Half the laptops sold in the last five years have no disc drive, and plenty of DA offices still produce discovery on burned DVDs. So the evidence sits in a paper sleeve on your desk, technically produced, practically unreadable.
A USB disc drive costs about twenty five dollars at any big box store and works the moment you plug it in. If the office has an older desktop with a drive, that works too. Copy the entire disc to a case folder before you do anything else; burned discs degrade, and the second read sometimes fails where the first succeeded.
If the disc spins up but shows nothing, try it in a different drive before assuming it's blank. Cheap burns are picky about which drives will read them.
Sometimes it's a video DVD that plays like a movie: VLC opens those, and the files inside look like VIDEO_TS folders full of .VOB pieces. Sometimes it's a data disc holding the same things a download link would: bodycam files, a DVR player export, jail call audio, PDFs. And sometimes it's an interview room system's own format that only its bundled player understands.
That's the usual second act: the disc was the container, and the real problem is a .VOB, a .dav, or a player .exe from 2011. We convert all of it into files that play anywhere, hash the originals at intake so everything traces back to the disc the State produced, and return video you can scrub and audio you can search. Mail us the disc itself if that's easier than copying it; we'll image it and work from the copy.
A drawer full of discs is a bulk order waiting to happen.
File conversion, $50 with any order