...because we all have our motley moments!


Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Movie Madness

Totally unrelated to Christmas, I'm wondering what you all do to preserve your DVD movies? We've been through two copies of CARS and I hate to go buy a third, just to have it scratched and ruined again. This is getting expensive!

So many of our favorite DVD's are now unwatchable due to imperceptible (sometimes quite OBVIOUS) scratches. Are you really just supposed to keep rebuying these things? I've copied our music and audiobooks onto the computer (see my recent post Our Listening Library is "Ripped!"), but you can't do that with DVDs...can you?

We've tried the scratch repair kits which, for the most part, do NOT work. We don't usually allow our kids to handle the DVD's, but when KID 1 occassionally does, he's very careful. The disks still end up scratched.

I've seen these things called "D-Skins" on the market, but they're expensive. Has anyone tried them?

How do you keep your DVD movies scratch-free?

5 comments:

Liz said...

You CAN do that with DVDs, although it's hard. Well, it's not hard to rip it onto your computer, but it is hard to then burn it onto a disc. They do take up a lot of space, though, so you might want to put them on an external hard drive. We keep our DVDs in a hard case folder thing so they're not constantly putting them in and out of boxes. Our Fox and the Hound got ruined and so did Wall-E before I put them in the DVD folder. I also emphasize holding them by the edge and not sliding them on the table or anything. Sometimes they get dirty, but we haven't had any scratched beyond repair in a long time. Hope this helps! I don't even know what those D-skins are, so I can't comment on that.

Lindsay said...

Wow I have no idea, but we've never ruined any. And it's not because they girls take great care of them. I just picked one off the floor today. But I've never had a scratch that caused it to not be watchable. And only a few times have I had to take it out and dust them off.

Sorry I'm not much help. But watch now that I typed this they will all get scratched...lol

Maria said...

Hey! When I buy a DVD, I immediately throw away the hard case and put the new DVD in a big soft multi-holder type DVD case that has mostly children's movies in it. This saves a lot of space and keeps them out of easy reach.

I also have a small, portable DVD case that has about 10 in it. This is the one that goes in the car and the kids can use to pop in their movies into their dvd player.

Also, I limit the handling of them by the kids. They have learned that it is not fun to sit down and watch a movie only to have it skip around.

Karly said...

Sorry Donna, no help here. We have the same problem! Scratches, ugh!! I just thought I would comment so you would know you are not alone. :-)

One thing I love is the "on-demand" option through our cable company. There are a lot of free options and you can watch them when you like. And NO SCRATCHES. But if I recall, you don't have cable. So again I am probably not much help. Sorry!!

Donna said...

Gee, thanks for rubbing it in, Karly. (jk!)

We definitely enjoyed this feature with our digital cable up at Silver Bay. We had so many rainy days last summer, the free on-demand kids' movies were a great distraction.

Sounds like we need to at least store our DVDs differently. We keep all our music cd's in big soft cases. Guess I need to go get more cases for the movie collection.

Thanks to all who "weighed in" on this. I really don't like wasting money and I was almost to the point of refusing to buy ANY more DVD's for the kids. Maybe I won't give up on DVD's just yet, but couldn't they just make them scratch resistant? Sheesh!