“They curdle like milk”: WB DVDs from 2006–2008 are rotting away in their cases
Some affected discs aren’t manufactured anymore and can’t be replaced.
This is why I rip discs as soon as I get them. I also like going to the thrift store and purchasing discs there. I'd say about 60% I'm able to rip, the rest have varying levels of failure.
Wouldn't have thought the failure rate would be as high as 60%.
I've had failure rates as high of new BD discs, even.
The US BD pressing plant shut down a while ago and the new ones are very hit or miss, I've gotten several that were heavily scratched or otherwise unreadable – brand new in sealed case, from the only NA factory.
You’d be surprised. I purchased new, unreadable discs on a semi-regular basis.
Prolly mostly from scratches. I always check the disk before buying.
Some people are brutal to their disks.
I’ve had a few prior to that degrade as well. Definitely rip your discs. DVDs and BluRays. I had one BluRay get its encryption key revoked and couldn’t play it anymore… luckily I was able to rescue it by ripping it in an older BR-ROM drive.
Which is kinda funny because I've recently started getting my old files off of burnt CDs older than that and was surprised to find that (so far) there haven't been any noticeable degradation issues.
The pressed discs are supposed to be longer lasting than burned discs but evidently WB just went really cheap with their discs. Kinda makes me wonder if they didn't just cheap out but deliberately did this to fuel a future format upgrade cycle or drive people to streaming even after purchasing their movies legally.
Though at least they didn't make them install rootkits to try to prevent any disc ripping, whether it was related to piracy or not.
Luckily my collection is practically all Blu-ray at this point. I'll be sad if any of them decay in their case. Most of my movies I don't believe have a UHD release and I doubt they will
