The DVDs are another story.
Apparently, the people who have been handling these DVDs believe that the disks are made out of some kind of indestructable material they may have seen on Star Trek and so have been using them as doggie chew toys and sandpaper testers. These DVDs are the most badly scratched disks that I have ever seen. They've had to send me the originals because they are having trouble making copies with most of them. Gee, I wonder why? What's even more perplexing is that the copies that they made for me, on apparently new blanks, are just as scratched up!
The original media is on 8mm tape which my DV camcorder won't grok, so I've had to do a bit of research to see how to repair the scratches. There are some scratch repair/disk polishers out there, but they aren't exactly cheap, with the most effective sounding ones carrying a price tag upwards of $100. But, there seems to be a large contigent on the internet that advocates Brasso brass polish.
Both scratches and scuffs can be removed by the same method - by polishing them out using Brasso. Engineers have been using Brasso as a polish for plastics ever since it was released as a polish for brass.
Use the Brasso in the normal way. A drop or two is usually sufficient (one tin will last you a lifetime of great listening!). Use a soft clean cloth to rub the affected area with the Brasso until the mark is almost gone. Polish scuff marks radially. Scratches are best handled by rubbing along the direction of the scratch. With a scratch it usually is not necessary to polish it completely away - just clean it up enough for the laser to be able to see through it.
Finish up by letting the Brasso dry on the surface, then use a fresh soft cloth to rub it off. Just for good form's sake, do this last stage radially. Remember radial scratches won't generally interfere with the tracking mechanism.
[...]
So far I have not found a scratched or scuffed CD I cannot fix using Brasso. I hope it works for you too!
from "Fixing Scratched CDs" on www.mcgee-flutes.com
Well, I tried the brasso this morning on a test CD that my kids had scratched up badly. Polishing with the Brasso for five minutes didn't seem to make much of a difference to the appearance of the scratches. I'm not sure how must polishing this is supposed to take, but these disks don't feature the single scratch or scuff referred to in the article, they are scratched everywhere. Even with rubbing my test CD on my concrete floor, I couldn't get it to look nearly as bad as the DVDs I'm trying to repair.
I think I need burn a test DVD, scratch it until it plays erratically, and then try the Brasso. The CD I was using as my first test was still readable even before I tried to repair it, so the test was really just a trial run. I'll burn the DVD and try again tonight.
If this doesn't work I do have an alternate method. A coworker told me that he uses Formby's Furniture Polish on his NetFlix DVDs that come in scratched. According to him, the scratches visibly disappear and the DVD plays fine. If the Brasso test fails again, we'll give this a try.