PSA: DVDs don’t last forever
Back when DVDs first starting becoming popular, everybody was all “They’re better than VHS tapes cause they’ll last forever!”
Turns out, that’s not true. I’ve gotten far enough in my project to store all my DVDs on my media server that I’m getting to some of the older movies and TV shows on DVD now. And I’m starting to find a lot of older discs that used to work, and now they can’t be read. The worst culprits so far have been first season releases of TV shows, specifically 24 and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. 24 was partly a victim of bad packaging that scratched the disc, and partly a victim of disc rot. The demise of the SVU discs is a mystery, since they still look perfect, but the 1st and 3rd discs are unreadable. Which really puts a halt to my plan to rewatch the series from the beginning.
Time to borrow replacement discs from Netflix and work a little faster at getting the DVDs transferred over to the media server!