Shades of laser rot...Some people are suddenly worried about "DVD rot" ruining their movie collections. It seems a recent article in The Sydney Morning Herald addressed the issue, claiming that it affects between 1 and 10% of all DVD discs. First to explain... "DVD rot", or any kind of optical disc rot, is something that can occur when the bond between the different layers of a disc fail, a process called delamination. Rental discs that often are poorly handled have shown signs of this, but it results from poor handling. I have rented discs and it seems that unless you rent them they day they are put on the shelf, you may be out of luck later on.
Can DVD rot occur? Yes, in limited cases. But I can tell you that I have never seen it with the movies in my collection. Sometimes different machines react to older discs in varying ways with freezing or pausing. Scratches are certainly a factor but there are new buffing products out there that can minimize the results of abuse if not eliminate it. To test this, you need to make sure the error occurs at the same place on the disc and that it happens on more than one model of player. So yes, DVD rot is a possibility, but you should not be panicing about it. If you are really worried play some of your older discs to watch and see if you notice any problems. As far as I am concerned there is no real reason to fear for your DVD collection. Certainly not the problems we had with the old Laser Disc format.
CC