Good stuff Harry. While you were doing that I finally managed to find a DVD that was unreadable in my collection. It was kind of surreal as I was going through all my old Princos and cursing and swearing because they were all still readable, the opposite of normal behavior :). Well they all worked because a few months ago I went through my whole collection and threw out anything where the media was too crappy.
Finally good old Ritek G05's crappiness came to the rescue and I found a movie that was completely unreadable on both my DVD burners. Both direct file copy and dvdshrink failed with ecc errors, basically if I didn't have a backup copy of this disc I would have been screwed.
Now normally of course you'd make the ecc correction file beforehand but in this case I was able to make the ecc file right now from a second good copy of the same disc. Not the way you'd normally do it but the principle is exactly the same.
The results: Well the program was a little slower than I expected, it took 2hrs to reconstruct the iso from the combination of the damaged disc and the ecc file, but it was successful and the movie that was burnt from the reconstructed iso file played without a hitch. BTW I did the reconstruction on my second computer that's only a slowish Duron 1000 with 20G drive, it may run faster on a better computer.
At least the readback of the damaged DVD was not too much hassle, once I read the manual and placed the readback in "adaptive read mode" as recommended then it quickly read the damaged DVD skipping over the damaged areas and reconstructing them from the ecc file. In fact when it got to 90% I was expecting it to take ages as most of the worst degradation was in the last 10% of the disc, but I was pleasantly surprised when it simple skipped the read of the whole last 10%. It appears that the "adaptive read" mode must tell it to not try and read any more of the damaged DVD than it really needs to. As it knew it had enough info in the ecc file to cover all of the last 10% it seemed to just skip it entirely, terminating with the message that it had enough data to fully reconstruct and just waiting for confirmation to proceed.
It was only in this last part that the program seemed a little inefficient, taking a little over 2 hours to reconstruct a 4.1GB ISO file from the partial ISO it had already made and the existing ecc file. Since all this stuff was already on the hard-drive (the DVD drive didn't even appear to be accessed during this time), I expected it to take more like 15 or 20 minutes, but hey it worked so I cant really complain about the time.
BTW.How long did you reconstructions take Harry?
