semi-OT: a Blu-ray disk that won't play the film

When DVD player / HC systems were first around, there was quite a lot of this sort of thing with specific titles doing odd things like refusing to play beyond the opening menu screen and so on. It never seemed to be due to either the player or disc per se - just a lack of compatibility between some 'unusual' feature of the disc and the player's software. Where this occured with a disc of a popular film where the player manufacturer would receive a lot of complaints from their dealers, the issue was usually cleared up with a software update, often distributed on disc, but sometimes only available as a website download. I would not assume that because you have the latest software flash in your player, it is not still a compatibility issue that may even have been introduced by the particular revision that you have now.

Sleepy Hollow's not that good a movie anyway ... ;-)

Arfa

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Thank you for a clear, terse answer. Guess I'll just have to complain to Paramount.

Agreed, but I got it cheap and it's the kind of film that looks good on a big HD screen.

I have little trust in optical media. Except ones that had hard error detection and correction designed in like CDs. I also have little trust in digital magnetic media, having seen Philips DCCs and Exabyte tapes utterly currupted. There's a whole big problem waiting out there.

Graham

I'm battling with a 'media error' on the second of two files on an EXB-8500 tape; there is no media physical damage. I'd like to find a program (on whatever o/s will support it) to permit reading past the corruption to recover the remaining data. Low level scsi commands should permit this but I am not yet ready to code an app for just this one tape.

Anyone have ideas?

Michael

Well, I've never had a defective DVD, and this my first "bad" BD. It played on a Panasonic player at Fry's, so it seems this is a firmware incompatibility.

Thanks to everyone for their comments.

Hint: You'll get better answers if you disclose:

1. What problem are you trying to solve?
2. What do you have to work with? (Hardware and software).
3. What did you do so far and what happened?

I have a raw read utility for Archive and Wangtek QIC drives, but it doesn't work for Exabyte. A bit of googling found:

all of which cover recovery from Exabyte tape read errors.

This is kinda interesting:

Also see code for tarskip.c at:

I have a version for SCO Xenix and OpenServer. I haven't compiled it for any Linux mutation yet.

Any chance that the file on the tape is a sparce file?

Of course, this has nothing to do with the DVD player problem.

Ok, so optical media and magnetic tape are unreliable. That leaves paper tape, punched Hollerith cards, and stone tablets. Which do you prefer?

Incidentally, my vote for the worst backup media available was DDS-1 and DDS-2 tape. 1/3 of the data on each tape was for error correction and it still didn't work right. Average life on a the heads was 5,000 to 10,000 hrs. The typical backup and verify took about 8 hrs total, which means the drive was good for about 3 years before wearing out. Extra credit to HP and Sony for making tapes unreadable on different drive firmware mutations.

Can't read past 'media error' on an 8mm tape recorded on an EXB-8500. Would like to sync on good data past the damage. Data recovery service sites describe using physical cut and splice techniques but I'm not willing to do that yet.

Exabyte drives: EXB-8500, EXB-8505, EXB-8900. *nix including SVR4, Solaris Sparc(various versions), Linux x86 (various releases), Cygwin, OpenBSD (various Sparc and x86), BSD/OS, HP/UX (various), MS-DOS diagnostic apps for the drives, etc.

Tried skipping the bad block(s) using tape positioning commands on *nix and cygwin, such as 'mt', skip arguments in 'dd', 'cpio', etc. *nix includes SVR4, Linux 2.4.x, Solaris 2.6, OpenBSD 3.2, etc., etc. The drive's firmware returns a 'media error' status upon encountering the corruption and subsequent attempts to read causes the drive to go 'not ready'.

Tried working at a low level using Exabyte 'Expert' diagnostic software package under DOS, issuing SCSI commands and modifying code page data. Reading the SCSI command set description in the EXB-8505 manual (for instance) suggests it is possible to physically position the tape, by modifying the code pages to change behavior, and perhaps the drive will sync to good data past the damage, but I have not done this yet.

Indeed; I had read that one last month during my searches, but didn't become inspired to try to convince someone at the site to release their tape software "mccd_rd_tape", which according to the file has raw read and skip capabilities of some sort.

This one describes reading telescope image data from exabtye data tapes but I didn't see anything about tape error recovery.

On a QIC drive, one can skip over bad blocks but unfortunately not on an Exabyte 850x using only standard *nix drivers.

Would work for any tape device that permits skipping bad blocks using the installed drivers, but won't work for the Exabyte 850x with stock drivers.

The tape does contain sparse files, but not at this position. The error is at the beginning of the second file, the first is just a header file of 16384 bytes.

It's a follow-on to Graham's comments about corrupt Exabyte tapes ;)

I'd like to learn what the data recovery houses purchase or build for themselves (hardware and software) and some of its specifications and capabilities; the websites are (intentionally) quite vague.

I downloaded a 'trial' version of a (Windows) tape recovery package that specifically stated it could deal with 'media' errors on 8mm tape; the 'trial' version seems to be seriously gutted - it had absolutely no menus or command line arguments or switches, it moved the tape but that's about all I can say it did as I stopped it after six hours and found what was supposed to have been a raw image file was only a short text file with the string "TRIAL " catted throughout.

Michael

I remember the HP DDS-2 drives we used to back up out Netware server with as being the most unreliable device I've ever encountered. One thing though, I yanked the tape drive out and made an external SCSI drive with the rest of the "guts" and that was back in 2003. The drive runs 24/7 here at home on my Netware print server. It's one of the older larger form factor Seagate Barracuda 4.3 gig drives. The one that rattled so much they sounded like the head servo was going to explode.

If you're running some flavour of Unix, have you tried using dd to dump the raw tape data to a file? I assume you've already tried using a cleaning tape.

I'm sorry to be the beaerer of bad tidings, but if the drive itself is throwing the error, you're pretty much screwed. Is there any chance of trying to read your tape on a different brand of drive? Other than that, splicing the tape - which is a long shot at best - may be your only hope.

detection

Stone tablets - stored at someone else's place.

Oh hell, ain't that the truth? ;^)

Been there and done that. While not exactly stone tablets, some of my customers are sufficiently paranoid that they keep paper records of all their transactions, invoices, memos, and payments. I must confess that these have saved their posterior more than once or twice. For example, they were able to operate during the 4 hours (yawn) that were required for me to restore the DDS-1 tape backups after a drive failure. Many companies have huge storage requirments for such archival paper tablets.

Offsite storage is a good idea. I have my office backups at home and my home backups at the office. One customer used to drive around with the backup tapes in her car. Whatever works. However, it doesn't always work as expected. After the 1989 earthquake, one large customer had their backup tapes and CD's stored in a bank safe deposit box. The bank building was declared unsafe and access was impossible. I had a similar situation with my office, which was also in a building that was allegedly ready to collapse. It took a court order and release of liability to obtain the backups 2 weeks after the quake. In my situation, I had to bribe a guard, hop a fence, and burglarize my office for the cash box, records, and backups. Make sure the other place is accessible.

It was a close race between the DC-2000 style mini (CMS) tape drives, but DDS-1 and DDS-2 takes the grand prize for maximum dollars wasted, megabytes lost, and hours wasted. Floppy tape drives are in a class of their own by running slower than the average glacier.

Yep. I've lost count of how many times I've DDS drives with chewed up tapes in them.

I once had a client using those, who, (unknown to them) had never had a successful backup, because the nightly backup was still running when they ejected the tape in the morning. I replaced it with a good SCSI card & a DLT-8000 drive. After that, the nightly backups completed in less than 2 hours.