A Christmas Carol - Solution

[iLLuMNaTi]

A Christmas Carol (2010)
Region 1 - USA
The Single Disc Pack

After purchasing the disc from Walmart in Nashville, TN, I wanted to make a backup copy and got I/O errors using AnyDVD 6.7.2.0 and CloneDVD 2.9.8.5. Even though the disc played fine in my home DVD player(s) I assumed I had a defective disc.

Since I own the disc, I decided to rent the same disc from Blockbuster, only to find the same problem. Then I rented one from RedBox and had the same problem again. That makes 3 disks in Nashville that had the same read I/O problem.

I started reading the SlySoft Forum posts on this subject to find others are having the identical problem. It reminded me of the problem I had a couple of years ago with "Die Hard with a Vengeance" movie. It all pointed to I/O errors and defective disc.

It turns out that was the problem with that movie. It was a bad batch of movies sent out to Nashville, TN (and who knows where else). I solved the problem by purchasing the disc from Amazon. In that case, you could actually see the glitch occur during the elevator fight scene, The disc would hesitate and pixilate during the bad portion of the disc. Finally, when I got the disc from Amazon, it played perfectly and copied just fine.

I'm not sure that is the case with this movie ... A Christmas Carol 2010 starring Jim Carey. I think we have something else going on.

I think what we have going on with this disc is a deliberate anomaly. What I will call a purposeful defect in the manufacture of the disc to make it hard to "copy". Everyone knows that a home DVD player is way more forgiving than a computer optical drive. It is instructed to ignore certain read errors that a computer will not ignore.

I am thinking back to an old game that came out on 3.5" floppy drive called "Lemmings". What I learned with that software was that the floppy disc was engineered with a deliberate disc defect. If you tried to copy the floppy disc, your operating system would see the read errors and write them as zeros or ones in such a way that the copied disk had all readable sectors, all be it erroneous, it didn't matter to the OS.

But the fact of the matter was that when you installed the software it would look at a particular sector on the original disc that was deliberately marked as bad and the installer was smart enough to know "hey I can't read from that sector ... it's bad ... and that is good because if you can read zeros or ones from that sector something is not right ... you cannot read from that sector I made it purposefully bad.

If you copied the disc, the installer would try to read from that region of the disc and it would actually see erroneous zeros and or ones and say "I can actually read from those sectors, it doesn't matter what the data is, I can actually read it", then the installer would say "that cannot be right because I have manufactured the disc to bonk out when you try to read data from that sector ... so this must be a copy, not an original".

You would have to physically damage the clusters on that disc to make them unreadable. That is something that could be done on a manufacturing process.

I am suggesting that something like this may be going on with the Christmas Carol DVD. To prove my theory, those of you having problems, try this :

1] Put your disk in without AnyDVD running.
2] Instead of playing the movie, open the disk and look inside the VIDEO_TS folder.
3] Copy the file called VTS_02_0.VOB from the disk to your hard drive.
4] Notice the error you get "Cannot copy VTS_02_0: Cannot read from the source file or disk".

I don't know what it proves, but it does demonstrate that your disc has a problem and it has nothing to do with AnyDVD. But I have found a work around and this may be why some people claim to have had no problems with copying the disc. They either have no problem or have a problem and don't know it, because they skipped certain tracks.

Here is the work around :

Fire up AnyDVD. Insert the disk. Open CloneDVD and select the following tracks including the menu, but none of the other tracks:

Track 27 (Main Movie)
Track 54
Track 56
Track 50
Track 47
Track 52
Track 96
Track 45
Track 99

Using Single Layer DVD-5 and without the French Audio (ridiculous, who the heck would want French audio in the United States), you will have 82% quality which is excellent and everything you would want to see and hear. All you will be missing is some BS tracks you don't want to see anyway and some movie previews.

The movie will copy just fine using this method.

[mike_r]

Or change the disk, Disney must be shown that consumers will not pay a premium price for a substandard product.

[DrinkLyeAndDie]

The solution for this release by Disney is to return the defective product until you get a non-defective one. I, personally, purchased the 4 disc release from a major retailer and got a bad SD DVD disc. I returned it for a refund and purchased the 4 disc release from another retailer. This time I had no problems.

There are bad batches of pressings of this DVD release going around and I believe that Disney used the same exact SD DVD disc for the regular DVD release, the Blu-Ray + SD DVD release, the Blu-Ray 2D + Blu-Ray 3D + SD DVD + Digital Copy release, and the rental release to Blockbuster and Redbox.

[jimates]

I bought the standard dvd and the 4 disc br set. The SD from both packages would not copy with Clonedvd nor would they rip with AnyDVD when I attempted on my Acer laptop. by reading the forum I was getting the same errors at the same places as everyone else.

I got out my wife's Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop and updated AnyDVD on it and both copies ripped fine. CloneDVD successfully made a copy from one of the ripped files.

originally they would not play in my Acer either. They would hang at the same place shortly after the beginning. They played fine in my Toshiba dvd player.

[DrinkLyeAndDie]

Originally Posted by jimates

I bought the standard dvd and the 4 disc br set. The SD from both packages would not copy with Clonedvd nor would they rip with AnyDVD when I attempted on my Acer laptop. by reading the forum I was getting the same errors at the same places as everyone else.

I got out my wife's Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop and updated AnyDVD on it and both copies ripped fine. CloneDVD successfully made a copy from one of the ripped files.

originally they would not play in my Acer either. They would hang at the same place shortly after the beginning. They played fine in my Toshiba dvd player.

This points to borderline bad discs, IMHO. Some DVD drives are simply better readers than others. A really good DVD drive may have no issue while another so-so reader will throw read errors. Some drives may read the disc while others may not but remember the root cause of this problem is the quality of the original pressing of the DVD.

[Chris23]

DrinkLyeAndDie,the best drive for these jobs just for me is only one...Sony Optiarc!I never had any problems with these optical drives.Very strong and stable!Just i share my opinion...

[Clams]

Originally Posted by iLLuMNaTi

I think what we have going on with this disc is a deliberate anomaly. What I will call a purposeful defect in the manufacture of the disc to make it hard to "copy". Everyone knows that a home DVD player is way more forgiving than a computer optical drive. It is instructed to ignore certain read errors that a computer will not ignore.

<snippage>

I don't know what it proves, but it does demonstrate that your disc has a problem and it has nothing to do with AnyDVD. But I have found a work around and this may be why some people claim to have had no problems with copying the disc. They either have no problem or have a problem and don't know it, because they skipped certain tracks.

1. If it was deliberate they would all do it. Many many people have had this disk copy/rip with no problems.

2. Many people with no problems used the AnyDVD ripper which does not allow track selection. So, again, that's not why some people have no problems. I got one from a store and one from RedBox to test - both ripped just fine with the AnyDVD ripper.

Drinky appears to be right - Exchange over and over until it rips. Bad quality must be punished.


-W

[Mavrick]

I just tried your solution and I still get errors 3% in... So it did not work for me.

[mike_r]

Originally Posted by Mavrick

I just tried your solution and I still get errors 3% in... So it did not work for me.

Try this, or this. Don't forget this either.

For what it's worth, my 2 disk BD/DVD combo arrived from Amazon.co.uk yesterday and worked fine. The issue seems to be related to region 1 USA only.

[b15cu1t]

1st off i tried everything then i was reading about the drives on the computer and so i used my burner drive and it skipped right through the whole movie and all i used was anydvd 6.7.2.0 and clone dvd and it got the menu and the whole movie so im thinking that the problem is coming from a dvd rom drives so try ur burner and if that dont work i guess try a new drive ... but i beeen working on this movie since last night at 10 and just now figured it out