www.makemkv.com

I have a problem that might be happening to other users. I have been presented with a large collection of 20 year old ink-jet printable DVDs (not commercial products) where some of the discs are loosing their printable surface while spinning in the DVD drive. It's inconsistent, probably related to the DVD blank batch. All were stored in the same place. It's very hard to predict which disc will have the problem before it happens in the drive.

When the surface fully delaminates, the interior of the drive is filled with small to minute flakes of the printable surface. So I have to vacuum the drive which is a minor hassle but I'm afraid the drive might be damaged at some point as I have another 75+ discs to go thru.

The discs are readable without the printable surface. Removing the surface before using MakeMKV might be an option but I don't know of an acceptable solvent that would not potentially damage the data.

MakeMKV naturally goes to fastest read speed which makes sense in nearly all situations. What I would like to experiment with is reducing the DVD drive's read speed to 2x to see if that reduced the stress on the printable surface. Is there a way to do this with the user accessible interface?

You can try MakeMKV's speed control settings: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=22689

I had this problem with a few ~1996'ish Taiyo Yuden's that suffered horrible flaking so I put polyimide tape over them. It stopped the flaking although the discs still didn't read :-/.

flojo wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 10, 2025 5:36 pm

I had this problem with a few ~1996'ish Taiyo Yuden's that suffered horrible flaking so I put polyimide tape over them. It stopped the flaking although the discs still didn't read :-/.

Yes, exactly...Taiyo Yuden discs! I was considering using DVD paper labels to hold the surface on but that might make things worse if the entire paper label flies off.

flojo wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 10, 2025 5:36 pm

I had this problem with a few ~1996'ish Taiyo Yuden's that suffered horrible flaking so I put polyimide tape over them. It stopped the flaking although the discs still didn't read :-/.

dcoke22 wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 10, 2025 2:16 pm

You can try MakeMKV's speed control settings: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=22689

Thank you for the info. I'll try this soon.

ArtLunam wrote: ↑

Thu Dec 11, 2025 5:00 pm

Thank you for the info. I'll try this soon.

Right, but in case you haven't worked it out yet, the tape can adhere to the inner ring that almost all disc labels don't fully adhere to and you can wrap it underneath if you can discern that the data isn't written to the brim. The aggravating part about this for me was that I was looking for _THIN_ tape, which means cheap tape, but it's harder than you think to find thin 3+ inch polyimide tape at any quality :-/. I kept finding ~3 to 5mil, but eventually I did find ~1 mil.