Verying Retail Video DVDs Before Backup

[Thadius856]

First and foremost, I'm very paranoid about losing data. Hence, I back up all of my videos DVDs to expensively genuine Taiyo Yuden media.

Most of the DVDs I buy are "pre-owned", "previously used", etc. Aside from sitting down and watching them in real time, I'm at a loss for how I can determine if I've bought a bad disc. Obviously, if the original is damaged in some fashion, the copy will suffer. I find it incredibly annoying to burn a copy, just to have to take back the original where I bought it, wasting perfectly good time and media.

Is there any real way of testing pressed retail media before I copy it? So far, CDCheck is working alright, but it's hard for me to determine if that's really a good measure. I've tried DVDInfoPro with varying degrees of success.

Does anybody have alternatives?

[redwudz]

Not really. I mostly do a physical inspection of the playing surface for scratches, blotches or other damage.

But others may have some favorite programs to check a disc. I find that playback, though time consuming, seems the best way to see if they will work properly.

And welcome to our forums.

[guns1inger]

Major read errors (scratches etc) can be checked for by using DVD Info Pro or Nero CD/DVD Speed read testing. It will basically just read through all the content of the disc, and if it can't read it, it will show an error. All this says is that your DVD drive can read the data (or not, as the case may be). It does not guarantee that a standalone player can read the disc.

[Bix]

I've had CDSpeed's read test fail where some sort of copy protection (I guess an artificial error) was introduced. The disc played fine when watched in real time or fast-forwarded through, but CDSpeed thought it was messed up.