DVD recovering

[carlmart]

I placed this question here, but I'm not sure if it belongs in another video quiz group.

There's a DVD I have which stops during playing, and I would very much like to recover the video on it.

There's no surface damage at all, or any apparent thing that might justify this behavior.

Is there something I can try to recover the video inside? Using which program?

[Cornucopia]

"No surface damage at all" - That you can tell from the naked eye.

ISOBuster, managed copy, possibly using multiple drives/passes if necessary.

Scott

[october262]

need more info, is the dvd a commercial store bought disc
or a home made dvd ??

[hech54]

May be something as simple as it has titles instead of chapters?

[jagabo]

Also ISOPuzzle.

[carlmart]

OK, I installed Isobuster.

The recovery gets to 56.23% and it can't advance further, in spite of the options it provides.

The DVD is home made, made with media I do not use anymore. Anything else I could try?

[october262]

does the disc stop playing in your computer
or stand alone player that is connected to your tv ??

[jagabo]

OK, I installed Isobuster.

The recovery gets to 56.23% and it can't advance further, in spite of the options it provides.

What do you mean? Did it abort the process? Did it just seem to be stuck? If the latter just let it run overnight.

I haven't used IsoBuster but if it has any options for software and hardware retries set them to low values like 1 or 2. Some programs have very high retry counts like 20. That's 20 hardware retries times 20 software retries -- 400 retries for each bad block. That many retires may take an hour or more -- just for one block. Changing the retries to low values will greatly speed up the process.

Another setting you can tweak is how many blocks to skip after a bad block. Typically, when a bad block is encoutnered the next few are bad too. Skipping a few blocks after a bad block will speed up the process (though you may lose some data that would otherwise be recoverable).

Set all of those options as low as possible first. Just to see if you can get past the bad part of the disc in some reasonable amount of time. If you can, then try decreasing the skipped blocks and increasing the retries to see if you can get more data.

[carlmart]

Well, maybe I need a better tutorial to use the isobuster properly.

The YouTube video I saw was very simple and didn't explain what to do if you found recovery problems.

[carlmart]

All these proceedings are made on my computer, with its own DVD burner.

I did try to play the DVD on two other burners: an external LG burner and on my laptop's burner, with no luck.

My computer's burner does play part of the disc, but then it stops.

On the first step for recovery, Isobuster tries to make an image of the damaged DVD.

In reading the damaged files Isobuster will offer you three alternate methods of dealing with data corruption before it begins the extraction process:

It can replace the corrupted areas with nothing.

It can replace the corrupted areas with fake data.

It can replace the corrupted areas with a series of zeros.

I tried all three, but it didn't proceed.

[KarMa]

DVD Decrypter will allow you to copy DVDs, even if they are damaged. So in the event of a damaged disc it will simply try it X number of times and then just move on to the next block of data. So it will at least playback but will have Macroblock errors in the bad parts.

There is also IsoPuzzle which is a way to see if different DVD Drives can get different bad parts of the DVD Disc, as these drives are all slightly different. Though be careful, it blew up a DVD of mine, which I talk about in my review of IsoPuzzle.

[carlmart]

The problem is not to copy the DVD, but to recover it, or I won't be able to play it.

Are there any other methods to recover the data?

How can a DVD player be blown?

[Brainiac]

It blew up (destroyed, disintegrated) the disc, not the player.

If you haven't done so already, visit the TOOLS section on this site, you'll see Isopuzzle listed. Go there and read the reviews. There you will see Karma's review.