I went a couple of days ago to the video store and bought a couple of previously viewed DVDs. I got them home and saw that a couple of them had some scuff and scratch marks on them.

The thing is, while they have a year long warranty, I may not get to watch every single minute of all of the special features and everything right away. How do I tell how readable the disc is without having to watch every second of the movie? And then, what happens if later down the line, the discs become too scratched to read anymore? Am I out of luck?

Not so - I picked up a copy of DVD X Rescue by 321 Studios. They license technology from Arrowkey (or look awfully similar to the Arrowkey software package CD/DVD Diagnostic). DVD X Rescue has the ability not only to analyze a messed up disc and retrieve data, but also to analyze messed up video DVDs and retrieve data from them.

Got a bad DVD that your player doesn’t like? Pull the movie off and burn it to a new disc so you can watch it again.

The reason I got it, though, is it has a “readability test” such that you can put discs in and see whether you’re going to get errors when you try to play them. No longer do you have to watch 20 hours of extra features to see if it skips - run it through this media tester and away you go.