(O/T) DVD deterioration

[hartley967]

marksmith said:

[quote author=markboulton board=general thread=1132271203

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).

Mark
can you remember the specs of what it was capable of?
I may have got it wrong in my original post.

[Deleted]

lfbarfe said:

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.

I must say though, that i've lost hardly anything on tape (VHS / Beta / U-matic / SVHS) over nearly 25 years of recording. I sadly am of the opinion that the same low loss rate won't be the case with DVD that amount of time ahead though. I've just heard too many horror stories and too many accounts from others I know about discs failing in the short-term. I think the companies are aware of this but aren't too bothered as there's a financial disincentive for them not to hurry to look at it (if we own pristine copies of material on disc, we won't want to buy it again from them in future!) Cynical but, I think, realistic.

Like you, I do all those same things (e.g. multi copies of important stuff, spot checks etc.) but I think there's a disincentive for the manufacturers to look at disc reliability as if we own pristine copies of material in perpetuity, we won't want to buy it again in future! I certainly don't have the same confidence in DVD in the way that I did in tape when I first bought a VCR.

It's a pain though as some of us prefer to keep our own archive independently of the whims of the TV companies repeating / archiving material; if we're waiting on X programme to be repeated again in order to replace a failed disc of the same, we aren't successfully doing that. Sure, a lot of stuff is available in perpertuity these days in a way that it didn't used to be. But there will always be stuff that never gets repeated, which is the stuff that my efforts towards preservation are directed at.

What are others' thoughts / suggestions on this important topic?

[colebox]

I have transferred most if not all of my off air VHS captures to DVD and so far have only had a handful of discs go bad. The problem was with a particular brand of disc I was using at the time, Infinity, and with a particular DVD-Burner, Lite-On. These discs refused to play on any other burner or DVD player, but thankfully I was able to copy these to a different brand which solved the problem (plus getting better DVD burners).

The main issue that I have encountered is more regards the equipment and not the media; my very first DVD player wouldn't play DVD-/+R or even CD-R; my second (Toshiba SD220e) would, but would give up on DVD-Rs at the end of most plays and cause jumpy playback with VCDs (my first ventures into VHS conversion). Only commercial DVDs or CDs gave a reliable play back.

I then found a Compacks player in Safeways. It may have been cheap at the time (£30 in 2004) but will play anything put in it, even a slice of beans of toast!

This machine is now a back up as I now have a Sony DVD player stand-alone and DVD Recorder. The player did have one issue with a disc authored by a particular software's chapter marks, but once this was re-authored with different software it was fine.

I just sometimes wonder if the more complicated things are the worse they get. DVD players have to do so much more and that leaves so much more room for error. Put a VHS tape into a VHS VCR and it will, invariably, play; a DVD-/+R into a DVD player has to be read digested and hopefully play.

On the other hand some tapes recorded on one VCR can have tracking problems on others. Some of my older tapes (pre hi-fi) have pretty poor soundtrack playback because of this.

I did dabble with S-VHS for a while but found that many of my recordings, whilst having a much superior picture than VHS, did suffer from quite a lot of drop-outs. Maybe I was just unlucky. The S-VHS machine is very good at VHS playback, but at the same time illustrates what can go wrong with tapes too; playback tearing, dropouts and when comparing to other VCRs, the vast differences with playback capabilities of different machines: washed out colours, picture tearing agian, chroma noise and with some older tapes, stretch lines (maybe down to poor media).

On balance, I prefer DVD-R (and, thus far, have a brand that I trust) but only just; both DVD-/+R and VHS have their pros and cons - I have read that some VHS tapes, probably not stored in the right conditions, have had mould develop on them - but the better picture quality of a DVD capture compared to a VHS capture swings it for me and back-up copies are far easier to do.

P.S. who recalls cheap audio cassette tapes that used to leave muck over the tape heads and sound muffled? Cheap media is cheap media and to be avoided at all costs whether DVD-/+R, VHS or cassette tapes.

[Deleted]

Personally, I'm looking at transfering my footage to MiniDV camcorder tape. I'm already doing this to record programmes off TV, it strikes me as likely to be more stable than this, coupled with a higher video bitrate (25mbps) than DVD and uncompressed audio. And it makes it very easy to transfer footage to your computer for either video editing, burning to DVD (compressing to MPEG-2 using 2-pass VBR will offer much better picture quality than the equivalent bitrate using a real time codec in a DVD recorder) or even making hard-drive based backups of the DV footage (therefore being able to make another copy if the tape gets damaged)

[Deleted]

I was considering DV myself for archiving. Can you get any actual decks though (rather than just camcorders) and if so, where? I know the format to be good and have used it myself for shooting but is it going to die out and leave us with the VHS transfer problem again? Anyone got more reliable info on the DV format?

[Deleted]

They have Decks on certain websites and eBay, they aren't cheap though unfortunatly- you'll be lucky to get one for less than around £700, I just find myself using a camcorder- though you have to makre sure you get one with analogue & DV inputs (the DV input allowing you to feed footage from your computer back to the camcorder), as many only have outputs.

[Deleted]

Thanks, James. I suspected they weren't cheap if they existed! Cheers anyway.

[lfbarfe]

Laurence, I don't think you're too cynical to suggest an element of built-in obsolescence with modern media. However, I'm reasonably confident that pressed DVDs will last. It's the recordables that give me sleepless nights. I think the difference between analogue and digital is that with analogue there are degrees of degradation, whereas with digital, it either works or it doesn't. You can usually get something off a cruddy, abused analogue tape, even if it's incredibly snowy with a soundtrack hissier than the reptile house at London Zoo. In contrast, if the digits on a DVD-R are compromised even slightly, it's not going to play. On a tape I transferred last week, I found I could either have an excellent picture with linear mono sound, a rubbish picture with crystal-clear stereo sound, or a tolerable picture and reasonable stereo. The machine I recorded it on went in a skip in 1999, after my mother stored it in the shed over a bitter winter (was it just my mother who did things like that?). The ideal solution would have been to do two passes and reunited the perfect audio transfer with the perfect picture transfer in the computer, but I decided it wasn't worth the time and effort. My point is that VHS has its own archival issues.

[Tom Morris]

As mentioned by someone else earlier in this thread, try making a simple data copy of the DVD-R on a computer using a programme like Toast on a Mac or, I believe, EasyCD on a PC. On some machine you can even convert it to DVD+R. I would recommend a Mac, but then I'm biased!!!

It worked for me on a dodgy DVD-R. With the costs of DVD-Rs and DVD+Rs so low it's worth a try.

[lfbarfe]

To rescue dodgy recordable DVDs, I've used DVD Decrypter in file mode. I've got 2 internal DVD-RWs in the PC and an external, and I sometimes find that they can each read different parts of the disc. THe external is old and slow, but it tends to get a stable read out of discs that make the other two grind to a halt. Once you've got all the VOBs and the IFOs etc retrieved, I burn them as a new DVD-Video in Nero and we're away.

[hartley967]

IMHO its madness storing to DV tape , these are just too small and subseptable to climate changes (inside) These are ok for short burst of activity IE shooting films, but running 2 hour programmes is another matter.

For asmall alternative how about a HI8 'digital' ?

[lfbarfe]

hartley967 said:

IMHO its madness storing to DV tape , these are just too small and subseptable to climate changes (inside)

I think the main problem is the width of the track laid down on the tape. It's incredibly small, and minute differences in head alignment can make a difference. Camcorder manufacturers don't seem to guarantee that long play recordings will play back in anything other than the machine they were made on. I gather that DAT suffers from a similar problem.

[Deleted]

Let's face it though- anyone who uses LP on MiniDV tapes is asking for trouble. It's not like with analogue formats where you sacrifice audio & video quality- it's cramming the same amount of data into a smaller space. I use SP and the only problem I've ever had was down to dirty heads. DVCAM I believe uses the same tapes, but runs faster than MiniDV, so there's even less chance of problems.

[Russell Gray]

Makes me wonder about bought DVDs. These are gonna last a while, right?

[hartley967]

Should be no problem with bought discs as thesE use a different process to DVD- + R
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These discs are used in professional archiving

MAMS

www.mam-a.com/products/dvd/Gold%20DVD/DVDR%20Gold.htm

They are available in the UK at pro outfits like 'Stanley Productions'


AFAIK These discs use 24 carat leaf, so expected gold plated prices