JohnQO

DVD Movie 'scandisk' to detect playability?

hi, Just joined specifically to ask this question:
Recently I bought some used DVD movies from a video game store. These had slight to slightly more scratches and smudges. They play to the menu screen OK.

I'm looking for a PC application -like scandisk- I can run against these disks to determine if they will play correctly in my home DVD player (Sony DVP-S300) without having to actually watch each movie individually right away.
If they won't play or they skip the store will refund.

Please note: I'm not interested in ripping,copying,etc. I only want to find a scandisk sort of application to check them for playability on my DVD player. I'm not even interested in watching them on the PC-just checking them.
I do have a DVD-ROM drive in my PC (WinXP-ProSP2;P4-2.53-1GB).

I have tried Nero6 DVD Scandisk and Digital System CDReader 3.0 and Copy It Anyway 2.4 (in testing mode) to check for errors, but I question if these are the correct or best utilities for my purpose.

Is there a specific or best application recommended to do this?

Thanks.

JohnQ118

Jeff Gatie

Because each player/drive is different in sensitivity, even if you had an application that does this, it would only tell you how it will play in the drive that you are testing in in. Switch to another DVD player that is more sensitive and a disk that tests fine may not play, or conversely, a disk that tests faulty may play in a player that tolerates more errors.

Frank Lee

I've thought of the same thing. I think it would be a nice feature to build into a DVD player.

JohnQO

Thank you for your reply.

This is a commonly given answer, but really not to my question.

Is there an application that can judge the effect of scratch errors? I'm not interested in if the player error correction capability can 'fix' the playback in the PC or home player. I realize there are player differences.
However, not having any application at all as opposed to having an application giving some indication that could be useful (i.e. no errors detected) is a difficult situation requiring playing each disk and taking too much time.

From your reply I assume the answer to my query is 'NO' and my search is hopeless.
I can imagine such an application would be highly sought after and discussed which is why I came here to ask.

Does anyone have experience with the applications I mentioned or others that can run file checks on DVDs?
Are they not useful at all?

JohnQ118

John Garcia

I've never seen or heard of such an application. The reason the answer is "common" is because it is correct; error checking in one drive would only tell you if it will work in THAT drive and not whether it would work with ALL players. For example, I have a Denon 2200 that would not read a particular rental disc, but in my 7 yr old Sony player it worked fine.

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Jeff Gatie

Because there are player differences, some scratches may be seen as errors by some players and the same scratches may read through fine on other players. It really has nothing to do with error correction. You are right that a piece of software to count the number of times error correction is enabled may be useful, but it does not take into account the often huge differences between what individual players discern as an error in the first place. If the "test" player reads right through a scratch that another player cannot, then we learn nothing about the viability of that disk in another player.