So I may have picked up a box of burned DVDs from someone on FB Marketplace. I was told they appear to be 2000s news broadcasts, religious shows, and other random things (like Presidential Debates, but those are probably archived in multiple places at this point) and I thought it might be useful for data preservation purposes. I know this sounds like a tech support or data recovery question off the rip, but I’ve done the research on what might be going on, and the potential fixes seem a bit beyond my ken. (I’m not a hardware person)

The discs I’ve tried are clearly burned (ring on the bottom and/or label on the top) but my computer shows them as blank. I spent about three hours searching for a potential fix – I don’t have the money for IsoBuster or I’d try that – and came to the conclusion that the likely problem is either they were burned off of a DVR and would only work on that, or they were burned using a format that my drive isn’t set up to read. I won’t discount disc rot since they’re pretty old, but even if disc rot has set in for the majority, by virtue of sheer numbers there is likely some unicorns that survived this long unscathed.

But any option of why my computer can’t read them is beyond what I can manage with my hardware or budget, which is why I’m posting here. Does anyone know of a product or service that might be able to help with reading/ripping the discs that won’t cost an arm and a leg?

Or, alternately, does anyone here already have a setup that might be able to read/rip them? I’d be happy to ship a handful of discs to test, or if you’re in the Portland, OR area I’d have no problem meeting to hand over the entire box. Shipping the entire box right off the rip would be prohibitively expensive, though, because there is A Lot and they are Very Heavy.

Thank you for your time!