threaded firmware doesn't know how to retry.
DRM ruins everything, per usual.
I Want My Two Dollars! (Score:3)
I had a Matrix Reloaded rot and there were no obvious scratches or pits.
That's a WB title from that era but not on the list.
I actually just recently got another copy from a thrift store for $2 and it ripped fine. Some day I want to do a combined edit of 2/3 with a tight runtime and with the trash cut out.
It should be about 1:40.
Anyway, WB, I want my two dollars!
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It's not only DVD, WB HDDVDS are now dead as well (Score:1)
And it happened during the same dreaded 2006~2008 time span.
For lovely pictures of the dead disc, I wrote a long post on LDDb's forum with matching pictures.
The Final Chapter (full collection rot review)
https://forum.lddb.com/viewtop... [lddb.com]
It's quite a depressing read... and of course WB never compensated for anything to this day.
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Indeed. I had to rebuy the Superman HD DVD back in the day, and after that I ripped my entire collection. I think I have around 60 discs in total and I shudder to think how many of them would refuse to play now.
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I've been going through my collection of HD DVDs and almost none of them work, and yes, virtually all of them are WB, including my beloved Blade Runner HD DVD collectors edition set.
For those wondering why HD DVDs would be affected, HD DVDs used the same duplication equipment as DVDs - that was one of the major selling points to studios, none of the companies that pressed DVDs would need any new equipment beyond the thing used to generate the master. The "new" stuff was basically thing to create master, whi
\o/ (Score:1)
Of course.
DVD medium costs essentially nothing to them neither do the rights to whatever piece of shit they've managed to con people to exchange money for. Money on the other hand could be exchanged for something worthwhile. On the plus side, if refunded, it would probably be wasted on something equally pointless so nothing is lost.