Defective X-Files Disc

[TrebiusUK]

Hi,

Not being of the age to fully appreciate the X-Files when it was originally broadcast I've been recently getting into it through the dvd box sets of the many seasons out there. I has merrily arrived at disc 4 of season 6 (region 2 as I live in the UK) when the disc stopped playing and returned me to my dvd player's starting screen just before it reached the menu after the copyright notices. Odd I thought, but by manually choosing to go straight to the menu I managed to bypass that little bug (which is reproducible on a pc using PowerDVD interestingly) and watched the first episode of the disc without any further problems. Upon trying to play the second and fourth episodes of the disc however I only managed to view stuttering, corrupted video. Even odder however is that from the brief corrupted snippits I could discern footage that was clearly not of an X-Files episode. Indeed one episode contained footage of Judi Dench, who has never even been in an X-Files episode. It appeared to be from the film Mrs. Henderson Presents, if I recognised it correctly. The surface of the disc is pristine, free from any visible defects.

Is it possible, therefore, that this disc is the result of a defective master? Has anyone heard of any defects with X-Files dvds from the dim and distant past? Unfortunately as the box sets were bought in bulk a few years back from a store that no longer exists I can't return them to get a replacement. Still I was just interested if anyone had heard of anything similar happening before?

[setarip_old]

Hi!Unfortunately as the box sets were bought in bulk a few years back from a store that no longer existsWhat is the color of the underside of the problematic disc?

[Mug Funky]

eeks.

maybe try to rip the disc to your PC and examine the files individually. this should give us more information about what's going wrong. it could be IFOs or VOBs have been swapped or overwritten before premastering, or the disc could just be completely screwed.

the video you saw with Judi could well have been a trailer... otherwise it makes noooo sense.

also, try an error scan in DVDInfoPro, or something similar (what's that Lite-On software called? that's pretty reliable). believe it or not, commercial discs can get pretty messed up, but usually they're noticed before they hit the stores... (i once saw a copy of "Bad Santa" that was actually "Tintin v1"... these are released by different companies, but they used the same replication plant who apparently swapped the DLT tapes)

[burfadel]

Many fake DVD's aren't just burnt disks, they're made at a 'proper' manufacturing facility. Some are that well done just looking at the disks or the cover doesn't tell you whether its is a genuine article or not. Pretty much all fakes are done in DvD-5, and generally (although not always the case) companies prefer DVD-9 for better quality. The X-Files I think worldwide were all done in DVD-9, so just check the space used on the DVD's. If its only 4.5GB or so then they're very possibly fakes. Also region encoding is a giveaway, if they are region free on the disk (ignore the cover) then they're fake. Also the disks should be in PAL in the UK, so if they're 720x480x23.976/29.97 then its very very suspect!

[TrebiusUK]

PowerDVD reports the disc as being played at 25fps, 720x576 and windows reports the size of the disc as 7.63 gb so it's definitely dual layer and the right specs for a PAL disc. The disc is most definitely pressed and not burnt. If it's a fake then it's the best damned fake I've ever seen! I tried to rip the disc using DVDFab but that simply spewed out an error about the disc being corrupt. I'd be more than happy to scan/analyse the disc but not knowing much about the intricacies of the dvd format I wouldn't know where to start. Any suggestions?

This is the beast in question:

http://www.jbadham.com/xfiles/xfilesdefect01.jpg

http://www.jbadham.com/xfiles/xfilesdefect02.jpg

[burfadel]

It seems that it is a genuine disk :) Has it been cleaned? some disks look flawlessly clean but don't work, whilst I've seen others that are horribly horribly scratched that not only play well but extract faster using DVDfab decrypter/dvddecrypter!

The reason for this is the laser doesn't see the fine scratches, but it does see and oils etc on the disks surface (such as fingerprints you can see and smears you can't see). You probably know that light bends when it passes through different mediums as its speed changes (light travels slower through plastic, water, oils, air etc than a vacuum), and as the laser is optimised for normal conditions presence of oils on the disks surface can put the reading of the tracks off. As someone mentioned this could affect the .ifo file which has the chapter, stream, region encoding, copy protection etc information. DVD's actually have backup ifo files, the .bup files.

Try cleaning the disk with window cleaner and try again. If it still doesn't work try copying the files on to the computer normally, then delete the ifo files and rename the .bup files, and set the source under dvd fab decrypter to decrypt of the hard drive instead (its designed to do this). There's a few different things you can try!

[setarip_old]

It looks like parts of the outer edge are damaged - on the underside/non-label side this appears at the left edge slightly above center and at the bottom edge slightly to the right...

[TrebiusUK]

It looks like parts of the outer edge are damaged - on the underside/non-label side this appears at the left edge slightly above center and at the bottom edge slightly to the right...

That's just the reflection of some natural light from the angle I was taking the photo from - inspecting the disc by eye doesn't reveal any problems in those areas.

Well good old DVD Decrypter was the only program I could find that even made an attempt at ripping the disc contents to the hard drive. It didn't throw up any read errors and so I'm fairly sure that there's no physical damage to the disc, but it did give me plenty of "Pack Header Not Found" error messages for most of the titles on the disc. Upon inspecting the result there is most definitely content from Mrs. Henderson Presents and from what appears to be some special feature (cast & crew interviews and the like) related to the film! The only vobs that actually have any useable data in them are, not surprisingly, the two watchable episodes, intro Fox logo and the menu videos. Everything else is pretty much unplayable aside from the odd moment of extremely corrupted video. As it's such a targeted error I can only guess that somehow the other two episodes on the disc were replaced with some data meant for a dvd release of Mrs Henderson Presents at the authoring stage. How bizarre! Can honestly say I've never come across this before, although the question now is whether or not I can get a replacement seeing as how I can't return it to the original store; I'd rather not buy the entire season again just for the sake of one disc!

[Inventive Software]

If the original store no longer exists, the only thing I can suggest is return it to the manufacturer and see if they'll replace it.

[Mug Funky]

if you're lucky the distributors may be aware of this problem and offer a free replacement. try to get hold of them.

i know this is the case with madman discs, but then they tend to be a more customer friendly DVD place than one of the huge media behemoths like fox.

if the data is that mung, it must have been that way on the glass master. so there's probably a smallish (~5000) batch of bad discs out there and you were just unlucky. if you're nice when you contact the distributor they might just mail you a copy from a non-borked master. just don't talk to them like they've done anything wrong (as they probably haven't - it could have been the replication plant).

if they're not aware of this problem then you might want to send them the offending disc as i'm sure someone there will be very interested in how such a thing has happened.

(i used to love raiding the returned disc pile as quite often there was nothing wrong but a thumb print)

[linyx]

An alternative solution would be to use an old "hack" to backup the disc.
1) Open a media player (VLC, PowerDVD, etc.) and play the disc.
2) While the disc is still playing, copy the contents of the disc (AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS) to your harddrive.
3) Decrypt those files with a decryptor of your choice.
This will allow you to copy the (still protected) files to your harddrive without reading information from the IFO and/or BUP files. Even if it does not work properly, you may still have be able to reauthor the disc.