Cavity Protection for your DVD's

When we're feeling like a stay at home date we usually whip up a batch of (don't look Kathleen) Peanut Butter cookie dough (way better than popcorn) and pop in a movie. The nearest DVD vending machine to us is 30 minutes away, so when we decide to actually rent a movie, it's big deal. Everything will be going great...we'll be snuggled on the couch with our cookie dough when all the sudden the movie will die because the last person to rent the DVD decided to use it as a skateboard. :| (I always think of an angry Muppet with people type that "face"). 

One time we decided to see what we could do to "fix" it and found the toothpaste method. Never head of it? Well, let me show you. 

The Original Pin

http://thehandmadedress.blogspot.com/2008/09/do-you-suffer-from-scrached-dvds_27.html 

The idea of it is that you take kids Crest (because it's grainy) and you apply it to the DVD and then buff the disk. This is supposed to buff out the scratches to minimize any refraction when the laser hits that section. We tried it and the DVD played a few minutes farther, but then it died again. So it worked...for a few extra minutes, but not great.

Well, fast forward a few years and we have Pinstrosity going and low and behold we get a submission from Alison using the exact same method that we tried.

The pin that Alison found on Pinterest had the following caption: "I just did this and it WORKS! Not once did it skip!!! And it was a bad DVD before hand." So she pulled out a scratched DVD, raided her kids bathroom, and buffed away. 

The Pinstrosity 

Here is Alison's result. "Not only did it not work but you can actually see the additional scratches that were added by "buffing" in the toothpaste. Oh well, it was worth a try."

I've had friends and family have relative success with this method, but it never seems to fix a disk 100%. It can help a disk play better, but it does not make your disk like new. And, if you have kids at home (to supply you with the Kids Crest, right?), chances are that the disks will get scratched again. Heck...if you have humans in your home the disks are liable to get scratched again. I swear I've blinked and had an eyelash fall on a disk and scratch it. 

There are various machines and gadgets out there to help get rid of scratches. Some of them work, some don't. My mother's been through a few of them...my brother used to be really hard on disks. They work great once or twice a disk, but any more than that and you just need to replace the disk completely.