The dream of DivX is alive at Warner Brothers
This is also a big problem for police, courts and public archives who have lots of interview records on DVDs.
I suppose you guys have never seen LaserDiscs before. Disc rot is nothing new.
Plastic shopping bag: lasts 1000 years stuck in a bush outside a Tesco without breaking down
Carefully engineered storage medium stored in ambient temperature indoors in a case:
Plastic shopping bag: lasts 1000 years stuck in a bush outside a Tesco without breaking down
I know you didn’t mean it, but actually they break down into smaller and smaller fragments very easily because of temperatures changing, so not visible after a few winters. Maybe except areas which don’t freeze, like those plastic floating islands in the Pacific.
Disc-rot. -It happens but it’s not as common as its made out to be. In my collection it’s only occured in 2 out of 500+ discs.
apparently xbox 360 discs were particularly susceptible.
A couple years ago I made a big project to rip all my DVDs.
Out of several hundred movies only 6 were unplayable. There didn’t seem to be a pattern to it either; age of the disc, wear or handling, big budget then current release or old movie slapped onto a disc in one of those cheap cardboard sleeves.
Out of my collection of TV shows on DVD, easily a quarter of the discs failed, and if one disc in a season of a show didn’t work most of them probably wouldn’t. Many had visible blotch marks in them. I figure they probably used a cheaper manufacturing process for TV shows where they were selling 3 to 6 discs rather than one, maybe two discs with a single movie on it.
What is the goto software/suite for ripping DVDs these days? It has been ages since I’ve done any.
Are you planning on re-encoding anyways? For DVDs Handbrake can read and re-encode them directly so there’s no need for an intermediate.
If you’re not planning on re-encoding or we’re talking BluRays then makemkv is the most used and allows creating disc images, file extraction to drive, or file extraction to drive in MKV container.
One of my first jobs in IT I worked in a local newspaper - I thought I wanted to be a journalist turns out it’s boring. Anyway we had all the old archived papers on a dvd and someone used it as a coaster and erased about 10 years worth of files. Naturally there were zero backups, so that data was just gone. Fantastic.
Fortunately the local library has backups but they’re on microfiche, so not particularly convenient. I think Google might have scanned them now though so they’re probably archived again.
Google made thier cached pages inaccessible though, better to check the way back machine.