Ripping a good way to test a disc for skipping/jumping?

[justinrye]

Not really an authoring question, more a question of testing shop bought products...

Would it be correct to say that if you can rip a blu ray disc without error then the shop bought disc will not skip when played? (Assuming DVDFab doesn't fill in some blanks when tiny errors occur).

The reason I ask is because I'm looking to buy some second hand blus and would like to know a good way to test the discs (other than actually watching them, of course). I am aware of the tougher coating on blus but peace of mind would be achieved by simply ripping them with dvdfab.

Thanks for any help.

[hech54]

Have you ever heard of EAC?

[fritzi93]

Would it be correct to say that if you can rip a blu ray disc without error then the shop bought disc will not skip when played? (Assuming DVDFab doesn't fill in some blanks when tiny errors occur).

Almost certainly.

I have a number of ex-rentals and only a few exhibit any 'glitching". Only one of those few could be ripped, and it took DVDFab many hours to plow through it. No doubt you know that a standalone will ignore read errors.

I've stated before that Blu-ray discs are by no means immune to scratches. Well, I finally decided to test it definitively.

I just retrieved a disc from the trash, a backup I did a few days ago, but had printed the wrong label on it and had to do over. I put a deep scratch on it with a penknife, about 1/4 inch long radially, deep enough too feel with your finger. Then did a transfer rate (read speed) test on it with OptiDriveControl.

Here's the screenshot:




I fully expected the disc to become unreadable at the scratch. No such thing.

This makes me wonder why those ex-rentals couldn't be ripped, with much less obvious scratches on them. I guess I'll have to try putting a scratch across the disc now, rather than radially.

[fritzi93]

Okay, I take it back, ripping is not a reliable test.

Here's a screenshot of a transfer test after another, deep crosswise scratch:



Anyone care to explain why the first, radial scratch doesn't appear on this scan? Anyway, surely it won't rip, right? Oh yes it will. It got perilously close to 0.0 MB/sec read rate, but it got through the scratch and ripped alright.

The rip shows lots of bad glitching right where you'd expect, for about 2 mins, starting at 23 minutes into the movie. Played with Arcsoft TME (Digital Theater). Oddly, the disc played with less glitching in my LG standalone. If I wasn't paying close attention, I might not have noticed.

I know, this was a recordable disc, not a pressed disc. Maybe that would make a difference, but I'm a little surprised. BTW, the disc was a CMCMAG_BA3_000, burnt at 4x.

[fritzi93]

Just to emphasize, if I hadn't been watching the ripping process, I wouldn't have known that the drive had to struggle to read the disc. It only took 10 minutes to get through the scratch, and then it finished ripping normally. With *NO* error notification. So the time to do the rip was not obviously out of the ordinary. That's why I don't think ripping is a reliable test.

Unless someone has a better idea, I'd say a transfer rate test with OptiDriveControl may be the best you can do to ensure a disc plays without glitches. Short of playing it right through on your standalone, that is. If you get a nice smooth line on the graph, you should be good. If you get a jagged line with bad dropouts, you'll just have to play it to see.

Neither of my BD drives support disc quality tests, so I dunno how useful that would be, assuming your drive supports it.

I don't know of any free program that can do transfer rate tests on BDs like ODC. Nero's Disc Speed is free, but AFAIK is limited to CDs and DVDs.

Does no one else here have an opinion on this? That would be hard to believe.