Having VERY bad luck with Warner HD-DVDs! - Page 4

Alter, haha-no worries...just wanted to be sure there was not another OOP I had to dig up,LOL.

Well, sign me up for the club.


Decided to throw in Goodfellas and the disc gave the error message and stopped playing shortly after the double date. I tried cleaning the disc, and it did no good - same spot.

For what it is worth, I was able to advance to every chapter and play for a few seconds, so advancing from chapter to chapter doesn't do any good. You will have to play through the entire movie.

This sucks - it's one of the best titles I own for the format.

Also, it came in a Seastone case with a 2006 ad, so it was an early one. Warner moved to the Viva Elite cases later on. If people are having problems with the last Potter disc (for example - I think someone mentioned it earlier in this thread), then it's not limited to a small time period. I'm hoping this doesn't mean eventual failure for all of these discs. I own a little over 100 Warner titles. Crap. Bought before the real firesales, too.

I'm not familiar with this terminology. I have almost 200 HD-DVDs and the ability to convert, at least, the movies (but not menus) to other formats e.g. BD, but it would take me 6 mos of daily effort to do so!

Ain't gonna do that. But I am going to scour first the "HD DVD exclusives" sticky here, and see which of my collection are not currently available on Blu-ray, and commence immediately to convert them (provided they're not bad already).


I've been saying this too so agree completely. What a PIA huh!

I suppose I could contact Warner and tell them "all of these <200 discs are bad" but that's not my style. Nor will I hammer my PC HD-DVD drives scanning for Read errors on every one of my discs. I think I have a total of 5 PC drives and 2 settop players (three if you count my BH200) and these are all looking like rotten investments at this point.

Seastone is the brand or name of the keep case that early Warner and Universal titles were in. They have a rounded spine, a disc hub that pops in to free the disc, and tabs at the bottom which allow the case to stand upright by itself. Some had a textured inside, some didn't. Viva Elites are the cases that Warner currently use, with more a more squared spine, and a hub that looks like four arrows pointing inward.

Thanks for that.

BTW it seems the only "HD-DVD Exclusive" Warner title I have is Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) so at least I know where to start checking/converting. The others can be had on Blu-ray. As an aside, I've noticed that so far at least the few of these I've looked at have all been "TRENDY Co. JAPAN" discs.

I've been looking at a half-dozen or so of my HD-DVDs, and with the exception of Pan's Labyrinth, manufactured by "Ulead Systems USA", all the rest, including Warner and Univeral and Paramount and even Cream/Royal Albert Hall (Rhino) have an Implementation ID (manufacturer) of TRENDYCoJAPAN. So if there was a manufacturing issue, I would think it would extend to other studios and not just Warner, except of course if there was a very early problem before the other studios started production, and which was subsequently resolved.

Of course, I could be wrong too about what TRENDYCoJAPAN is--maybe that is the mastering house that prepared ISOs for pressing at [various] facilities. EDIT: I found Trendy Co of Japan and it appears likely they do mastering but not manufacturing. So it seems it may be impossible to find out where these are made by reading the disc or the packaging.

Hey you guys w/bad discs--do they have white rings in the center of the under (read) side of the disc? And a stylistic HD DVD embedded (faintly) outside of this ring?

My defective Bullitt looks this way, as does Purple Rain and 2001 and etc. where Paramount and Universal are different. Pan's Labyrinth has this white ring as well.

Whaddya say?

Pan's Labyrinth is New Line but it's technically a Warner disc also. Your description matches what I think all Warner discs look like. At least from memory.

I'll buy this, and it will help me to decide how to prioritize checking (and backing-up) my discs, thanks. I did successfully back-up my Mutiny...1962 disc to BD btw, and it's surprising to me that it's apparently a single-layer disc, as the movie is 185min long and the disc has many featurettes besides. Looks great regardless.

So I haven't seen any dual-rings yet but I've only looked at a handful of discs...

Well, for what it's worth, I have been watching my Warner titles in my regular rotation (at a rate of perhaps 3 titles/week), and would have no idea that people were having a problem other than what I have read in this thread. Bear in mind that I am not skipping between chapters as a test, but am simply watching the movie from beginning to end (and maybe randomly chapter-skipping to a specific scene, or watching some supplemental stuff). So far, no problems at all. Then again, amidst a similar concern with combo titles, I never had a problem there either. At this point, I figure I will replace any problem discs as I find them with the BD counterpart (most catalog BDs are pretty cheap anyways).

I will report any problems I find here (providing they are are repeatable, are not simply an "eccentricity" of the player, or otherwise intermittent) to try and establish a pattern. Anywhoo, the titles I have watched so far without incident (since this came to light) are:

Batman Begins
Superman Returns (combo)
The Matrix
Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone
Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix (combo)
Swordfish (*)
Gothika (*)
The Invasion (combo) (*)
Corpse Bride (*)

Also note that all titles have been watched multiple times since purchase, so there is no chance of them being bad from inception (I replaced the few defective ones when I bought them). A few titles were purchased from inet video at the outset of the fire sales (*), but most were bought on original release from either Amazon, or B&M.

Can you clarify what you mean by this? I have gone-thru all my Warner discs, and they all have a single white ring perhaps 1/4" thick. All, that is, save for two (Corpse Bride and Space Cowboys). And then of course there are the HD DVD Combo discs which are very different.

If it is the "white ring"-manufactured discs that are at issue, these include the nice Matrix and That's Entertainment! box sets. I have about 46 total movies and afaik only Bullitt that's defective so far.

I have every Warner HD DVD and none of them are bad. I never had a problem with combo discs either. I'm using XA2s, Onkyo 805 and PC drives. Are all you people with problems are using 3rd generation machines?

junglalien: Using an XA2.

On "Mutiny", I wasn't too impressed with the video. I thought it was waxy looking. "Grand Prix" looked much better.

You didn't answer my question about this. I had mentioned the "white ring" and this was your reply, and yet double-layer discs only have one white ring. So what are you referring to.

I dunno that I have ANY single-layer Warner HD-DVDs, which would only hold 15Gb...is there a list somewhere of titles and layers?

I think the white ring is just the other side view of the disc label.

Well, the shortest Warner movie I have is Corpse Bride, which is still 20Gb and thus 2 layers (and btw has no white ring). So I don't know that any single-layer HD DVDs exist at all.

I've found that ImgBurn tells me if a disc is 2-layer.

I have Christmas vacation and can see that it indeed has only one "data" ring vs. dual-side discs.

And what I've been referrring to as a "white ring" isn't a "white ring" at all, but the underside of the front-side label that is sort of magnified to look milky white. Well duh, Brian81 said it and I just didn't understand.

I get it now, thanks.

The early combo discs such as Rumor Has It and Animal House were single-layer on the HD side.

Wonder if I should try copying all my warner discs (takes 30min per disc probably) to my HDD.

Well, I am rather astonished this morning. Having found a bad software CD-RW the other day, I applied IsoPuzzle to it and was able to recover the data. On a whim, I plugged-in my (very defective) Bullitt HD DVD and it recovered the whole thing! Or at least, it appears that the entire movie and menus/extras are intact though I haven't of course been able to watch each/every second of it. But this is remarkable and very unexpected; I sure didn't expect IsoPuzzle to even acknowledge (read) my HD-DVD much less succeed in recovering it.

IsoPuzzle makes a .iso file on your hard drive, and works & works to read everything on a disc for as long as you want, including giving your optical drive "cooldown" breaks. Oddly, the .iso of Bullitt that it created is slightly LARGER than the original, but the bloody thing plays on my PC (after mounting as a virtual drive) where the original does not!

The "bad" HD-DVD can't of course be replicated as-is, with menus et al, I do know how to remake the movie (and any extras) into BD or DVD and will do so now at my leisure given the .iso is safely on my hard drive.

EDIT: Oops, I tried to extract the main movie from the .iso and there remain errors in it that confuse my tools. So it's not going to work for that purpose (and proves again the "skipping around the disc" is not a valid way to find errors). Nice tool anyway, I could get the extras off of it if I wanted.

Yes there were single layer hd dvd's. TimeCop is single layer.

Maybe that would explain the absolutely wretched PQ. It might be worse than the DVD.

After reading this thread a few weeks ago, I've started rotating in my Warner HD DVD's. I have about 520 or so HD DVD's total, and this weekend I watched Full Metal Jacket (yellow/green cover), and P.S. I Love you on Onkyo 805. No problems with either. I'll contribute as I watch more.

Finally go a hold of an HD-DVD copy of "Blood Diamond" from my sister in Upstate NY a couple of week ago. Played it and skipped from chapter to chapter on her A-30 Tosh player (which has been relegated to SD DVD playback since 'the war' ended) and the movie played fine. Then, over the weekend, I borrowed "Blood Diamond" and took it home to play on my XBox 360 HD-DVD drive and then (with the commentary track on) in my Toshiba F45 AV-423 laptop with HD-DVD playback.

On all three machines "Blood Diamond" played like a champ and looked mighty fine. Good flick too, although very depressing and not something I'd watch often (it even makes the usually sexy Jennifer Connelly look homely and dull). Other random Warner titles I've thrown ("Bonnie & Clyde," "Goodfellas," etc.) on my HD-DVD playback devices have so far been fine. Guess I'm either very lucky or us Yanks got the better-pressed discs out of the lot that were made worldwide.

Since I saw this thread I thought I'd check mine.

I noticed a very interesting thing though. It appears that the plasticizer of the red cases is breaking up and clouding the HD-DVD disks for some of my titles. (the case has a cloudy film on the inside)

I've cleaned them off (disk and case) and flipped the playable side over before placing them back in the cases. I think I might replace all the faulty cases.

Or it could be the disk itself if coming apart and the case is showing the problem?

Some problem disks Red, That's Entertainment (3 disks), The Sting

The cases are not the problem. Look in yor DVD cases. Most of the cases which have plain insides are affected.