AKICOLJ

[desperance]

My DVD player is v old, as these things go. Occasionally the picture breaks up as if it were a digital TV signal suffering interference; occasionally it will skip part of a scene altogether, in a nasty jerky fashion.

Is this likely actually to damage the discs at all?

If not, is there any other reason to buy a new DVD player, other than saving myself the annoyance (which I can live with, if it's not doing actual harm)? Given that I won't be upgrading the TV for a while, so there's no point thinking about high-definition stuff or that kinda thing?

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

The analogy for hard disks would be the head crash, where instead of flying just above the surface of the disk and interacting only magnetically, the head ploughs into the surface of the disk like a train wreck, making the disk itself poisonous to other good heads too.

This happened to me, with my first computer (an Apricot, 'way back in the mid-80s...). Calamitous failure of floppy drive; I returned the machine under warranty; they fixed it and sent it back; I then experienced exactly the same problem, making the same horrible noises, and phoned them in tears and rage. They said, "Are you using the same disks?" Um, yeah, I was...

Happily, the poisonous floppies had not harmed the new drive head; double-happily, it was a double-drive model (no hard drive! hee! I had a conversation with my guru, who said, "Chaz, you don't need a hard drive" - and he was right!!), programs in the A-drive and data in the B-. I'd only fouled up the software, not the stories...

Happily