DVD-Day

I bought DVDs from ebay.
I spent alot of money on these DVDs.
In fact these are the most rarest of rare DVDs in North America.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, last July I bought the entire Ally McBeal series on DVD. These are available overseas, but will never be here due to music licensing issues (or so I've been told). The items I got my hands are promotional copies sent to TV studios and such. They look authentic enough, not too flasy and have for promotional use only stamped on each and every one of them.

I guess I should really start by explaining that these weren't for me. My boyfriend had asked me to scour the internet looking for them because he loved the show. Well, given all the free time I have at work these days, I found them. Then the problems started.

After over a month waiting for the damn things, the seller tells me that they must have gotten stopped at the border. She said she would send new ones and write that they were a gift for her cousin or something on the customs forms.

Anyways, they finally arrived. Five lovely boxes with 4 DVDs in each. Let me rephrase that - 4 DVDs, some of which had popped out of the holder so that they slid around inside the case and got scratched all to hell. I decided to pop them in the player and try them anyways. They still seemed to work, so I thanked FickleFemail73@aol.com very much and went on my way.

We watched Season 1 with no problems, and didn't get to the other ones because we were moving. Close to Xmas, a friend of mine asked if he could borrow the season with Robert Downey Junior cuz his girlfriend loved the show. No problem. They watched it and the disks worked fine. Then he asked if I could make a copy of the series for him. No problem, I said, and duplicated season 1 (love the DVD burner).

Then he asks for season 2. No problem, I say. I was mistaken. There were BIG problems. Corrupted disks problems. Every disk I tried to copy would crap out due to read errors. I then atttempted to play them and discovered that certain episodes were unwatchable. Even on the disks with no scratches.

So I decide to email Ms FickleFemail73@aol.com and see if she could send some replacement disks or something. She wasn't there. She had packed up her bags and left that good for nothing AOL of hers - and deleted her ebay profile as well.

Well, after realizing that I was royally screwed, I scoured the internet for data recovery software. I found 3 - IsoBuster, CDRoller, and BadCopy Pro and used them all in combination. After a lot of frustration and long hours (Season 2 Disc 4 took over 10 hours to recover) I managed to get every disc ripped and reburned properly.

So with a smug face, I attempted season 3.

I've been working on Disc 4 for 2 days. It's scratched and gouged. I left CDRoller working on it overnight and it had moved from 29% to 31% in around 8 hours. I really think I'm going to burn out my DVD laser. The prognosis is not looking too good.

ebay buyers beware.

And to FickleFemale73@aol.com, if you ever read this - screw you. I want my money back.