If this guy is selling Verbatim, that should tell you something!

J--

He's actually just an acquaintance, and an article he read told him that. I wonder if it was one of those advertisements that looks like an article, but says "advertisement" at the top....or it could have been somewhere on the web. Thanks for the info...

Jon

the dye layer of DVD media isn't on the surface, which it is for CDR. Another plus for DVD media.

I look at the choice of DVD media primarily for playback compatibility, then for longevity and finally for the minimal risk to my recorder.

My good ones, discovered through reading and then evaluated over this short number of years with DVDR writers:
******************
G04, all current Verbatim (Japanese fabricated, not quite so keen on Malaysian after the surface printing caused bubbling to a friends), Taiyo Yuden (also branded as Panasonic), and MAM-E (France) (and some Mitsui also fabricated in the MAM-E labs in France).
******************

Avoiding some of the cake boxes seems good and also buying from a box shifter can be good if you are in a country where the sunshine has already had a chance to deteriorate the media whilst stocked "out front".

I wouldn't like to guess at the longevity, but 80-100yrs seems a good target for the caring manufacturer (!?!). This is in keeping with the best predictions for ink-jet dye that folks are putting their valuable photos out to.

If footage is valuable, it wouldn't hurt to make a copy across different brands and store them in a container that is least likely to have a chemical reaction with a polymer, at constant cool temperature and of course dark.

In fact magneto optical discs are where a lot of folks are putting their long term storage. However this is costly per gigabyte. Mostly because of the low volumes and high end industry placement. It would make sense to buy an external HD every 5 years and then put all your previous years valuable storage onto it/them. You'd never have that many of them as long as Moore's law holds out. Hard discs should retail for 5 years without any need for rewriting the data to them.

Same would be true for red-laser DVD-ROM becoming BD-ROM, etc etc.

Haven't had any Ritek DVDs for more than 1 year, so I can't say. But the guy you talked to and the one who wrote the article, or any of us, will not be around in 100 years to argue the point! ;o)

You just gotta go with your gut feeling. Ritek is, according to Ritek, the world's largest maker of DVD media.

Riredale's comment fits best!

J--

I would have to agree with your friend, cheap DVDRs may not last past five or ten years.
I made a few DVDs last summer and one friend is quite rough on DVDs, these were the cheap 1.35 1X from cdrdvdrmedia.com.
As you could have guessed none of the DVD he got still play. I looked at them and was amazed how quickly they went bad.
My tip of the day, never leave a DVDR in the car, any brand!!!!!
Heat was the number 1 killer of the DVDs I made, 2nd was light scratches and I mean light.
Total time played for his DVDs, about three months Of course this was "worse case" results, so I would not use cheap media for back-ups or high mileage DVDs

Hunter

Hunter, that doesn't surprise me. But it isn't a "fair" comparison. Any dingleberry who'd leave in a DVD or CD in a car to bake gets what he deserves, in my opinion.

When anyone abuses any thing, the life expectancy is shortened dramatically! I could buy a Rolls Royce and not change the oil. Under those conditions, it wouldn't last any longer than a Ford or Chevy under the same circumstances.

I think it is very safe to say that Ritek media will last longer than five years, with proper care and storage!

J--

1. I have found no reliable third-party accelerated aging tests for DVDs. Absent that, most of what you are going to find on the subject is speculation (including some of what I'm going to say below).

2. Heat, sunlight, and scratching will accelerate the aging. Even the case you put them in makes a big difference. Ever wonder why DVDs come in those bigger cases? Part of it is just to make them harder to steal, but you will also find that the "playing side" of the DVD doesn't actually make contact with the case. This reduces chances of scratching as the case is bounce around in transit.

3. There was lots of testing done in the early days of CD-R to estimate longevity. Some of the tests by Kodak on their own media suggested 200 years. Obviously, this applied to top-quality gold media, in tightly controlled conditions. Most of us have had CD-Rs go bad, so we know it doesn't apply across the board.

4. Laserdiscs got everyone worried because some of them exhibited "laser rot" after only a few years. However, they were manufactured in a totally different manner, with two layers mechanically bonded together. The bonding material leaked air and corroded the reflective surface (like an old mirror that has gone bad).

As already pointed out, DVD-R material has the reflective coating embedded in the plastic, so it is more impervious to scratches from the label side, and to corrosion from air seepage. If you really want a DVD to last a long, long time, make an extra one and put it in a full size DVD case, don't put a label on it; store it in a completely dark room with average to low humidity, at a cool 60 degrees F, and I am quite certain it will outlast you or anyone you know.

There is a format with quite a few backers for a recording media that can survive being thrown across the floor, stood on, writing on the surface - however hard. It'll have enough bandwidth to carry off a look like broadcast video, will never give you a burning compatibility problem or a 16:9 compatibility problem in the menu. It'll approach 4:2:2 colour subsampling, multiple audio tracks, subtitling/CC (subject to manufacturer implementation). It won't even need a website to help you work out where to buy the media from or to help with set top player problems. You will even get away with leaving it in the car, more often than not.

The only downside will be if you are in an area with constantly high humidity......


contd.....

















Its S-VHS ! ;-P

That's progress. (tongue slightly in cheek)

Thanks for the excellent info, Guys. I'll just stick to Ritek, and if a client comes to me and complains in 50 years, I'll hit him with my cane or run over him in my Rascal.

Jon

Why not back them up to VHS? That lasts indefinitely. Funny how what goes around comes around. lol

John

VHS breaks down at about 15 years. The oxide will start falling off the tape or something like that.

An excellent resource I've found regarding DVD lifespan is at
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/carefordisc/CDandDVDCareandHandlingGuide.pdf

For those too lazy to read through the whole thing, the main points are:
A- It's difficult to tell how long DVDs will last.
B- Store them well! The article/PDF has tips in it.
C- If you wanted to, you can make backups of your DVDs are keep copying them over and over without any generation loss.

As an aside, I did a favor for a friend a few months back by putting some video of a dance group onto DVD. The video was on a "U-Matic" cartridge, dated 1976. For the young'uns reading this, U-Matic was based on 3/4" tape and the cartridge was about the size of a Webster's Collegiate dictionary.

Anyway, a local TV station still had a U-Matic VCR in the rack, and we were able to pull the short program off it and onto DV tape. The engineer was very leery about the whole idea, since we were talking about a tape nearly 30 years old, but it played just fine. The image quality was surprising--not very sharp by modern standards, but clean and pretty good color.

So I take it with a grain of salt whenever someone says that tapes degrade quickly. This one didn't.

What I DO know is that a couple of days of sunlight will destroy a DVD-R recording layer. I left one outside intentionally last year, with one disk partially overlapping another. After a couple of days a "shadow" was clearly evident, and after a few more days the disk could not be read.

I've had cd's/dvd's go bad on me enough times to not really trust this this form of storage, despite what so-called experts say about their longevity. On the other hand, contrary to what I've read and others have said, I have vhs tapes that I shot 25 years ago, that I never rewound annually as advised, that look as good as the day I shot them. No deterioration whatsoever. The tapes were just stored at home here in California, with care being taken to not directly expose them to any more extremes of temperature and humidity than occur here naturally. I wish somebody would come up with an application to recover recoverable date from recorded optical media. Seems like if anything goes wrong, you lose everything, whereas with tape, you may lose segments here and there, but non-damaged areas are still intact and accessible. Does anybody know of an application that'll read data off of a disk that can't be accessed thru normal means ?

I can only say this about Ritek GO4's
Zero Coasters...none. Never a custiomer complaint...none. Never failed to play.

What more could I ask?

What more could I ask?

True archival longevity...

I think you're the exception, not the rule. One of the reasons I was so attracted to DVD was the archival aspect. Much smaller (even in large cases) than tape, and you can copy without loosing quality. I'm convinced they'll last at least 25 years, at which stage another medium will have surfaced to take its place, and I'll start a conversion business for my kids to run, and they'll have fun doing it.

One other option is to "print to tape" and save the footage that way. Isn't DV tape supposed to have excellent archival quality?

Jon

True archival longevity...

Problem is, we won't know for a long time from now if it worked or not!

Remember, ten years ago there were no DVDs that we could burn. So what will we be using ten years from now? In 100 years??? The issue will be moot because DVDs and DVD players will be long gone by then!

J--

VideoCurmudgeon, I did state worse case, but the point I'm making is that I really can't see a DVDr lasting that long. Main reason I say this, DVD copying. One thing I did notice about the DVDs was the silver ones faded faster then the white backed. They weren't inkjet printable but had a white layer in the disc with a gloss label side.
I have "white" DVDs that I burned two years ago in cases and seem to be fine. But again I don't expect more then 5-10 years life of these.

Hunter

p.s. That friend is a city police officer, now you see why taxes are so high .... LOL