Dvd scracthed or is dvd player failing?

Anonymous

Older DVD-Rs can degrade over time and repeated usage so that they're far harder to read. It's much worse with DVD-RW which was never intended as a long-term storage medium. Your player has error correction routines and data buffering, so the reason it's slow is that it's replaying the parts it finds hard to read multiple times to try and build complete blocks of data to load to the buffer. Laser heads also don't last forever so the problem is worse if your DVD player is old. Even if it's not, constantly re-reading data on flaky discs works the laser far harder and so ages it prematurely. I suggest that you try to rip the older DVD-R discs to a computer and then re-burn them onto new discs, or consider buying them on official release DVDs or even skip that altogether and store them all on a hard drive/SSD and play them via a media streamer. Although you might still wish to burn irreplaceable/sentimental content to fresh DVD-R discs as backups.

spacemissing

Part of the appeal of optical media is that There Is No Wear On The Discs From Players. Reading the disc with a beam of light provides a non-contact method. The problem is not scratches; it is deterioration of the dyes used in the blank discs. There is no way to restore them. The only remedy would be making new copies from the original sources. Different players have differing abilities with all types of discs. "Burned" discs are always potentially worse than manufactured ones.

inconsolate61

Best thing to do with scratched dvd's is to polish them. If they still dont play, are deteriorated, pitch them.

Lance

Its copy rights protection. Sony is noted for being very sticked with copy rights protection. After all they own the rights to a large collection of popular movies, and have a lot to lose... A Toshiba DVD player is probably your best bet. Toshiba is a bitter rival to Sony as Sony pushed out Toshiba's HD-DVD format in favor of Sony's Blu Ray player and disks...I'm not that familiar with LG but they also may be a rival of Sony....A long time ago I switched from a Toshiba DVD player to a Sony model and had a similar experience...So I know from actual use that a Toshiba DVD player will play almost any kind of disk with out problems.