Tweet Can a dvd wear out from over playing it?

Can a dvd machine's laser literally wear out a disc?

Sounds crazy, but I have a dvd of the MGM edition of "Some Came Running." I previously played a couple of scenes many times over to watch Minnelli's flowing camera. I went back to the disc months later and I found that my Sony player will no longer play those scenes, either when I access them from the menu, or play the whole movie. It's as if they burned or wore out. The screen freezes, skips, or I get green pixellation. The disc is in pristine condition. The rest of the movie plays fine!

I have an identical second copy of the movie--same exact disc edition, never played. I put it in the Sony machine--and it plays perfectly, and the player can access each scene.

Both discs also play fine in my HP computer.

What happened? Did my repeated plays in my Sony player do something to the data on the disc, so that the Sony can no longer read it? This has never happened to me before.

My copy of the 6th season of DOCTOR WHO wore out, but looking at it I see there are a lot of scratches.

Bob

[Christopher Jacobs]

If there are no scratches, dirt, or fingerprints, and it used to play fine on the same player, I'd be inclined to think it's the player starting to become more sensitive to DVDs being authored, recorded, and pressed just exactly right. My first stand-alone DVD player (about 12 years old now) started doing this several years ago, and now does it so often I rarely use it. I tend to use this player to check my own home-burned DVDs, and if it will play them from beginning to end the disc usually play on pretty much any other player.

Note that DVDs (and Blu-rays) play from the inside of the disc to the outside edge, and the dispersion of the dye layer on DVD-Rs is more likely to have issues from the middle to the outer edge, so these problems are most likely to show up halfway through or more. The same disc may still play fine in newer players that are more tolerant to disc and encoding anomalies. If not, then it's definitely a disc problem of some sort.

Some manufactured pressed discs have similar problems, more often from certain distributors (or authoring firms or replicators) than others. For example, many of my Kino discs won't play on my oldest players but look beautiful on the newer ones.

Thanks for the info. The dvd does start having trouble about an hour in.

I thought maybe my dvd player had become a critic of my tastes!

My experience is also that cheaper DVD players might have issues - especially with rental discs from Netflix - but my Sony Blu-ray has played anything I've ever put in it.