Ripping scratched DVDs

[AussieBigD]

Hi. This is my first post. Please let me know if I do anything wrong or if this belongs in a different forum.

Sometimes when I try to rip a scratched DVD (using DVD Decrypter) I get some sectors that are too badly scratched to recover. I have 3 questions:

Question 1: DVD Decrypter reports which sectors that it can't read. It appears to me that there is a fixed number of sectors per side so it should perhaps be possible to write an app which shows you graphically (or at least reports in text) exactly where the faulty sectors are on the DVD. (Maybe it could only report that the sectors are in a ring that is m millimetres thick and approx n millimetres in from the centre.) With this info you could try to "clean" or rejuvenate your DVD just where it needs it. Do you know if such an app exists? And can you verify if the theory is correct?

Question 2: If I identify which areas/scratches that I want to eradicate/remove, what methods are best and safest (and affordable) to tackle bad scratches? (I clean them well for fingerprints, etc, but I haven't had the bravery to use those cheap CD/DVD scratch removal kits yet.)

Question 3: Does DVD Decrypter have better settings than the defaults that would help? Maybe a more exhaustive error correction algorithm? Or a way to reduce the standard 20 retries (to say 5), but only after one sector fails with the full 20? (This would speed up the process of getting through to the good sectors, although this may be of little use.)

Thanks for your help.

[jdrumstik]

Well first of all, if you have encountered other errors, it may be due to Encryptions that DVD Decryptor doesn't handle so you might want to use Ripit4me which runs on top of DVD Decryptor.

Second. I always use toothpaste. Tooth Paste, not tooth gel. Its 50/50. Sometimes it works, often times it doesn't. But always worth a try. I Just swirl it all around the disc and then wash it off, and then dry it with a microfiber or something else that won't make the scratches worse.

[CWR03]

I had a pretty badly scratched disk that I managed to repair with a Disk Dr. and toothpaste (it happened to be the whitening kind, very abrasive). I smeared toothpaste around the disk before I put it in the Disk Dr., then polished it again with a new wheel and it smoothed it enough to read it. I should add that it was a rental disk from Netflix, so I wasn't concerned about ruining it.

[kmac61]

1st thing I try is a different reader(s) if available Some are better at error correction than others. A few times I've gotten part of a disk from 1 and the rest from another

[setarip_old]

@AussieBigD

Hi!

Have you read this thread?:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=114815

[jdrumstik]

I had a pretty badly scratched disk that I managed to repair with a Disk Dr. and toothpaste (it happened to be the whitening kind, very abrasive). I smeared toothpaste around the disk before I put it in the Disk Dr., then polished it again with a new wheel and it smoothed it enough to read it. I should add that it was a rental disk from Netflix, so I wasn't concerned about ruining it.


Just so you know virtually all toothpastes are composed of the exact same chemicals; wheater its whitening, cavity, or tartar control; all the same.


P.S. as far as the toothpaste scratch method goes, sometimes I have noticed that it stains the inner part of the hole in the middle of the DVD (the part that snaps onto the spindle of like a laptop drive). Just so you know. My DVDs usually don't have many scratches its the dang rentals.