can dvd discs decompose

clay_angel

dvd discs that have been recorded from a camcorder that have always worked in the past now dont work in our disc drive(they stillwork on the dvd player)pc world have checked the disc drive but say there nothing wrong .
its not just 1 disc theres dozens of them.They are not scratched

fwor

Yes, they can decompose - all consumer recordable CDs and DVDs use dyes which are known to deteriorate with time. From personal experience, some are very susceptible to sunlight - I have had some CD-Rs that have been unreadable after a year.

They can also suffer from other problems, such as delamination, where the upper (recorded) surface lifts away from the plastic - often made worse if the disk has been labelled.

It's probably best to assume that a recordable CD/DVD has an unpredictable lifetime and anything stored on one should be backed up on another medium.

~However~, in your case, it may simply be that the you no longer have a codec on your PC that is compatible with the one that the camcorder used to record the DVD. Did the camcorder come with any utility CDs for use on a PC? It may just be a matter of reloading those utilities.

Sput2001

Dozens of them won't have died within a relatively short space of time like that, unless they'd all been badly looked after. You'd be pretty unlucky if even one had deteriorated.

I'd say it was a near-certainly that something else is causing the problem.

tomthered

some camcorders use a special way of putting the data to disk to allow alterations easier at a future date before finalising the disk.Have you checked the mftr site?

clay_angel

thanks for the above replies
fwor
nickmidgeley
tomthered

yes the camcorder came with a disc i will try that. would the codec be a problem as it was a dvd player that recorded from the camcorder
iwill have a look at mftr site of camcorder,dvd player and computer also ,(have tried in the past for things and usually go round in circles)
thanks again you have been most helpful .
also i didn't say in my first post pc world tried one of our discs on several computers but it didn't work
tried disc didnt work also tried down loading dvd codec programs from windows
any ideas