The kids nowadays are young enough to have not grown up with optical media, so you hear a lot about “movie CDs are rotting!!!” in sloptube comments or whatever. I pretty much took this as a falsehood; burned CD-R/RW discs and DVD + and - R/RW discs do often quit, 'cause of the way the laser has to burn the pits and lands into the dye of the disc or whatever. But pressed discs? Maybe Laserdiscs, but I have CDs from like 1986 that are still in perfect playing shape. A copy of “Decade” with literal holes in the plastic player that still plays and rips perfectly.

Recently though I actually found a disc that might be “rotting”, which is a 1997 (or whatever) DVD copy of Interview With The Vampire. The problematic vampire yaoi made me fight to watch it, because the disc doesn’t really have any scratches, but the data layer at the outer edge of the disc (where the layer change happens) has little nicks and chunks missing, even though the plastic surrounding it is fine. So my Sony 4K player freaks out when it hits the halfway mark, and skips like five minutes because the data is actually missing. PC drives don’t do much better, so like… wow, I wonder if this is a manufacturing defect or genuine rot? Wild though, first pressed disc I’ve ever bought that had non-scratch issues…