So I’m re-ripping my DVD copy of MAS*H to re-encode to a new codec, correct some mistakes I made with my original rip, etc. For example, I noticed that, since this was one of the earlier shows I ripped, I completely missed the fact that there’s a second “No laugh track” English audio track that I didn’t rip the first time around.
Anyway, these discs have been out in my shed for a number of years now and I have noticed a few of them have started de-laminating in spots. This one in particular, disc 1 of season 4, failed to read once so I pulled it out, cleaned it good and put it back in. It has one large bubble between the layers that isn’t apparent on the label side so I don’t think it’s anything to do with the label getting damp or anything. There’s also a wide band of what appear to be very tiny little micro bubbles in a complete circle around the disc. If it doesn’t get destroyed in the compression, you can see them in the lower portion of the photo. After letting it warm up and cleaning it a bit I tried again and on the second try it slowed down and thrashed around for a few moments when it got to that same section, dropping into kB/s read speeds, but eventually got past it and succeeded in making the ISO.
I guess I’m going to have to make space to keep complete ISOs of shows and movies I particularly like, like this one. Man, those Bluray images are ridiculous though.
Yeah. Every day you are not rescuing stuff off of old optical media, is a day you are losing bits of data.
Other than that one disc I haven’t had any real issues getting a complete copy of the whole disc, and that disc did eventually cooperate. MakeMKV is pretty good about halting or warning you in the event of an error, checksum mismatch, etc. So I haven’t lost any data so far and I’m up to season 6. I’ll start season 7 tomorrow and try to finish the whole show in the next day or so and I’ll just keep full ISOs of these discs. I’ve got the space and an off site backup so I might as well do it at least for stuff I really like. Years ago when I first started my home server I kept ISOs of everything; but that quickly got out of hand when I started backing up my Blurays at 50GB a pop.