Clean a Blu Ray

Toothpaste used to be the standard way of cleaning a DVD but I haven't tried it on a Blu-Ray disk.

tissue and ipa or lens cleaning stuff

-- Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early twenty-first century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age.

Richard Lindzen

Yes, and always wipe from the centre hole to the edge, and never around the disk. That way, if you scratch it while wiping it, only a tiny amount of data is damaged in each sector which should not effect anything. If you create a scratch along the track, that's much more likely to be harmful.

Also try reading it on a blu ray drive on a computer if you have access to one (preferably with older firmware that makes ripping possible) - they sometimes have better error recovery than the normal players.

Many thanks for all the suggestions :-)

I had a go at this earlier with plain water then tried to prepare an iso from it. However, after 5 hours it was at 32% and seemed stuck so I clearly made a right mess of the disk.

Kodi on my Nvidia Shield TV Pro will read DVD iso's and present the full DVD menu which is brill but it can only do that for a Blu Ray iso if the Java runtime is installed and it's not available of the Shield TV so it's plain DVDs only in future.

Thanks again!

VSO Inspector is freeware, and perfectly accurate with its results. "

The Blu Ray disc has a hard-coat on it, and unless the muck on the disc has somehow obscured the layers beneath, it's unlikely you've scratched the s*it out of it. It is supposed to have a harder finish than the other earlier disc types.

With error correction, the biggest risk on a disc, is the loss of the ability to follow the groove encoding. If the hardware can focus on the groove, a lot of the read errors can be corrected. The Reed Solomon works best with radial scratches, while tangential scratches are a bad thing. That is why wiping in circles is not recommended, and especially if using sandpaper :-)

You should be able to hold the media on an angle, and see if the glare of scratches meets your eye.

Doing an error scan, is how you get some idea what is going on.

Paul

Supposedly:

I don't think I am up to that on my Shield TV, it's controlled by a remote, how I would install (?side load) something like that I have no idea.

I wonder if it's not made available officially for security reasons? I think the last virus I got on Windows was a Java exploit.

Than you :-)

I tried VSO Inspector on a DVD that my computer just couldn't read. VSO Inspector can't read single byte from it. It actually looks clean and not scratched but there's something wrong clearly!

You'd probably use 'adb' to push .apk files from a PC over USB.

Or install an alternative app store like Obtainium and tell it the URLs of the Github releases.

You may need to use a mouse and/or keyboard to set such things up - I've never used Android TV to know how that works (seems that Obtainium's Android TV UI still wants a keyboard)

It probably wouldn't meet Play Store vetting, given it's designed to do something the Blu Ray people don't want you to do.

Theo

Some DVDs will only play on players that have legal DRM read ability.

Mots of that has been cracked, but not all.

You may do better using a 'live linux' boot disk to read them

I run a Linux box with Brasero to create iso files, that didn't want to know either!

I'll try my Panasonic DVD player later.

Please give the exact title and information about the SKU.

We need to run a Google and check for "exotic" protection methods, such as weak sector or something. Sometimes, there will be long discussion threads, about what happens to particular titles.

I don't have a Bluray player, have no experience with the protection methods, or anything of that sort. I know that the ability to load the Java programs (.jar) off the BR disc, the ability to revoke the key for the media and so on (using a network connection to the player), are all part of the BluRay experience. But there could be other methods added to the media, to prevent computer BluRay drives from reading it, and only an STB would be designed to open and play it. Assuming the STB had a network connection, and the media can revoke and make itself unplayable (on that particular playback device).

With BluRay, you can buy the media, you can own the media, you can play the title multiple times. You can buy a second disc. The second disc communicates with the network, gets a copy of the revocation list, the key for the encryption on the previous disc is revoked, and suddenly... the disc that used to play, no longer plays.

This is the BluRay customer experience. Can you see why I do not own one of those drives ? Or any materials associated with the methods ? Even when you are not a pirate, you are treated like dirt. And that's not right.

Run the title and any identifying numbers through Google, and start searching for revocation.

In the DVD era, an example of a media with a reputation, was "Casino Royale". One release of that, had a special protection method. If you can Google and dig up that one, then chances are good you can dig up a story behind your BR title.

Paul

I am not sure that Brasero would understand DRM encoding. You need some ripper software like makemkv...

If that works OK you definitely have run up against DRM issues.

They deliberately corrupt the data so without a special key the disk simply looks unreadable

DVD/bluray players have the keys. Computer blue ray players may not.

Many thanks Paul & The Natural Philosopher :-)

This became a swamps & alligators situation for me, I lost interest in the film, the challenge was somehow to create an iso!

This one is a bog standard DVD not Blu ray.

The Samsung DVD drive on the Linux box couldn't read it.

The Asus Blu ray drive on the Windows box couldn't read it.

VSO Inspector on the Windows box couldn't read it.

Next step was to try my Panasonic Blu ray player but a thought came to me last night. I have a very old external DVD player that can read/write anything, I bought it years ago to back up to DVD RAM. Separate PSU, USB2, really old.

Plugged it into the Linux box, put the DVD in, iso created as sweet as a nut!

I must stencil "do not throw away" on the top of that drive!

Incidentally I agree with the comments about Blu ray, just not worth the effort.

I'd be tempted to look into a 'LibreDrive', which is one that just reads the raw bits and doesn't care about DRM or anything:

Theo