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How Has Your Luck with Defective DVDs/BDs Been?


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Blood-
Bargain Hunter



Joined: 07 Mar 2009
Posts: 23669
PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 9:38 am Reply with quote
I'm probably jinxing the hell out of myself by broaching this subject but what the hell. So far, out of that part of my collection that I've watched, I've only run into real trouble with my Planetes set. Fortunately, the problem was limited to two eppies (9 and 10, I think). I was able to watch a good chunk of 9 before the image freezes up and you can't play any more. I think my eppie 10 is almost totally unwatchable.

I thought of this topic last night because after work I wanted to watch some of my Heroic Age BD and when I put it in, nothing was playing. Ultimately, I figured out it was an input problem which I corrected and the disc itself is perfectly fine, but it got me to thinking about disc defects.
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The King of Harts



Joined: 05 May 2009
Posts: 6712
Location: Mount Crawford, Virginia
PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 9:54 am Reply with quote
I've been cursed twice. One was volume 6 (THE LAST ONE!) of Beck would not work at all in my BD player; like, it couldn't even read it. For some reason, though, it worked fine on my laptop, and thankfully I can hook my computer to my TV, so it still worked out. I had a similar situation happen with Witchblade volume 4, where my BD player just could not read the thing, and I could hear it really trying it's darnedest to do so.

Even though I could play them on my laptop, I bought new copies so that I could run them through my BD player since my computer isn't exactly the best DVD player.

I could have more because I have a lot of unwatched discs on my shelves, but thankfully, if there are defective discs in there, I don't have anything too pricey*. Although, it does suck that I could have a 3 year old, unwatched discs on my shelves, and I won't find out they're defective until I get around to watching them.



*There are my Sailor Moon discs, but I checked those out immediately since they costs so much.
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DuelLadyS



Joined: 17 Mar 2006
Posts: 1705
Location: WA state
PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 10:07 am Reply with quote
Let's see... I have a defective vol. 3 of Angelic Layer I really need to replace (I borrowed a friends copy to finish the series, so it's not a high priority). I had a defective Shadow Star Narataru volume that I sent back to TRSI for replacement... I forget which one it was. I also have/had semi-defective discs of Haruhi, Blackjack, and Excel Saga. By semi-defective, I mean my main player skips and generally has issues with it, but at least one of my other 4 DVD playing devices is fine with it, so I just kept it. Except the Excel Saga disc... I only had 2 total DVD playing things at that time, and they both had issues. I swapped with my fiance's copy, since his players were fine with my disc, and his disc was fine with my players.

So far, I've yet to encounter a bad blu-ray, but I have a lot less of those.
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ailblentyn



Joined: 28 Mar 2009
Posts: 1688
Location: body in Ohio, heart in Sydney
PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 10:19 am Reply with quote
Semi-defective discs of Kare Kano, according to DuelLadyS's definition (skipping scenes in my player, but not in a laptop).

And of course bloody Voyager Entertainment's Space Battleship Yamato movie, which I don't think anyone ever got to play right. I managed to watch it once in my wife's laptop (after my own laptop and the DVD player both refused to acknowledge it at all). Once, and it never worked again, if memory serves me.

(I see that Voyager's box set of the five movies is going for $125 on Amazon, which should count as an anti-sale, in that you'd never be able to watch them if you bought them.)

Edit: I just remembered another one. The first disc of three in USMC's digipack complete Patlabor: New Files collection didn't work on anything I owned, even though the second and third discs had no problems. Fortunately, I also had the single for the first disc, which worked perfectly, so I swapped the two copies to make the complete set (which is more convenient to have to hand) fully functional.
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Sanosuke_Inara



Joined: 23 Nov 2009
Posts: 1662
PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 10:25 am Reply with quote
Pretty damn good, I'd say--haven't had one before. Laughing
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The King of Harts



Joined: 05 May 2009
Posts: 6712
Location: Mount Crawford, Virginia
PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 10:32 am Reply with quote
You also have, like, 10 things in your collection. Probability will kick in once it starts to grow.
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Sanosuke_Inara



Joined: 23 Nov 2009
Posts: 1662
PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 10:48 am Reply with quote
The King of Harts wrote:
You also have, like, 10 things in your collection. Probability will kick in once it starts to grow.
13 things, thank you very much. Laughing
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PetrifiedJello



Joined: 11 Mar 2009
Posts: 3782
PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 10:58 am Reply with quote
I've had three issues:
Adventures Mini-Goddess - yeah, the title's not accurate, but something to do with the AMG franchise using little chibi-like characters. Disk 1 has a pit in it, which affects episodes 4 and 5. This was a blessing in disguise because once I stopped here, I saw no reason to want to finish the "series" or replace the disk.

Galaxy Express 999 - stops playing at episode 4 despite no physical damage to the disk. Assuming a bad press on this one. One of these days, I'll replace it, but it didn't leave me an impression I had to rush in order to finish the series.

The Third - GwtBE - I had my eyes on this title for some time and when it was finally dropped in price, I snagged it only to discover there's an issue with the second disk (episode 9). I sent it in and had it replaced, but the issue persisted, which means it's a coding issue on the disk. My DVD player, at the time, was pretty old and may not have been capable of reading the layer.

I say this only because my laptop DVD drive had no issues with it. I figured another replacement would have been moot, so I left it as is. When I forget about this series, I'll see if the BD player can handle it.

Now, for a "not critical because it doesn't affect playback but it still bugs the shit out of me" complaint. I'm curious why distributors/retailers feel it's necessary to ship a product when they can clearly hear the disk is dislodged from the spindle.

Do they believe the product will truly make it to its destination without being scratched? Is it a game of chance they play to piss of customers when these disks are damaged and have to be replaced?

I'm sure there's some dislodging occurring between retailer and my residence, but I find the odds it's the postal services fault to be questionable when more fragile items arrive at my home damage-free.
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RightStufSpecialsMinion
Company Representative


Joined: 12 May 2011
Posts: 331
Location: Iowa
PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 12:05 pm Reply with quote
ailblentyn wrote:
Semi-defective discs of Kare Kano, according to DuelLadyS's definition (skipping scenes in my player, but not in a laptop).


Just popping up since this release was one of my favorites:

Skipping scenes in His and Her Circumstances are very likely not because of a defective disc but the sheer number of subtitles and other lines of disc code that went into that particular release. It was actually one of the most complicated DVDs in the world when it was originally released in 2002: 79,713 assets (menus, subtitles, audio tracks, video tracks, etc.) versus a "normal" disc's average of 1,000, and 347,006 lines of code versus an average of 17,000. Yes, we wrote down the numbers. Smile

The result was removable subtitles (as opposed to hard-coded) that matched the original fonts and colors in the show wherever possible, important for such a text-heavy anime. Unfortunately, certain older players sometimes can't keep up with all the code. It's rather like playing Crysis on an old PC. I'm glad to hear you were still able to watch the show with your laptop.
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larinon



Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Posts: 992
Location: Midland, TX
PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 1:11 pm Reply with quote
PetrifiedJello wrote:
The Third - GwtBE - I had my eyes on this title for some time and when it was finally dropped in price, I snagged it only to discover there's an issue with the second disk (episode 9). I sent it in and had it replaced, but the issue persisted, which means it's a coding issue on the disk. My DVD player, at the time, was pretty old and may not have been capable of reading the layer.

My problem with The Third was in episodes 13 and 23 when they sent all the work to the wrong animation studio.

@Blood- My Planetes episodes played fine as far as I can recall, but I did have trouble with some of the later Eureka 7 discs in the Anime Legends version being unplayable (discs 10 and/or 11 IIRC). I seem to remember there were other Bandai discs that I had issues with as well, but I don't recall the names at the moment. For those usually there would be just one bad spot that I would be able to fast forward past so that I would really just miss a couple of seconds of video. Definitely it's a hassle though.

And those Kare Kano numbers are crazy, but appreciated Wink

The only BD issue I've had so far was with the 4th Indiana Jones movie which was unplayable. Probably that was for the best.
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DerekTheRed



Joined: 19 Dec 2007
Posts: 3544
Location: ::Points to hand::
PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 1:18 pm Reply with quote
All of my issues have been unique to specific pieces of equipment so far. I haven't had anything that simply does not work.

Bandai: Planetes, Cowboy Bebop and Scrapped Princess all had issues with various disks that fail to work on my old DVD player. Also, I am convinced that some of them are out of round. YOu can hear them spinning and physically brushing against something in there. Sounds like a propeller.

Funimation: There are two tendencies that all DVD's (that format specifically) exhibit when viewing on my Blu-ray player. The first is that it stops playing. It always happens about 20 seconds after putting the disk in, so usually during an FBI warning or something like that. You just have to hit stop then play to get it going again then it won't happen anymore. The second is a tendency for the subtitle track to freeze. It only happens if you change subtitle tracks while the episode is playing, but sometimes I like to watch a show dubbed with subs on to see any changes they might have made. The only way to safely change subtitles is to use the disk menu. I normally only watch dubs, so if the subs lock up I'll just turn them off, but I can see how this could make a sub watcher irate.

TRSI: This one doesn't really count, but I have an old second hand Irresponsible Captain Tylor disk where the second to last episode simply will not play on anything. I think it's disk rot. I DLed the episode though episode on PSN though, so we're in like Flynn.

ADV: Nothing, ever, on anything.

Geneon/Pioneer: Nothing, ever, on anything.

Animego, Tokyopop: Extremely small sample size, but... Nothing, ever, on anything.
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jmfsilenthill



Joined: 31 Aug 2009
Posts: 1863
Location: Chinese cartoons are srs biz
PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 1:39 pm Reply with quote
I've bought Planetes Volume 2 three times now. The first two discs would freeze and skip around episodes 9 & 10. But those two discs were scratched to hell when I bought them (though they were new) so that might have something to do with it. My Full Metal Panic Vol 2 disc is sketchy, but I bought that used and it's a little scratched. I had video issues with my Paprika Blu ray...I couldn't get it to play sensibly on a standard tube-tv. I have a pretty big collection, and those are the only problems I'm aware of. In the past though, it always seemed like Bandai's discs were more likely than anythinh else to be defective (Flag, Eureka Seven, Bebop, Planetes, Haruhi S2 lol).
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DerekTheRed



Joined: 19 Dec 2007
Posts: 3544
Location: ::Points to hand::
PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 1:47 pm Reply with quote
jmfsilenthill wrote:
I've bought Planetes Volume 2 three times now. The first two discs would freeze and skip around episodes 9 & 10. But those two discs were scratched to hell when I bought them (though they were new) so that might have something to do with it.

That reminds me, I returned a Shin-Chan season 1 part 1 because one of the disks had a deep gouge in it a good 3-4 inches long. I didn't even try to play it, just brought it back to Best Buy for a new one.
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Kruszer



Joined: 19 Nov 2004
Posts: 7981
Location: Minnesota, USA
PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 2:07 pm Reply with quote
I buy a lot and get maybe one defective or damaged disc or case for every 50 purchases I'd guess. I've gotten at least one from every major anime company, Bandai, Funimation, VIZ, Media Blasters,etc though Bandai takes the prize for worst quality control, and Funimation comes in a close second.

I get mostly encoding errors where the disc is totally fine and yet portions of the shows are unwatchable because the video will skip, pixelate and freeze. This was most common with Funimation releases from 2008 where nearly everything I bought from them was unplayable junk, the the two Negima series and Solty Rei for example.


Last edited by Kruszer on Wed Jun 29, 2011 2:37 pm; edited 2 times in total
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John Casey



Joined: 31 May 2009
Posts: 1853
Location: In My Angry Center
PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 2:14 pm Reply with quote
Pretty bad. Almost everything I've ever bought from Bandai messed me up at some point. The only ones I haven't had any bad luck with were Outlaw Star, Bebop, and Escaflowne DVDs.

The Yu Yu Hakusho DVDs I bought (brand new) at FYE all gad horribly cracked cases - some of them even scratched the discs. Moribito, while I love the series and the cases, I've also had bad luck with. Half of the ones I bought have been cracked - and you can't just swap them out for regular DVDs, so I basically has to buy a super-jewel bundle from Amazon.

The GITS 2nd Gig DVDs I have, I've had weird experiences with. All of the DTS discs are perfect, but the standard ones - half of them jump around to random scenes on every DVD played I've tried.

Haven't had any bad luck with Blu-Rays, though. Yet.
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