Blu-ray layer rot?

The other night one of my daughters wanted to watch The Godfather: Part II with a friend. All was going very nicely until 1:42:32 into the movie, when it became a stillie. The picture froze for a minute or so, and eventually jumped to 1:58:30.

I was using the Oppo BDP-83, which is seemingly impervious to disc problems. I pulled the disc and inspected the surface, and it seemed clean, so I put it in an Oppo BDP-80 which I’m checking out at the moment. Same problem. So I put it in a Playstation 3. Same problem.

My records show that I got this disc back in October 2008. I have watched the movie all the way through with no problems at all at least once. I scanned it all the way through using BDInfo on 26 May 2009, no problems. But since then it has ceased to work. I’ve given the disc a gentle clean, especially around the edge — since the problems are halfway through the movie and this dual layer Blu-ray disc’s contents come to 45.35GB, of which almost all is the movie, suggesting they are near the edge (Blu-ray discs read, like DVDs, from the disc centre towards the edge and then back again in the case of two layers).

All this is somewhat reminiscent of DVD rot which was a problem some years ago.

Update (1:12pm): Treblid in comments has some links into discussion of this problem on various forums, so I’m not alone. It seems to afflict UK discs primarily, but as I demonstrate here, the UK and Australian discs seem to be the same.

I am making enquiries with Paramount about what arrangements they have in place for replacement discs. It seems to be quite consistent: if the disc is faulty it will stop playing about 1:41:30. Just jump to 1:41:00 and wait to see what happens.