Help Cleaning Discs

[Cloning is fun]

What is the best way to clean DVD rental discs? I usually just wash them with hand soap and water but many discs will have marks that look like smudges that cannot be removed. These smudges can sometimes cause errors like cyclic redundancy error, etc. I saw a product in the store that had a bottle of liquid which said it contained something like alcohol. Not sure if it was alcohol but the word made me think that it was or a close cousin to alcohol. Is alcohol ok? Any other ideas on cleaning solutions and or home remedies. Thanks!

[sfheath]

Alcohol is a generalised term. Some alcohol/solvents can be harmful to particular substances eg. Chloroform on Polystyrene. Hence some can be harmful to CD/DVD media. Another example is the various threads asking which pens are ok on media, xylene ones being dangerous.

If the disks are not your property I think washing in warm soapy water is probably as far as you can go. . . . on the other hand, you can obtain near-abrasive wheels that skim scratches out!