Another Movie Guide

Making Your DVDs Playable Again

Fixing DVDs is fairly easy as long as they are not too damaged.

I’ve been in the media industry for many years and have handled thousands of disks. Here are my ideas for getting your favorite movie or game to play again.

If there are no scratches and you just have fingerprints or food or some other material that’s stuck to the DVD you just need to clean it.

Hold the disk towards a source of light and rotate it in your hand so you get a better view of it. This is the best method of finding smudges and prints.

All you need is a little water and a rag. Dampen the disk and leave it for a few minutes and then wipe the surface until you can not see any smudges or prints. This may take a little force, if it’s food you may need to make it damp a couple of times before it will budge. Once the disk is clean try to play it.

If the disk still doesn’t play and you can see scratches then you’ll need to buy a DVD repair kit such as SkipDr and have a little patience. You can clean the surface with other abrasive tools, but to be honest disk repair kits are really worth it. The manual ones start at about $10. I started with a manual and moved onto an automatic. I’d say I have about a 90% success rate and I’ve run perhaps 300 disks through one of these.

If after removing smudges and prints the disk still doesn’t play then try the repair kit. Be careful to only run it through once at first as these devices actually remove the surface of the disk to get the scratches out.

If you still have an unplayable DVD you can try run it through the repair kit again, but in all honesty you should probably look into getting a replacement.

Using a DVD backup solution gets around this issue as if you only play your copies and they get broken, scratched or lost you just need to make another copy and you’re back in business.

Al Doosal