Wohoo, my replacement Firefly Blurays arrived. The first set i ordered had a small defect in disc 2, making one of the episodes unreadable in one region. This one seems fine. No read errors.
Good thing I've started to check the discs in the boxsets. I've had a lot of issues with the big 41 disc Stargate boxset produces by VEI. The disc production is of mediocre quality, which is disappointing considering the steep price.
@astralcomputing Yeah, VPN on a TV is complicated and I have no intention of watching TV on a computer screen. Also, I'm generally tired of chasing shows all over the place with the current fragmenting and enshitification of streaming, so I'm falling back to buying Blurays. They are often quite cheap these days. Especially older shows.
@veronica I've been fairly lucky with discs except for two memorable occasions.
I think my DVD copy of The Terminator suffered from "disc rot" as it kept going milky underneath and I had to keep cleaning it.
Secondly, one of my first ever Blu-ray purchases, the Spiderman trilogy. Only watched a handful of times, always kept in their case. I had to throw them away this year. All three discs are no longer recognised as Blu-rays. Tried pc drive, PS3, 4 & 5. No luck.
@UKFilmNerd On Linux there is a command line program called ddrescue that can read broken discs up to a point. The one that was really broken from Stargate (season 5 disc 4 of Atlantis) I have managed to read just once, and I think my drive just accidentally hit a speed and direction that worked (was reading backwards at the time), so I saved the ISO image. I want to write a new copy of it that works.
Most times I've tried to rescue it, the drive has been trying for 1-2 days without success.
@UKFilmNerd Yeah, the FIrefly disc had a line embedded in the plastic somewhere, it wasn't a scratch. It also followed the arch of the track. It corresponded to about 100 MB of unreadable data or thereabout. That is enough to cause a lot of glitches in playback, and in a player may cause it to skip since it needs to keep up the pace with the playback.
I usually convert my discs to video files so I can stream them to the TV, which gives me a bit more time to get the data out.
@UKFilmNerd I also had a lot of issues with season one of my old Star Trek Deep Space Nine DVDs for my video upscale project. Turned out they used a form of disc encryption that made blocks on the disc unreadable. I installed the correct Linux library for it, and suddenly they were fine. The rest of the season did not have this.
The upscale turned out fantastic by the way. About to finish watching season two. 😊
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