Who still burns DVD's in 2013 !?!?

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

I still do. Take good care of my collection (couple of BenQ DW1640s, crap ton of Sony-NEC OptiArcs, bunch of LiteOns, etc.)

 

[AViking]

I have. I probably had 750 disks. Mix of CD and DVD. Going back to the earliest CD's up until about 4 years ago. Stored in nice cloth cases. I have never seen them peel but they simply wouldn't read correctly and wouldn't burn.

Burn speed is another thing. Pop one of your old 1x speed CD's in your drive and pull your hair out. Ridiculously slow.

Hard drives do die though. Thus why you need to have backups no matter which way you go.

 

[Aminados]

I don't even have a DVD drive in my new PC :biggrin:

 

[Virgorising]

I don't burn DVDs very often although they are occasionally useful for sharing things with the family or friends. Rather than give them a flash drive that costs pounds I would rather give them a DVD worth 10p. I might get the flash drive back but I don't just keep a few spares around for lending out.

The reader part of the DVD however I use a lot. I still buy most of my games with physical DVDs as its quite a bit cheaper than digital for newly released games and if there is a zero DRM option I take it.

I relate, cept I ain no gamer. I would never wanna be without an optical drive in any system. I too download things from the net I know some of my friends and colleagues would cherish, convert and burn them to DVD and happily pass them along. I recently even made a gift DVD for my eye doctor for his birthday!!! He was stunned and delighted. He even smiled. and he is not the smiling type.

I also find it scary and depressing when I see anyone, usually unwittingly, being a slave to commerce re that was then, leave it in the dust, cause this is now, and now is better and cooler. It is never, ever discerning.

 

[Virgorising]

I still do. Take good care of my collection (couple of BenQ DW1640s, crap ton of Sony-NEC OptiArcs, bunch of LiteOns, etc.)

The Optiarcs are my fav.

I also have a LiteOn.....but boy, it takes so long, the media very expensive (I use Verbatim, get spindles on ebay), and so, I fell out of love with it.

 

[AdamK47]

The protective coatings on CD\DVDs can peel if they are stored improperly. High heat can do this.

I have 20 year old PC games on CD that still look brand new and work fine.

 

[AdamK47]

My stash of retail PC games collected over 20 years. CDs and DVDs.

 

[GoodEnough]

Do the anti USB guys also avoid SSD drives?
Same thing? I just backed up my SSD hard drive b /c I expect it to fail one day.

 

[lucky9]

I still use CD/DVDs. I've never had quality media go bad. I had some 15 to20 year-old DVDs that were stored in a rent-a-storage place. I live in an area that had a 105 degree F. summer and a 20 degree F. winter. Not a one of my quality disks were hurt. (All stored in Jewel Cases.)

I also use two external HDDs for backups. But I always archive to DVD. They are just too easy to transport to a separate location.

For those who have mentioned that they can peel, etc., a quality media is sealed. The bottom is polycarbonate. And the top sealant is extremely tough. The good stuff will last a very long time None of the metal that's used is available to air.

Plus EMP doesn't work that way. It's not even close to a Microwave. It's an electromagnetic pulse. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse#Effects

 

[Virgorising]

I don't even have a DVD drive in my new PC :biggrin:

Interesting and sad how, what Mfgs do over time to save money can been seen as some version of cool.

Optical drives are not like old floppy drives, after all, wherein floppies truly did become obsolete.

 

[Virgorising]

My stash of retail PC games collected over 20 years. CDs and DVDs.

OMG.😱 I must have close to 500 items in my DVD library (alphabetized), mostly bought, always used, in good condition on Amazon or eBay, cause for movies, I must have the best editions with the bonus material, but above....wins.

BUT, HOW on God's earth do U find anything?????????

 

[Virgorising]

Do the anti USB guys also avoid SSD drives?
Same thing? I just backed up my SSD hard drive b /c I expect it to fail one day.

:thumbsup:

 

[KingFatty]

My stash of retail PC games collected over 20 years. CDs and DVDs.

Don't lie to us, those are all free AOL installation disks!

 

[ultimatebob]

I do for bootable ISOs

Yeah, this. A lot of older OS'es don't like being booted from a USB thumb drive.

 

[Virgorising]

Yeah, this. A lot of older OS'es don't like being booted from a USB thumb drive.

Yep. And, for openers.

 

[corkyg]

I burn slideshows onto DVDs for sharing with fellow travellers after a cruise or photo event. I haven't found a better way to cheaply disseminate photos for use on people's home entertainment systems or computers. Thumb drives are too expensive for that and don't always play well in HE systems. 🙂

I have three DVD burners, and can produce a dozen all labeled and packaged for mailing in a couple of hours.

 

[iluvdeal]

I burn slideshows onto DVDs for sharing with fellow travellers after a cruise or photo event. I haven't found a better way to cheaply disseminate photos for use on people's home entertainment systems or computers. Thumb drives are too expensive for that and don't always play well in HE systems. 🙂

Why not use a photo sharing site (flickr, picasa, etc) or cloud storage drive (dropbox, google drive, etc)? Burning DVDs for sharing JPEGs seems like overkill. If they have a computer, I assume they'll have the internet.

 

[AdamK47]

OMG.😱 I must have close to 500 items in my DVD library (alphabetized), mostly bought, always used, in good condition on Amazon or eBay, cause for movies, I must have the best editions with the bonus material, but above....wins.

BUT, HOW on God's earth do U find anything?????????

That's when I was reorganizing everything in alphabetical order. The photo shows over 1,100 CDs/DVDs. I'm over 1,200 now. Usually buy new games on DVD whenever possible.

 

[Virgorising]

I still use CD/DVDs. I've never had quality media go bad. I had some 15 to20 year-old DVDs that were stored in a rent-a-storage place. I live in an area that had a 105 degree F. summer and a 20 degree F. winter. Not a one of my quality disks were hurt. (All stored in Jewel Cases.)

I also use two external HDDs for backups. But I always archive to DVD. They are just too easy to transport to a separate location.

For those who have mentioned that they can peel, etc., a quality media is sealed. The bottom is polycarbonate. And the top sealant is extremely tough. The good stuff will last a very long time None of the metal that's used is available to air.

Plus EMP doesn't work that way. It's not even close to a Microwave. It's an electromagnetic pulse. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse#Effects

:thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

And, U bet, proper storage is key. Along with my Verbatim media, I get full sized, clear jewel boxes on ebay. There, U can get awesome deals on both.

 

[corkyg]

Why not use a photo sharing site (flickr, picasa, etc) or cloud storage drive (dropbox, google drive, etc)? Burning DVDs for sharing JPEGs seems like overkill. If they have a computer, I assume they'll have the internet.

Public sharing sites are of limited use for home entertainment systems used primarily by seniors. Multi MB photos and accompanying music do not play well except from sites like YouTube. Again, not practical for the intended audience.

 

[bononos]

I don't think I'll do without a a burner and my dvd collection for now. I worry that my backup harddisk will fail to turn because the bearings have seized due to underuse or something like that.

+1 burning at about half max speed of the rating for discs insures extremely long shelf life IME. HDDs and flash drives fail for no reason, I've never had an optical disc suddenly become irreversibly inoperable that couldn't be attributed to mishandling.

Burnt cd/dvd's can fail due to the dye degrading. I had some failures due to that because the disks were well stored and had no scratches.
I think all dye used now are optimized for high speed recording. I found that burning at 16x gave significantly better results compared to 8x.

 

[code65536]

Burnt cd/dvd's can fail due to the dye degrading. I had some failures due to that because the disks were well stored and had no scratches.

I've been burning DVDs for a long time and had yet to encounter this sort of problem. I had to retrieve something tonight from a disc that I burned nearly 9 years ago, and while I had the disc in, I ran a PI/PIO scan to test the quality of the disc. I was surprised to see how pristine it was. We've been told about potential dye degradation for years now (I remember there being a lot of chatter about it back when I was a mod at CD Freaks about a decade ago), so I actually expected some degradation in the quality. But there was none, and the disc read back without a single hitch.

As for the burning speed, even with "modern" discs, I still find that I get substantially better PI/PIO rates when I burn it slow. 6x is a good speed for DVDs since that allows the disc to be burned at a CLV (constant linear velocity).


(Optical discs employ a lot of redundant bits for Reed-Solomon error correction and resiliency, so if the dye degrades and bits flip, one would expect higher PI/PIO error rates as more and more of the data require correction, until the number of errors exceed this fault tolerance, at which point the disc fails. This is why these kinds of scans are useful for estimating the health of a disc and the quality of a burn.)

 

[bononos]

I've been burning DVDs for a long time and had yet to encounter this sort of problem. I had to retrieve something tonight from a disc that I burned nearly 9 years ago, and while I had the disc in, I ran a PI/PIO scan to test the quality of the disc. I was surprised to see how pristine it was. We've been told about potential dye degradation for years now (I remember there being a lot of chatter about it back when I was a mod at CD Freaks about a decade ago), so I actually expected some degradation in the quality. But there was none, and the disc read back without a single hitch.

As for the burning speed, even with "modern" discs, I still find that I get substantially better PI/PIO rates when I burn it slow. 6x is a good speed for DVDs since that allows the disc to be burned at a CLV (constant linear velocity).
.........

One failure I remember for sure was a cd which was burnt about 5yrs before I found out it couldn't be read at all, in the same drive where it read flawlessly previously.

Very good quality disks are the older ones like the one you have 9yrs ago which were much easier to find. Now even the good brands like tdk are only abit better than the mediocre ones back then. I confirmed this in my testing of old media with single to very low double digit pi errors when I first burnt them iirc and it didn't increase much or only very slightly after 5-10yrs. New good branded media today have higher pi errors right after burning.

I did my own testing with some new mcc04 1-16 dvds and found that 16x gave better pi/po numbers vs 8x. Maybe newer media are more likely to be optimized for higher speeds or maybe 16x is no problem for 24x drives now.

 

[mikeymikec]

I back up less important stuff that I still don't want to lose onto CD/DVD. I have a DVD backup collection of about 150 discs.

I'm pretty aware of the downsides of optical discs as a backup medium, though the only problems I've personally experienced in the long term were due to fussy drives not accepting particular formats of disc. I've got >10 y.o. CD-Rs that are still readable.

 

[Z15CAM]

I will encoded and burn DVD for friends but haven't personally used a DVD since I found "MPG4C32.dll" on the Win98 Gold Edition Disc - So you might say the whole DVD Era came and went and I didn't even notice it. ;o)

Believe it or not but you can still install the old MS MPEG-4 VKI DS Filters in Win7x64. NOT practicable by to days h264/ACC mp4, FLV and MKV encodes. I use Thumbs to store approx 28 to 30 Movies on a 16MB USB Flash Drive. I've got boxes of movies on CD's burnt 320x280 mPeg4/ogg.ogm in the closet which I never look at unless I'm looking for something I can't find elsewhere ;o)

About the only thing I use a DVD Disk now is keeping a copy of the Win7 SetUp to back up a Thumb SetUp or for booting into DOS and running GHOST.