Scratched discs

What it does

Old home DVDs get scratched, smudged, and harder to read with age. Rippsy is built to get as much of the video off them as it can, instead of giving up at the first bad spot.

• Weak spots are read several times. A drive often succeeds on a second or third try.
• Spots that never read are skipped and left blank. In the video, that's a brief glitch or skip at that moment, not a failed rip.
• Deep scratches are stepped over so the rest of the disc gets copied first, then Rippsy goes back and tries those areas once more at the end.
• If a normal rip runs into trouble, or comes out shorter than the video should be, Rippsy switches on its own to "Recovering a scratched disc…". It copies the video to a hidden temporary folder inside your save folder using the careful reader above, then converts it from that copy. The temporary folder is removed afterward.
• If more than half of the disc can't be read, Rippsy stops and tells you, since the result wouldn't be worth keeping.

How to use it

There's nothing to turn on. Start the rip as usual and let it run.

• During recovery, the progress line shows how many unreadable spots have been skipped so far.
• A badly scratched disc can take much longer than a clean one while the drive retries. It's fine to leave it running.
• Recovery needs free space in the save folder about the size of the video on the disc (shown as "of video" in the disc summary), on top of the finished file.

When it's done, the result tells you how it went:

• "The disc was hard to read, but Rippsy recovered all of it." Nothing was lost.
• "The disc is scratched: N spots couldn't be read…" Each spot is a tiny piece of the disc (2 KB), so even a few hundred spots may only mean a few short glitches.

Troubleshooting

• Get more back: gently clean the disc with a soft, lint-free cloth, wiping in straight lines from the center outward (not in circles), then rip it again. A different DVD drive sometimes reads a marginal disc better.
• "Most of this disc can't be read": clean it and try another drive. Very damaged or "rotted" discs may not be recoverable.
• "To recover it, Rippsy needs about … of free space": see Not enough space.
• Glitches in the finished video: see Problems playing the video.

Related

• The rip didn't finish
• Disc images (ISO)
• Rippsy doesn't see my disc