Repairing scratched DVD

Posted by: Jonathan Gorse on 30 August 2008

Just discovered a disk from my prized Blakes 7 boxed set has been scratched (probably by my 3 year old) and would welcome any suggestions as to how to repair it. It's not a particularly deep looking scratch but the disk doesn't play one of the episodes properly.

Grateful for any help as I don't really want to have to replace the whole boxed set for one disk.

Thanks,

Jonathan
Posted on: 30 August 2008 by BigH47
There are these rotary devices that are labelled "Disc Doctor" etc whether they could do the job I'm not sure. Perhaps your local dealer could shed more light as I would thought accidental damage was par for the course with the amounts of demoing done.
Posted on: 30 August 2008 by Jonathan Gorse
Thanks guys, will try as you suggest - also some people on the web seem to suggest that polishing with car wax cream e.g. autoglym can help!

Thanks,

Jonathan
Posted on: 30 August 2008 by winkyincanada
Video/DVD rental stores often offer scratch removal services for a few quid. If you try to polish it out yourself, use radial strokes across the tracks, rather than circular swirls...
Posted on: 31 August 2008 by BigH47
quote:
Tooth paste will do the same


Be careful some toothpastes are really quite "gritty" and can do more harm than good, check effects on a silver coaster first.
Posted on: 31 August 2008 by AV@naim
Personally I would not advise any abraisives.

You could try ISOBuster for Windows. It can be set to deliberatly re-read the damaged portions many times more than standard software. It is payware, but I have used it on my own home-made DVD's and it works well in various situations. It's not 100% foolproof though.

The problem with DVD is two-fold:

1) the data is packed in tighter, thus the higher capacity on same size disc as CD. A scratch therefore will "damage" alot more info on the disc, compared with CD's 700MB. The good side of DVD though, is that the error correction is far better than CD's "CIRC".

2) the audio/video is stored on disc as several 1GB .VOB (video object stream) files. You may well find that the damage is within one of theses files, this means the entire 1GB stream is for all intents and purposes, unreadable.

Note: Bear in mind, technically you will be breaking the law by trying to revive the info from the disc...