Resurrecting Scratched CDs & DVDs
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- čas přidán 19. 06. 2024
- I'm trying to save a severely scratched game DVD with a simple method and some patience.
The polishing paste I used*:
DE: amzn.to/32WPkZS
The particular brand I used is only available in Germany, it seems. You can find similar plastic polish from elsewhere that should work similarly.
TIME STAMPS:
0:00 Introduction
0:43 Inspecting the Damage
2:59 Materials and Explanation
5:27 Cleaning
6:03 Sanding
7:53 Polishing
10:18 Results
12:27 Thank you & Good night
--------------------------------------------
MUSIC by FOCUS 10 focus10music.bandcamp.com
EQUIPMENT AND TOOLS I USE: kit.co/janbeta *
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Thanks for watching!
* Stuff marked with "*" contains affiliate links. You don't pay anything extra and I get a little commission from everything you buy through the links (even if you buy something different there).
#JanBeta #OpticalMedia #Restoration - Věda a technologie
Nice work there Jan! I've tried it myself for fun half a year ago, but I just got fed up with the polishing paste application and left it for "later" :) Keep up the good work!
I Jan, I really like your videos. This came out great! I did this many times; the sandpaper 2000 is perfect, you never want to go with 1500 it scratches too much. For the second pass, 2500 or 3000 is fine. In my opinion for polishing what works and is easier, and sometimes cheaper is car polish with the machine or foam drill attachment; the high-speed polishing makes the media look brand new.
I used to work at a video rental place and we had a DVD fixing kit..........it never worked not that I recall. I heard that toothpaste might work better. This thing would always rough up the bottom.
We had VHS fixing kits too and usually that worked. There was one time I had one that was completely crushed. I replaced BOTH reels and the shell. Worked perfectly after that.
Uuuah, it never would come to my mind to use sandpaper (no matter how fine) on optical Discs! 😲
I was quite impressed seeing the result after your polishing procedure! Never thought it would came up SO good! 👌
The sandpaper is only needed to get the deeper scratches out. You could of course use polish all the way through but it would take forever. ;)
Well done, Jan! You saved it!!
Yay! :D
Nice work! I have done something similar using PlastX and a drill mounted small buffing pad. This is a great technique on floppy cases with acrylic covers too as those old things are always scratched up. Keep up the good work!
Thanks! Yes, I'm going to have to get myself some polishing attachment for power tools, too. Doing it by hand is a bit tiresome. :D
Sei un mito Jan,purtroppo i cd e i dvd sono molto delicati,ma hai sistemato il problema alla perfezione,sei il meglio,ciao
Very nice to know damaged DVDs can be saved!
It might be worth mentioning that polycarbonate has a chemical in it known as BPA.
The dust from sanding might be a concern.
I resurrected a bunch of CD:s that I'd used in my car a long time ago, and wanted to rip them to mp3. I used an oscillating polishing machine and 30 seconds with a car polish and they all looked like new and worked again :)
I'm going to have to get some electrical polishing tool sometime, too. Doing it by hand took quite some effort... :D
nice work jan
It looked like it was having trouble loading the initial executable program in your first demonstration. Its always hard to say how much of the data was inaccessible and how much has been recovered. I dump a lot of media and am constantly surprised how resilient optical media is to scratched (thanks to its built in error correction). Absolutely far better than people give it credit for!
That said, I have also on multiple occasions opened brand new, still shrinkwrapped CDs (long after their manufacture date) and not been able to dump them or even have an optical drive recognize them until I took them to the sink and gave them a hand washing with soap and water. Then they read and extracted flawlessly! It's always the first thing I recommend people try because it's so successful for me. I really hope people don't immediately start sanding and polishing their discs needlessly just over some minor scratches that don't affect playback at all.
@@orangeActiondotcom I’ve had great success with window cleaner, but yeah when I was ripping all my DVDs, cleaning was all they needed. It only ever happened with box set discs that faced a certain way. I don’t know if some dirt got in only in that way somehow, but there we go. But at least now I know, if I ever run across a deeply scratched one, that I can use polishing compound to help.
I think we needed to see Jan get out the angle grinder next time ;)
I might actually try some power tool with a soft polishing sponge. Doing it by hand sure took a lot of effort! :D
I've been using "Duraglit" - a kind of cotton wadding soaked in metal polish - to remove scratches from CD's and DVDs for years. I was told to polish radially (i.e. from the centre to the edges and vice versa) so that any residual scratches would be at right angles to the tracks, but I can't say if it makes much difference. It is posssible to ruinn a DVD doing this, but if it doesn't play anyway you don't have much to lose.
You would probably only need to use the sandpaper if there are bad scratches rather than the fine scuffing that CDs normally pick up.
well done for not reverting to a drill bit with a soft cloth :) looks like it might be theraputic/zen :)
Nice job! Gonna try this method with my badly scratched PS2 games
Happy polishing! ;)
Nice work klop
The toothpaste method where you let it dry has actually worked for me in the past on some old scratchy audio CD's that would skip in some CD-players. It definitely wasn't perfect by any stretch, but it was apparently enough revived some discs to the point where I could at least make another copy.
Ah, good call. I can't imagine that it's a very permanent method but it might work for really light scratches. And if you make copies right away, it makes sense.
Toothpaste is an abrasive compound, which is how it scrapes the plaque off of your teeth. So I'd say it's on par with extra fine grit sand paper or polishing compound.
Do you think a rotary tool with a polishing bit and some polishing compound would work? I have a scratched up MGS3 here that I would like to fix.
If I remember correctly we used to use Nu-Finish car wax or something like that on Bad CDs
Nice! I had my doubts after the initial sanding but the disc looks great. I wonder is a polishing/buffing attachment for your drill would help.
My thoughts exactly
I just did this myself with a movide dvd, it was skipping badly. I was foolish enough to try to use a Dremel with obviously too much revs, and I ended up melting the surface slightly. So if using tools, should be more careful. Luckily the one I melted, was a test subject, and the actual movie DVD I did manage to rescue. But I ended up using A LOT of elbow grease.
@@borealis75 A good point. Low RPMs is highly recommended.
Yes, definitely going to get some polishing attachment and try it in the future. Doing it by hand is a bit tiresome to put it mildly... ;)
@@JanBeta my idea was mounting the disc on something, attaching that to a drill. Set the drill on a slow speed and hold the sand paper gently to the surface. Should reduce the toil but be controllable to not damage the disc.
One of those buffing machines works quite well. You just have to be careful about how much plastic you remove.
Hey there Jan! Great video as always. Could you tell me which (R) resistance 10w resistor you use to discharge capacitors? I've watched an old Amiga psu repair you did and you only mention you use a low resistance one. How low though? Would 15R be low enough?
One important thing! The thickness of the disc is actually the last "lens" for focusing the laser to read the pits and lands. Too much sanding and the focus will be wrong.
While that’s true, the pickup can adjust its height a decent bit for disc wobble - having to adjust a tiny bit within its normal range shouldn’t be a problem. The risk will lie in if you can take it beyond the automatic tracking’s tolerance, and that might differ drive to drive.
Ich hatte keine Ahnung man konnte DVDs/CDs polieren, um sie zu reparieren! Super gemacht!
Vielen Dank! Hat großartig funktioniert. Für die Zukunft werde ich mir aber mal ein elektrisches Polierwerkzeug besorgen, glaube ich. ;)
Funny! I had just muttered to myself "But they couldn't say 'turd'. They had to say 'poo'," and then you said "Did I say 'turd'? Sorry!" LOL!
Haha, it worked! :D
Several years ago, I purchased a small machine (it seems like a portable CD reader) that does exactly this automatically. You have special mini rotary discs inside of 2000 and 3000 and the paste. You put the CD inside, press a button and just wait... and it does the annoying job 😊
I used to recover my scratched CDs. They are still sold on Amazon. Make a video using one of those.
Nice and useful video! I suggest using some kind of tool/holder while polishing. And please be careful not to damage the other side of cd. Cheers!
Thanks! Yes, I need to get a polishing sponge I can attach to my drill or something eventually. Should make the process a lot easier and quicker.
Nice work Jan! Just a random thought that popped into my head as I was watching - maybe a sanding block would work even better? As it would keep the sandpaper flat against the surface of the disk. I might just give it a try! 👍
Yes, that would be a more elegant way. Would also be easier to use a drill or a sander with a polishing sponge to do the final step I guess. I'm going to have to upgrade my tools sometime... ;)
Polishing should by radial. Any circumferential scratch will tend to catch the laser.
So no little circles. Straight lines, back and forth from centre, radially outwards and inwards. Rotate the disc a little every few strokes to make it easier for your elbows.
Paper towels are abrasive by themselves.
Take care not to damage the label side. The lacquer is all that protects the foil.
Nice tutorial! I like the music in these videos. Do you listen to Kraftwerk at all??
The snowy tree cricket springs to mind 😊the Big Bang theory.the sound of the laser transport
That was very interesting
Get yourself a DA sander, use some tack to attach a round rubber mat like used to open jars, place CD/DVD on DA rubber mat and carefully spin it up and polish with compound. Been there, done that. Just be sure to spin down the sander before removing pressure or the CD might go flying. The DA's don't just spin round and round which is why this works.
Nice video Jan. Next one of the series would be about polishing a plate in a crashed hard drive :-)
Wow, that would be a challenge! :D
Novus plastic polish kit works very well.
Yes, I think most of the polishing stuff that's fine enough should work fine. Even polishing paste for metal and such should work although you'd probably take away more material quicker.
I use a whole sheet of sandpaper on a mirror or sheet of glass. Oscillate the disk against it in a random pattern, keep it wet and rinse off any slurry. Stops you getting high/low spots on the disk.
Yes, makes sense. I think I even have a left over mirror somewhere in the basement. I'm going to try that in the future!
Very cool - in the research you did, did you come across info about whether there is much difference in the depth of the acrylic layer on a burned CD or DVD?
For writeable media, I think the data layer sits closer to the top, so as they are the same thickness as regular CDs/DVDs, technically the clear polycarbonate layer on the bottom should be a bit thicker. But I didn't find anything conclusive about that.
I don't think there is much any difference. The dye layer is insanely thin and pretty much just lays in the pregroove. The fundamental difference between DVD and CD is that they define different ranges of focusing depths that the drive optical system must be optimised towards, so the CD focuses at 1.2mm into the disc and DVD-5 at 0.6mm, and these have been chosen due to different laser wavelength and optical properties of polycarbonate. Removing too much material - even long before you eat through the polycarbonate optical layer - will upset the focus. So a CD at 1.21-1.25mm total thickness is just one piece of polycarbonate with moulded-in groove or data, then dye if it's recordable, then metallisation, lacquer, and print; DVD-5 is one such piece like a CD but 0.6mm thin polycarbonate and with a 0.6mm spacer glued on top. Things get more complicated for a DVD-9, i can't tell you for certain how it works and how deep and where the layers are, i can't find actually trustworthy information! But i suspect both layers are a very small distance apart, because both must be near the optimal focus. BTW the Blu-Ray data layer is closer to the surface yet.
When trying to understand optical discs, please ignore illustrations that are obviously not to scale - which is pretty much all of them. The groove distance and pit depth are somewhere on the order of 1µm! Many are obviously wrong, i.e. showing the pits of DVD-9 aligned vertically, but that obviously can't be the case, since the two layers have different capacity, with the second layer being much lower capacity than the first - probably for a good reason, because with things hiding precisely in shadow of one another, no focusing tricks would help you see them. In fact bad and wrong illustrations of technology are pretty pervasive, because people hire random artists who really have no way of knowing and often no time to think, and aren't given the information they need, so a little bit of vigilance is in order. Remember the vinyl record video by Real Engineering, where the illustrator put the magnetic pickup into the counterweight?
I use AUTOSOL with a lint-free paper for polishing.
I have found the silk cloth you get with glasses works good
Ah, yes, makes sense! I have some of those somewhere, going to try that.
1:07 There are crickets in your PS2!
Once, when I polished a DVD, the water actually crawled in between the layers from the inner hole and of course ruined the disc completely. So be careful to not polish too close to the edge.
Good call! I think resting the DVD on a kitchen towel like I did later in the process helps with that, it should wick away most of the moisture from the sides of the disc. No problems yet with that game but I'm going to be careful with that in the future!
The magic may actually work. Some of the polishing stuff leave a residue that fills scratches or even dissolves a (car paint) surface with the intent to leave a smoother surface once dry. Such a repurposed product may or may not work for polycarbonate - but you can always try an old AOL CD ;-) Tooth polish generally seems to often use very finely ground lime but lately also some micro-plastics disguised as nano-technology. Whatever is used for polishing, it will always be rather gentle as tooth enamel doesn't naturally regenerate.
Many products are made from polycarbonate including airplane windows or some sports car windows so it's not hard to find specialized polishing products - it's harder to find one that's cheap and readily available at home for that one old CD or DVD that needs a bit of TLC.
I wonder if the Magic Eraser sponge would work for this since it is basically a very fine abrasive. Anyone ever tried it?
Try a pace ads 200 or a jbc . Olso nice job keep going .
They make disk burnishing devices (like the SkipDr) that remove scratches. They work fairly well,... Doing it by hand would be subject to more chance of ruining the disks,...
Yes, heard about those. I might get one eventually and try it. I think doing it by hand works well, even if it is a bit tiresome. :)
Recently I tried a very odd method. Get a CD case, pop it on the floor and hold it with your feet. Take a disc, drop a couple dots of Xerapol on it, place it in label side down into the case. Grab a car polisher (it's all I had!) and run it on the disc with force for a couple of minutes, then rinse. If it's not quite there, do it again. If you're worried about the label scratching, apply electrical tape around the edge of the CD tray.
I took a copy of Super Monkey Ball for the PS2 from "so scratched it wouldn't read" to being almost mint condition 😁
Makes sense! I'm definitely going to try to use some kind of power tool and a soft polishing sponge sometime. Doing it by hand is a bit tiresome. ;)
Ever tried one oft those mechanical cleaner? Do they work?
No, as I mentioned this was the first time I’ve ever tried this at all.
SUNNYDALE!!
Indeed. ;)
I got a disc cleaning machine from a charity shop for a couple of UK Pounds. Its complete in box. But the little bottles of polish are dried out. I'll have to get some suitable polish. any good brands that I can get?
You could try Brasso, as someone suggested in another comment. Or a car polish like Autoglym.
@@ianhaylock7409 I have brasso. Im not keen on it. I was hoping to get a suggestion from a peson that has a disc polishing machine, and has tried different products in it
Have you considered to back up your discs and play them with FreeMCBoot? In case the discs get damaged again.
Yes, I'm so going to do that! Way more convenient to run the games from the HDD anyway. :)
@@JanBeta Better than running games from USB drive ;)
@@ventrue6516 PS2 games load way slow from USB. It’s really not recommended especially when you have the option of using a HDD.
Nice video and... success! 👍😊
I used toothpast but I'm wondering about using Sidol next time (I checked Amazon.de and there it is too!): it's a paste used to polish metals. I never used sandpaper but with 2000/2500/3000 is a good start! Well done Jan! 👍
Back in the day I could hire dvd's and the times I simply couldn't play them was way more than once. Hated them for that. I wonder if they would've complained if I tried to fix it. :)
They would have blamed you for all the damage to the DVD, including whatever originally caused it not to work for you. Then they would try to force you to buy them a replacement copy. Then they would finally have a working copy to rent to their customers, with you paying for it!
Nice! I wonder if that much polishing stuff is needed, it looked like you used a lot. Of course, any excess is ultimately removed in the process, but if someone has quite a lot of disks to resurface (and a lot of time to spend fixing them), they will like to know how much is enough, so they won waste the product.
I just used that much initially for the "let it soak in" joke. Couldn't help it. Later in the process, I only added tiny amounts of the paste and used a lot of elbow grease... ;)
@@JanBeta Oh, I see. I'm feeling a bit silly 😂
E A SPORTS. ITS IN THE GAME. Forever etched in my brain lol
Unfortunately exactly the same here... They did some good advertising back then, I guess... :D
Wd40 then isopropyl helps 🙂
I have some Gamecube discs that my kids ruined that I am going to try this on if I can find a similar polish in Canada
Any fine enough polish should work. There's many different brands out there. I didn't want to link to something I haven't tried though. Looking for something that works on car headlights/clear plastics should be a good way of finding a suitable polish.
@@JanBeta I've found a few brands in North America. Maguiars, Mothers, and 3M (of course) have similar products. I'm wondering if these would also work to remove scratches from computer plastics as well, such as laptop lids (plastic lids only not metal/carbon fiber)
DId myself many disc repair.
If yhr scratches are not deep you can avoid the sanding, use right away the polishing paste.
Yes, I mentioned that in the beginning of the process. The sand paper is just to level the deeper scratches at first so you don't have to polish away endlessly.
i always used to use toothpaste with a wet cloth so your not digging into the disc to much .. i always thought that you should not go in circles or follow the disc around in circles but go in straight lines from center to edge ..PS2 purple i think are more fragile and PS1 black discs ( i think) ** do not follow my directions without first checking ** lol
Yes, I knew about that too: never follow the disc in circles around it, just "radial" movements between center and edge... But the movement Jan made were successful: small circles, not following with a single movement the tracks of DVD/CD.
Everybody with kids knows you get a SkipDr. It takes a couple of minutes and works great.
a buff wheel works better and quicker with final polish
Yes, I need to get one of those eventually. Doing it by hand is a bit tiresome. ;)
We used to have a hand crank gizmo called a skip D.r......
Nice! I think there's also some electrically powered devices for that purpose but they all seem rather expensive. (They spare you the tedious polishing though, obviously...)
A friend of mine had one, he ruined a few PS1 games by overdoing it. I use to use a CD cleaning kit(also worked on DVD) Radio Shack use to sale that looked like old weak gritty peanut butter that worked so well I could make 2 bottles out of it by thinning it with 90% IPA. I just cleaned the disk with 90% IPA, dried it, put the paste on in a circular motion, let it dry wiped off the disk till shinny clean it again with 90% IPA, and 95% of the time it would work, sadly it's no longer sold. 2nd best I can find these days is called "Scratch Out" which can't be thinned out, and it's not as gritty.
The scratches shouldn't be so bad. It looks more like the reflective layer is starting to deteriorate when it reacts so sensitively.
Never took you for a golfer. well, we live and learn.
I play a mean mini golf irl. ;)
I see the sandpaper and I cringe. I would've started with the polish. Personally, I've used toothpaste and an old athletic sock in the past, using strokes from the inside of the disk to the outside, i.e., perpendicular to the tracks to minimize further laser scatter. I don't know why you'd think that some toothpaste may be too abrasive. I would never trust sandpaper on my teeth - would you?
The sandpaper is just to get the deeper scratches out (which works really well). The polishing paste (or toothpaste) is for the final step. And I found that if you polish the whole surface evenly the direction of the strokes doesn't matter at all.
Looks like you moved Jan...? Nice space!
I moved 3 years ago. I just rearranged the little lab a bit recently and put another desk in. :)
@@JanBeta Cool, love the workspace. Your videos have been awesome, I appreciate your work!
That's cool. Now do a floppy disk... 🙂
@9:15 "A piece of old clothing that I cut up" - you can say underwear, Jan. We all know that's what you meant ;) (OK, Unterhosen, I guess..)
I use a SkipDr to automate this process
Yes, I've seen those. I kind of cheaped out but I might look into getting a device like that sometime. I have quite a few scratched CDs and DVDs still.
This issue of getting scratched Optical Media to work by scraping it with all types of things or stuff is residing somewhere between myth and science. Some guys on CZcams even use powertools like a dremel or something, others even make Fun of it saying it just does not help it. I guess the method you showed is one of the more reasonable ones....
I think a power tool with a soft polishing sponge and the paste should work really well. I'm definitely going to try that sometime. Doing it by hand was a bit tiresome. :)
i tried toothpaste, but it caused alot more scratches.. i ruined the CD (was a music CD "Turrican") completely!! It was about 10 years ago, but i guess toothpaste is still the same.
It wasn't ruined, it just needed to be resurfaced again with something more suitable. I had some toothpaste work, but it wasn't optimal.
I had good luck with just metal polish (brasso for example)
I guess most fine enough polishes should work fine. Probably you are taking away more material at once with polishes designed for metal, maybe you can even leave the sand paper out of the equation that way for deeper scratches.
@@JanBeta yeah I don't use sandpaper
Maybe Brasso(tm) as a polishing compound? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasso
Yes, any fine polishing stuff should work.
hello sir jan beta after cleaning you can clean your lens with the help of a lenzcleanner on sale at AMAZON. I BELIEVE IN YOUR COUNTRY OF ORIGIN what happens that is foreign to a dvd-video disc there are special brushes under to require your lens to play the playstation 2 and compatible for all forms of dvd and cd and bluray fanatic if you are curious like me go take a nudge at AMAZON has you good chase, thank you this June 6, 2021.
Weren't gonna show us gettin' outta the sand trap?
I didn't want to show off my "skills" too much... ;)
You need a "...Later that day..." text :-D
I considered putting in a "several hours later" thing... :D
I'm fortune enough to live near a shop with a professional resurfacing machine that only charges a few dollars per disc
try cleaning the laser lens first.....
In order to provide a true German quality of your work you need a Polish to polish and a Czech to check ;)
I am going to have to call in some international friends next time! ;)
2:32 - That is incorrect. CD's only have one layer of plastic - the readable side. The label side is just a clearcoat over the aluminized surface. That's why CD's are so much easier to damage than DVD's.
From what I've read, that's only true for CDR and CDRW media but I'm obviously not an expert. Do you have any source detailing that?
@@JanBeta Hi Jan. Here's an old video showing a CD replication line - YT video LEnmSem8C-0. The metalization/coating part is about half way through. Be well!
@@JanBeta This is true for all CDs. That's why double-sided discs with a CD layer are off-spec and aren't allowed to carry the compact disc logo. That said the thinner plastic layer is still within the focusing ability of most laser assemblies, which is why they still work.
A surface nick on the label can cause a spot of corrosion that spreads and rots the CD, as opposed to DVDs/Bluray/Laserdisc which are two layers glued together in a sandwich, in which case gaps occur in the glue and allow oxygen in from the edges. (In a properly produced disc like these, rot will start from the edge in, unless contaminants got in in the original pressing -- a problem with many early-rotting LDs but those bad presses are all destroyed by now)
you'd think the chinese would have super cheap resurface machines available by now
Just get a game doctor. Shout out to the EB Games veterans out there!
might have put too much paste on there chap !!
I seriously do not want to know how many hours I've spent playing Gran Turismo games...
Yes! They are quite brilliant. Never got into them back in the day but they are great fun indeed!
Those discs look like my kids got ahold of them. Sorry about that. :D
At least they are saveable this way. :D
Blu-ray discs are much worse. They are very hard to scratch, but once they're scratched, it's almost impossible to polish them.
Yes, I can imagine that. Fortunately blu ray isn't retro yet. Or is it? ;)
I never understood why they don't make CD's with a less scratchable plastic...
Designed to fail?
maybe it has something to do with the right rigidity required to handle all those high rpm drives
I think it's probably an equation that involves reasonable rigidity, inexpensive materials and easy manufacturing. The planned failure might be a point, too, but you could argue that these things last quite a long time if they are handled carefully.
They did it for Blu-Ray. My collection is holding up far better than all other optical media I have.
I think polycarbonate was chosen for its high optical density and high refraction index, to make the discs pretty thin and light, i imagine if the discs had to be 3mm thick or the pickup had to be bulkier and more complex, neither would have been desirable. Plus it's extremely impact resistant, i'm sure LPs shattering used to cause quite a bit of economic damage, and as a bonus, which only became relevant later, in a high-speed drive, polycarbonate can withstand the force pretty easily without shattering. It was not really a cheap material back in the 80s, but it did get cheaper subsequently due to economies of scale, and the patents were lapsed so they knew it would get cheaper.
Not repairable by a human?? Something you know Beta that we don’t? You friends with a guy named Bob Lizzare ?
I tried the toothpaste method once and totally ruined a relatively valuable disc that would probably have been recoverable if I'd just been willing to actually order some polishing paste. Never again. Do not recommend.
way too much compound... only a little bit or it won't actually grind the surface ... your not putting suntan lotion on your legs jan !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :D
I used smaller amounts later in the process, I wanted to make the "just let it soak" joke. ;)
@@JanBeta ahhhh gotcha :D
I will not buy this record 'cause it it scratched....
Hooray for referencing the pythons! 😅
@@JanBeta It's from "Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook"
I thought of the parrot sketch first because it’s a similar setting, but you are correct of course! :D