Out of about 600 original DVD discs, i have two that freeze. They're both from quite obscure UK tv series (but from different sets), and I'd like to repair them if that's possible.

They both freeze at the start of a chapter point, and the only way to progress is to reload the disc, and jump to the next chapter. It amounts to 13 and 6 minutes respectively that cannot be viewed. I've tried them on three different players, with the same results. Apart from a few very minor scratches on the underside of both discs, I don't see any damage. There's nothing stuck on them. The top sides of both discs look undamaged.

Is there any way to get them working properly?

The only thing you can do to the disks themselves is clean them. Though dirt/scratches would affect the disk in a random way. If the disks freeze consistently at a chapter transition then that would suggest a defect in the manufacture of the disk rather than a blemish on the disk.

If you have appropriate software and hardware on your computer you could try ripping the content of the disk to the computer hard drive and burning it onto a blank disk. If you are lucky the defect won't copy as well. Otherwise you might have to get creative with a video editor package and see if you can locate the problem area and edit it out. If that is possible.

Thanks. I tried your suggestion of ripping one of the discs, but it only got about half way through the disc analysis process before stopping and declaring that the disc was unreadable. I tried one of the 'healthy' discs from the same set, too, and that worked alright.

I guess the discs really are defective, and there isn't anything I can do. Wish it wasn't something I really liked, though (and it wasn't something that was nigh on unreplaceable).