Michael A. Jensen 2009-01-06
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
I bought this set back in October and ran into the same quality problem so many others have experienced. However all eight discs played fine on my Toshiba HD-A35, albeit some were a bit noisy. (Rebecca being the worst) Since they did play, I did not return them fearing I would get a set that was worse. I recently set up my old Liteon region free player to take the workload off of the Toshiba, as the vast majority of my viewing is in SD. I have been watching the reviews here and decided to take another look at these discs on my Liteon player. The vibration was tremendous on Rebecca and it refused to play. Notorious was almost as bad as it would spin up freeze, spin down and back up again, freeze again, stop, start, etc. About 4 of the 8 discs have no problems; the others do with varying degrees. My curiosity was up, so I had to experiment. I was able to rip all eight to my hard drive with no problem. This is a good test of the data. I made a copy of the worst one, Rebecca, on a DVD+R DL disc and tried it out on the Liteon. It played perfectly, nice and quiet. This tells me there is no problem with the data on the disc. I know some have commented on the funny look of some of the discs, and think that it is due to de-lamination from warpage, and therefore gives read errors. Mine also look like that but I have seen this on other discs of mine that were packaged properly in standard cased. They have never given me a problem. The next step was to open up my Liteon and see just what was going on. I put Rebecca on the spindle with the magnetic clamp on top and slowly spun the disc. With an eye loupe I could see no indication of warpage, but did notice that the two layers of Polycarbonate that sandwich together to make the disc were not exactly lined up. There was a bit of adhesive on the edges also that was not consistent. I did the same inspection with the DVD-R DL that I made, and the difference was amazing. The edge looked like a perfectly machined surface with the slightest hint of adhesive. The telltale test was actually starting up the disc to play. The vibration and out of round blur of the center of the spindle was tremendous. It was obvious that the disc was grossly out of balance. The disc has to spin faster when playing the beginning of the movie since that data is in the innermost part of the disc. DVDs play from the inside to the outside on the first layer, and from the outside back in for the second layer. The menus, studio logos, and FBI warnings are stored after the main movie, and end up about in the middle of the disc depending on move length. When I play Rebecca on my Toshiba, the noise doesn't start until the main movie starts, and as the movie progresses, the disc spin slower and the vibration slowly dissipates. The menu, logo, and FBI warning play silently. If the problem was warpage as some have speculated, the movie should play better at the beginning, and slowly get worse as the laser travels farther out, where the warpage would increase at the edge of the disc. To prove my theory, I took a piece of an Avery label with a couple of layers of copper foil for weight and attached it to Rebecca's topside. After testing in several spots I found the right place and Rebecca played just fine, with no noise or vibration, on my Liteon player! This is of course not a solution, but merely a demonstration of the actual problem with these discs. The discs are obviously defective. It is a sad state when I can go through hundreds of DVD+R's at about 25 cents each and never see a problem like this, and spend $10 or more, each, for a classic movie, and get the cheapest piece of junk, made by the lowest bidder that the studio could find.
P.S. Please don't lecture me on the legalities of the ripping and burning of this disc. As Doc Brown said in Back to the Future, "It's a science experiment". Besides I paid my money, and nowhere have I advocated or given instruction on how to circumvent any copy protection scheme.
