My Favorite ImgBurn story!

[Cadillac84]

 I bought a movie which would not play all the way through.  At about 1:25:25 playback would stall and after a minute or so it jumped to the end of the next chapter (or maybe even farther than that).  I tested the DVD in five different players (two computer DVD drives and three DVD and Blu-Ray players) with similar results.  One of the Blu-Ray players did better than any of the others, but the DVD was clearly defective.  So I returned the movie for a replacement.  The vendor did not give me any grief, but the replacement DVD did the exact same thing!

 

I visited the distributor website and considered if it would be possible to Stream or Download all or part of the movie -- not gonna happen!

 

But I noticed in the distributor website blog a post from another person who had the exact same problem and, needless to say, the distributor did not even acknowledge the complaint.

 

I decided to perform an experiment using ImgBurn.  I used ImgBurn to Create an Image File from the DVD.  Predictably, there were unrecoverable read errors and ImgBurn pointed to the VOB file that was defective.  I confirmed that by attempting to play through that VOB and confirmed that the playback stall was in that VOB file and the "SKIP" was to the next VOB file.

 

Not wanting to give up on the movie since I realized there was no place to obtain a working copy, I set ImgBurn to READ AT 1X.  That is much slower than the default MAX (which with my equipment usually comes out to about 8X). 

 

BUT HERE'S THE GOOD PART! 

 

When ImgBurn got to the defective area if reported a read error and after 2 retries, it was able to continue.  I think there may have been one other place where a read error was reported, but at the very slow rate, the ISO and MDS files were created and I was able to burn a proper DVD on an Inkjet Printable DVD+R DL and then copy the label from the original onto my backup.

 

When the backup copy I made gets to 1:25:25, there is a small jitter and pixelation, but it plays through and I now have an acceptable movie.

 

I tried to engage the person who reported the error on the distributor blog, but I guess he has moved on to other things (basketball?).  Anyway, I solved my problem and I give a big thumbs up to ImgBurn 2.5.8.0

 

 

 

P.S.  If you attempt this method, be aware that the Read Rate will remain at 1X until you set it back to MAX which is the normal setting for Read.

Edited April 20, 2017 by Cadillac84

[dbminter]

I've had weird cases where I HAD to make a copy of a DVD I bought in order to play it.  Panasonic stand alone DVD players don't like to play some DVD's.  Like Day Of The Animals and Captain Power Disc 4.  They simply don't recognize they've been inserted.  But, if you make a copy of them, the Panasonic plays do play them.  I've had 2 Panasonic stand alones that did this.  And I've read other reports of people with the Captain Power boxed set who can't play Disc 4 on their Panasonic DVD players.

[Cadillac84]

I haven't had that problem, but I'll keep it in mind.  What intrigued me was that with ImgBurn set to read so very slowly, it was somehow able to see through the mastering error and make some kind of approximation of what was supposed to be there.  (Somebody will tell me that's not what happened, but I like to think of it that way even if it's wrong. :-)

[LIGHTNING UK!]

There's no magic in ImgBurn for this.

 

If the read retries eventually worked, that's down to the drive.

[dbminter]

I've also had weird cases where ImgBurn would have 20 Retries failing to read a bad sector, and I'd tell it to keep trying.  It would Retry a few more times, read a few more KB of data, and then run out of Retries and ask again.  I'd eventually tell it to just keep trying without bugging me and though it would be super slow, a few KB at a time, it would eventually extract the bad sectors.  And the data would be fine when played back.