Hi,

We have a problem with our recorded DVD discs breaking down over time. Some of them break down almost immediately, while others over a period of time. The dubbing/finalising usually goes smoothly and the discs appear to be playing OK at first, but then sooner or later they will start skipping, freezing and eventually fail to load altogether. Some of them still play after continued use, but there's no way of knowing when we might lose them.

We have a Sony RDR-HXD710 and I'm not sure if this problem is related to the recorder or the discs we use, or both. We have tried several brands/formats of discs and there appears to be no link between the discs we use and the occurence of the problem. For example, if I compare two discs from the same batch, one would play OK for dozens of times while the other would start acting up after just a couple of watches and then gradually break down completely. Also, I've noticed that the skipping/freezing tends to happen towards the end of the disc.

I must say we do hammer our discs by watching them dozens of times back-to-back (if you have young children, you know what I mean!) but we always make sure they are protected against scrathes and dust. Plus, watching them too many times doesn't explain why some some of the discs break down almost immediately.

Is there a logical explanation to this? Is the recorder faulty or the discs? Or is this just the way it is with this technology? While losing a programme recorded from the TV can be extremely annoying, it can be absolutely devastating if it happens to your irreplacable home movies! And there's no point in backing up onto other discs as there's no guarantee that those won't break down the same way. For now, we keep all our home movies backed up on tapes. Old technology is more reliable!

This maybe a problem common with CD's, the dye used in the making of CD's and DVD's is (obviously) light sensitive, if the discs are left exposed in daylight, over time they become “bleached” and no longer work.

I have had very similar experience with copies of music CD’s used in my car, even though the CD’s are kept in a black holder on the visor, the light can get in on the edge of the disc, and over time the later tracks on the disc sound like a dusty vinyl disk, eventually the tracks fail to play.

Some of the older blank CD’s that I have fail to work, due I think to the light getting in to the edges of the disc in the stack (spindle of 50).

I now take great care to store blank discs and used discs in light sealed containers.

You can test your DVD’s and CD’s with Nero on a PC, the errors build up toward the end of the disc, the dusty vinyl sounding CD’s have lots of small errors across the surface.

So if you keep your discs on a windowsill in full sunlight, I would expect them to fail this way very quickly, maybe just a few days in summer.

A good demonstration would be to put an opaque shape on the active side of a (useless) disc in full sun for a week and see the difference in dye density afterwards. I had a pile of CD “coasters” on a windowsill for months; some went white, moon shapes left on those covered by other discs.

Chris

Thanks, Chris. That's definitely an interesting idea worth investigating. We'll try keeping our newly dubbed discs in dark storage from now on to see if it makes any difference.

Come to think of it, this problem did occur more noticably in the summer months AND with the discs that had no individual cases, so you might just be right!