(O/T) DVD deterioration

[Andrew Doherty]

As I have always maintained:

When in doubt, tape wins out!

Yours,

[alistairwilson]

I used to have a Phillips DVD recorder and stored the dvd+r's in jewel cases out of direct heat. However when I try to play many of them now, I get an "Unable to Read Disc" message.

A few months ago I got a Panasonic DMR75 and have found it to be superb so far. Fast copying, uses all formats, ability to make your own menus and, touching wood, no discs going coaster so far! I guess only time will tell how stable the recordings are.

Would be nice to do tape back-up but only so many hours in the day of course.

[markboulton]

I still wish D-VHS (yes, there IS such a thing) had been made available in this country (and, knowing me, probably actually has if you're in the *right* circles). AFAIK It was only marketed in the US.

However, unless it already does it, I would think to be a really good bet a D-VHS machine would have to record a standard analogue VHS track in *addition* to the digital track, rather than recording digital only - so that the machine had a 'second grade' fallback to revert to if the edge of the tape gets chewed up - rather like when HiFi soundtracks momentarily vanish and the machine reverts to the mono linear track.

[Deleted]

I always back a lot of stuff up on tape too. Trouble is, VHS is not anywhere near as good as DVD quality. It's a real pain and a turn-off for me as far as investing in new equipment is concerned. I'm loathe to do this until a stable medium comes along.

[William Martin]

dvds have the potential to be tough and reliable, but most of them just aren't made well

[hartley967]

SVHS still looks good if Lawrence wants a tape alternative.

JVC was just about to anounce digital VHS , just before being overwealmed by discs.
This was a very promising format..about 6 hours of DVD quality
from a humble E180 or 16 hours of VHS quality ...

(figures might be a bit out but something like that anyway)

[Deleted]

I was never that amazed by SVHS. I have a couple of machines but it still suffers from a lot of the traditional VHS problems like unstable / off-register colour and dropouts. It's no real alternative to DVD (quality-wise) but it seems that it's what we're stuck with for the moment, in the absence of anything better.

[Deleted]

Our burned DVDs might not need to last as long as our VHS tapes. Hard drive capacities have increased so fast in recent years, they'll make DVD recorders obsolete before DVD recorders are as popular as VCRs. You can already buy a terabyte hard drive for £300 capable of holding around 400 hours of DVD quality video. As the next generation of PVRs will have to have much larger storage capacity to make use of HDTV, it can't be long before we start seeing terabyte models.

I've got my fingers crossed anyway, because after reading this thread I'm not optimistic for my Tesco DVD-Rs.

[peteseatonwsmuk]

which is no help when you have 40,000 hours of videotapes

[Deleted]

Exactly! A few hundred hours of storage space is a drop in the ocean really and isn't a serious archiving solution (at least not in the near future). It's a pity they can't simply make recordable DVDs more reliable! That's all I ask really. Never mind about ever more gimmicks being added on machines etc - just get the basics right first (i.e. make the discs to last).

[lfbarfe]

laurencepiper said:

It's a pity they can't simply make recordable DVDs more reliable! That's all I ask really. Never mind about ever more gimmicks being added on machines etc - just get the basics right first (i.e. make the discs to last).

The trouble is that you often can't know what's going to last and what isn't until it's too late.

[Ronnie McDevitt]

"The trouble is you often can't know what's going to last and what isn't until it's too late"

Which is why you should always keep a back up copy on S-VHS of anything important

[lfbarfe]

I've never owned an S-VHS machine, Ronnie, but I try to keep multiple copies of new, important recordings - using media from different manufacturers where possible, and uploading certain things to UK Nova, in the hope of dispersing copies as far as possible. However, for anything I've recorded off-air since owning a DVD recorder, there's a) a good chance someone else recorded it as well, and b) a reasonable chance I'll never have the desire to watch it again anway. I have worries about the longevity, obviously, but I'm given to worrying. For now, DVD-R is a massive improvement on VHS on just about every level, and in 3 years, I've only lost about 4 programmes irretrievably over 1100 discs, 3 of which have been repeated recently. I've been using CD-Rs for nearly 7 years and most of my earliest discs still play - it's specific batches from specific manufacturers that seem to be causing all of the trouble. The same seems to apply to DVD-R - I do random spot-checks on discs and all of the failures come from a specific batch I bought a couple of years ago. Anyway, at the end of the day, it's only TV.

[hartley967]

There is a theory that SVHS also records teletext

[Mark Smith]

markboulton said:

I still wish D-VHS (yes, there IS such a thing) had been made available in this country (and, knowing me, probably actually has if you're in the *right* circles). AFAIK It was only marketed in the US.

Rubbish!

I owned a D-VHS (from JVC if I remember correctly) in the late 1990s. And they were certainly marketed here in the UK (though sadly the format didn't really take off).