Here I'm referring to DVDs written using such as a DVD drive on one's computer with such as home movie material. I'm not referring to commercial DVDs.
Question is, do such DVDs have a limited lifetime, or suffer from bit-rot as they age? As it was our anniversary yesterday, SWMBO dug out the wedding DVD made by the BiL in 2004. As we played it, in a number of spots the sound and video stuttered as if there were reading issues at those moments, so I was interested to know if such DVDs are a poor bet for long-term storage.
I have CDs from 2001 that are still readable (data ones, so easily checkable).
These days, if I make a DVD, I keep the raw material on a separate data DVD (or two) but leave space on it for 20% error correction data. I can recover quite badly damaged data DVDs that way [1] and then make a fresh viewable one.
[1] I tested this by making a DVD with the ECC on it. I then randomly scraped it with a Swiss Army knife, and made some cuts too. I recovered the data successfully.
An MDisc is slightly better still, but does not have the 1000 year life they describe. The
1000 years may apply to the chemical trapped between polycarbonate surfaces, but, does polycarbonate last
1000 years ? Dunno.
Years ago, Verbatim used to sell a "gold" write-once disc. And I don't think anyone got too excited by that.
The Durability Claims section here, mentions another possibility for a storage media. Someone makes a glass disc.
formatting link
There is some bumpf in the first posting here concerning the glass disc.
formatting link
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I bought some RW media once, and the disc proceeded to degrade right away. After around three months, one of the discs was transparent, and sticking the disc into the drive, made the drive go crazy (as it could not find the groove, but it would not give up!).
You probably won't find any products quite that bad now.
That's just to give some idea how shoddy the cheap stuff can be.
The media is not made by the "brand name" you buy, either. My good discs are "Maxell, Verbatim, Fujutsu" and all of them contain Ritek blanks. I never had any trouble with those. Taiyo Yuden is an example of a well known maker of good blanks, but being Japanese, they are not available uniformly world wide, and some people have easier access to those than others. For a short time, Ritek sold under its own name, but this was a short-lived attempt, and I suspect someone just took it upon themselves to do that, and it wasn't really Ritek doing that.
When a blank-maker gets out of the business then, a large number of "brands" can disappear. And then the market is left to what remains. For example, the "Philips" I bought, is CMC.
You cannot tell by looking at the outside of the package, exactly what you're buying. It could be a cake box full of shit.
Well, there can be minute defects in DVDs and of course due to the greater data density than a cd you are bound to get problems. Sometimes a good wash and gentle clean with a soft lint free cloth can fix them, but also I'd suspect that not all recordable blanks are as good as one another. Brian
Rewritables are only good for temp storage I find, be they cd or dvd, they are never as reflective in any case so as the player degrades you get more errors, Interestingly a complet slow erase seems to make them more reliable after reuse, but write once are physically burned so should not change unless the dreaded oxygen gets into the disc. There were a number of cds in the early days made commercially that had this problem they turned a kind of grey brown colour inside. Brian
I'm not totally convinced by FLAC and prefer to use the CD-DA format equivalent (apart from anything else, the CD-burner software I have won't burn directly from FLAC!).
The FLAC files sometimes sent to me by others sound OK, but *wav really doesn't take up much space in these days of moderately-priced 1Tb and
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