Well, as mentioned many times before, I recently finished my first professional DVD project. Today, I received a copy in the mail, all silkscreened and shrinkwrapped. I put it in the player and… horror! A data glitch of some kind!
I deliberately zipped forward to the place where I calculated the layer break to be. I expected some kind of pause, as most dual-layer DVDs have. What I got instead was a broken up picture, freezing, and–on two different players–refusal to play the disc.
I’m terrified that this is because of the layer break, but thousands and thousands of discs have dual layers and no such trouble. I know it’s not my data, because I went back and checked it. Then I looked closer at the disc.
There’s a small indentation just inside the outer rim of the disc, extending about 1/4 of the way around. It looks like the disc wasn’t quite seated properly when it was pressed, leaving a seam, or mis-pressing… like a double-struck penny. If the glitch is near the layer break, that would put it right about where this indentation is… and it would explain the problem. Oh, please… let that be it! And let this be the only one with the problem!! Although, what are the odds that out of 1000 DVDs, the one with the glitch would go to the producer?
I’m just curious:
What would happen if more than one of these dvds was defective? Is there a provision in your agreement with the pressing company that they would re-press the whole shebang or refund your money or what? I hope it’s only one, but if the whole batch is bad, what recourse do you have, and how do you find out if the whole batch is bad?
What a quagmire.
As a musician/graphic artist that has packaged many cds for musicians, that’s always been in the back of my mind but it seems not to have happened yet.