ther was a company called 321 studios a few years ago that put out a software called dvd x rescue. I have a copy of this and it works great. I bet if you do a google search you can find somebody who still sells it.
Regarding 321 Studios. That was the company that created DVD X Copy Platinum. I use to use it to back up my originals. That damn splash screen was really annoying, and then I discovered DVD Decrypter, and Nero Recode. What a Duo. Back then that was the best combonation. No offense to Clone, but Nero has a better compression technology. I use Nero first and foremost. I have used others, and the quality IS comparable.
DVD Decrypter was the answer to that dilemma. It read the disc, and ripped it to the Hard Drive. It read the disc in various speeds, thus slowing down when needed, and speeding up when it could. This too, allowed you to make a copy of a badly scratched original. If you had one or two files that it could not finish, then you would skip it - making sure to delete it - and use another disc to fill in the missing files.
Anyway, all this software did (DVD X Copy Platinum) was read the disc very slowly. In the difficult areas to read, it would try to read it over and over again in various directions with your DVD laser. It would piece it back together on your Hard Drive, and then you take that and burn it to a DVD-R. It took forever too. Literally hours. I tried to use it on one of my very scratched DVD's, and the program could not read it in its entirety. Had I burned the image, it would have had small pieces missing from the movie. A few seconds here and there . . . just gone!
Software does not Physically repair any discs. Only machines that buff them out can do that. And even then, there are no guarantees. It depends on how badly it is scratched. I use to spend a lot of time buffing out those damn rentals because they would freeze up during playback . . . and always at the best part! That's when you run back to the video store to exchange it. Well, that got old really quick. That's when I started using that disc cleaning solution by MEMOREX. If this solution, and a buffing method does not work, then in most cases, either you are not doing it incorrectly, or the disc is scrap. Believe me, I had a lot of frustration with DVD’s that would skip, and now I no longer have this issue.
Hope this advice helps anyone who comes across this.
By the way Stretch, I'm not picking on you. I just used your thread to comment on the subject at hand.