Wednesday afternoon I got a stack of 15 DVDs handed to me, and I'm told that some of them are having trouble reading, so they want me to rip them all and put them on our secure content review system for people to watch. Oh, and one of those 15 DVDs was stuck in an Apple USB SuperDrive.
I learned something about USB SuperDrives that day: Apple has packed it full of DRM. No lie: I tried my MacBook, my Windows tablet, and a Mac Pro, and none of them could get the drive to fire up. I thought the cable was gone. I tell my boss, he plugs it into his MacBook Pro (a model just old enough to still have a DVD drive) and gets a notification that the drive isn't compatible with his computer. he takes it to the company owner and plugs it into his six month old MacBook Air and the drive springs to life. I have no idea why Apple would do such a thing.
But that was just the start of trouble. Since I had so many DVDs and it was about 3p when I got them my plan was to hit 'em with dvdbackup on as many workstations as I could corral, dumping the data to our SAN, and then farm out the encode jobs in a similar method. It was a solid plan and it had worked in the past.
Ten of the DVDs just flat out wouldn't work. I tried several computers, and they all reported back that there was no media in the drives. On a hunch they just hadn't closed the session on the disc I threw 'em in STB DVD burners. "The disc can neither be read nor written to" was the most luck I had, the rest just said DISC ERR and shot the tray at me.
The five that I was able to read did so poorly. Lots of read errors, and read at about maybe 3x speed at best. In STB DVD players they would stop and stutter quite often.
So I start whacking them with an encoder and it starts complaining, and spitting out bitstreams that make the HTML5 video player in Firefox very unhappy. I ended up retranscoding everything at least twice, three times in some cases, before it was happy.
Needless to say I left quite late that day, on the first day the city's bike sharing system was back up, the weather was a record-setting 85ºF, and the start of #30DaysOfBiking. I had quite the motivation to get things done fast.
The next day I got a fresh stack of discs, all of which read properly. Dammit.