Help! Can adhesive labels cause a problem for iDVDs?

I have spent countless hours, days and months transfering all my home movies to DVD. I checked all the DVDs after I burned them, but did not watch the entire disc, only maybe a minute or two of each chapter.

Now I've discovered when I watch my DVDs for more than a few minutes, they begin to pixelate(SP?) in my DVD player. They quickly become unwatchable. I have a quality JVC DVD player that, according to the manual, will play DVD-R discs. I used iDVD 5 for most and iDVD 6 for some. The problem happened on both.

Here's the only thing I can think of: I recently labeled them with a NEATO adhesive label program I got at the Apple store. I've noticed that discs I did not use the labels on seem to work fine, and do not pixelate. Has anybody ever heard of labeling causing a problem? Can I fix this? One more note: the discs play fine on my imac G5 (with the labels.) Thanks for any help!

Imac G5 Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Posted on Mar 13, 2006 2:39 PM

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6 replies

Mar 13, 2006 2:48 PM in response to bosoxer

Hi bosoxer,
welcome to this forum 🙂

I don't want to make "angst" (=you afraid), but NEVER use labels on dvds... they rotate with lots of rpm... you can damage ANY drive with that.

secondly, depending on what type/brand of dvd you used, the glue of the label can damage the ... is the english word "dye"? ... sorry, we should wait for forum member F Shippey, he seems to be the one....

your Mac's drive has a more elaborate error-correction system then most tv-dvd players.... but that means, you can use your Mac as a copystation from old to new dvds.... (no need for re-creating iDVDprojects etc) 😉

Mar 13, 2006 8:30 PM in response to bosoxer

bosoxer,

They quickly become unwatchable.


I suppose it could be heat builtup, but it is most likely due to vibration.

Back in the days when CD/DVD drive turned at much lower speeds, a slight unbalance of a disc due to a label didn't seem to matter much. Now a days, with high speed drives, a small amount of unbalance goes a long way and disc will vibrate.

There are also problems with labels coming off and leaving a sticky mess, labels making discs too thick to go into slot-loading drives, and general deterioration of a disc. You haven't had the labels on long enough to see these problems.

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Message edited by: F Shippey

I just read macanxiety's reference and it supports my suggestion.

Mar 13, 2006 8:54 PM in response to bosoxer

I would suggest getting some inkjet printable DVD-Rs (such as Verbatim 94495). Combined with an Epson R200 (they have newer versions now), it prints beautiful labels right on the disk. I sent some to my brother and he thought they were store bought. LOL.

Another thought - if you try to peel the sticky labels off of the ones you have already made, you can pull the reflective layer right off the DVD which destroys it.

Yet another thought - I always play my completed DVDs at 32x speed in the Apple DVD Player or on my home theater DVD player. If they get all the way through, most likely they are going to play back at normal speed just fine. That is probably overkill for most people, but if I'm going to give them to somebody, I don't want them telling me later that the DVD skips or stutters or worse - completely stops.

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Help! Can adhesive labels cause a problem for iDVDs?

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