Hundreds of your Warner Bros DVDs probably don’t work anymore

[chuft]

Hundreds of your Warner Bros DVDs probably don’t work anymore

"Due to the way WB manufactured their DVDs, virtually all discs pressed between 2006-8 are unplayable now."


What seems to be a full list but who knows

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threa...#post-34048768



"14.Blade Runner 4 Disc Collector’s Edition-Disc 1,2 and 4"

[BRBFBI]

Hundreds of your Warner Bros DVDs probably don’t work anymore

"Due to the way WB manufactured their DVDs, virtually all discs pressed between 2006-8 are unplayable now."

There’s irony in “Collectors Edition” disks going bad after 15 years. Another reason to store media digitally.

[possessor]

I have Enter the Dragon on Blu-Ray. Can't relate.

There’s irony in “Collectors Edition” disks going bad after 15 years. Another reason to store media digitally.

no

[chuft]

There’s irony in “Collectors Edition” disks going bad after 15 years. Another reason to store media digitally.

These are digital. They aren't strips of film, that would be analog.

I am not sure what you mean by "digitally." Do you mean on an online server? I kind of doubt they would allow ripped movies. I don't trust such storage anyway. Stuff gets corrupted. If it can go bad on my hard drive it can go bad on theirs.

[boredjedi]

I remember a story like this from a while ago

It turns out that virtually every Warner Bros DVD disc manufactured between 2006 and 2008 has succumbed to the dreaded laser rot

It was referred to as Disk Rot at one point.

"Disk rot" refers to the gradual deterioration of a CD, DVD, or other optical disc, causing the data stored on it to become unreadable due to chemical breakdown of the reflective layer on the disc, often manifesting as discoloration, spots, or holes on the surface, making the data inaccessible over time; essentially, it's the process where a disc "rots" and becomes unusable

[LazyPooky]

It rots even when stored under stable conditions. Last year I tried to read one of my CD-r with data from 2005 but failed. The whole disk had became a transparent piece of plastic.

[boredjedi]

It rots even when stored under stable conditions. Last year I tried to read one of my CD-r with data from 2005 but failed. The whole disk had became a transparent piece of plastic.

Yeah, I don't think environmental conditions is a requirement. It's just a breakdown of the actual chemicals being used.
I don't have an extensive collection but what I do have I have them ripped on hard drive. Including the 3D blue rays.
I can see why corporations wouldn't care at all about long term stability. They get to sell it all over again.

[BRBFBI]

These are digital. They aren't strips of film, that would be analog.

I am not sure what you mean by "digitally." Do you mean on an online server? I kind of doubt they would allow ripped movies. I don't trust such storage anyway. Stuff gets corrupted. If it can go bad on my hard drive it can go bad on theirs.

Of course you're right. DVDs are digital. I wasn't thinking. What I meant was digital backups on personal hard drives. Under fair use this is legal in the US, unless you have to circumvent copy-protection mechanisms to do so. I'm not sure what such storage you're referring to that you don't trust; cloud storage perhaps? The failure rate for hard drives is pretty low, and if you're diligent about keeping backups you only have yourself to blame if you lose data. The beautiful thing about digital media is that it's just ones and zeros. Unlike a painting or a VHS, a JPEG will be as perfect in a thousand years as the day it was encoded.

Edit: And more to my point, while a hard drive is just a digital storage medium like a DVD and both will eventually degrade to the point you can't read the data, if your movies are on hard drives along with your personal photos and everything else you should be backing up then they won't die with the DVD.

[BRBFBI]

This topic turned out to be quite interesting to me.

While I just advocated for backing up owned movies on personal storage, whether you can actually obtain a DVD for most movies which doesn't have copy-protection mechanisms to legally copy from is questionable. I think that's why it's de-facto illegal to rip movies while it's generally accepted that ripping music for personal use is legal.

Which circles back to the original article. You bought a movie, you own the rights to that media for personal use, yet due to DMCA you're not allowed to rip it from the disk and the disk only lasts 15 years. Seems like a huge problem. Of course if you buy a book you're buying a physical medium containing a copyrighted work, but if you take care of the book you can expect it to last hundreds of years. There is an expectation that if you buy a collectors edition DVD that it will last quite a lot longer than 15 years.

[chuft]

DVDs are supposed to have a shelf life of 100 years, which is much longer than magnetic media. They are also immune to magnets, power surges, and other mischief like malware, since they are not magnetic storage and are read-only. The DVDs in question had a manufacturing defect. This kind of malfunction is not normal. Normally optical media is a much safer storage option than magnetic media.

I have had files (including Lazytown files) get corrupted just sitting around on a hard drive. The hard drive didn't fail, but the file was corrupted. Unless you were looking at that particular file you would not notice it. Backups would not help since they would back up the corrupted file. Unless you can keep an unlimited series of backups and never overwrite an old one, backups will eventually all end up with the corrupted version of the file on it. That also goes for cloud storage.

[chuft]

On another note, remember this?


In a brief notice on the PlayStation website, Sony said it planned to remove hundreds of Discovery films from users’ video libraries, preventing them from watching the content they’d paid money for. Sony explained the decision as being due to “content licensing arrangements with content providers”.


Sony Pulls Discovery Videos PlayStation Users Already Own, Sparking Concern Over Our Digital Future

[BRBFBI]

DVDs are supposed to have a shelf life of 100 years, which is much longer than magnetic media.

I didn't know that. I love having these discussions. I get a lot out of considering my opinion, researching my position, and getting corrected.

I have had files (including Lazytown files) get corrupted just sitting around on a hard drive. The hard drive didn't fail, but the file was corrupted. Unless you were looking at that particular file you would not notice it.

There must be a way to combat this. Like dual copies of data and a hashing algorithm that periodically compares them for discrepancies. Maybe this is what RAID storage does, I've never looked into it. Anyway, you made your point well and I have a new fear of losing data.

Sony Pulls Discovery Videos PlayStation Users Already Own, Sparking Concern Over Our Digital Future

It seems more and more well known that when you "purchase" a digital movie/game you're really just making an agreement with the company that you can stream it as long as they are inclined/able to provide it to you. It's actually a bit misleading when companies offer these digital media for "purchase." It would be more honest if, instead of "purchase," the button read "rent for indefinite amount of time."

[boredjedi]

And if the masters get destroyed....

Remember what happened with UMG and their master recordings back in 2008?

UMG’s accounting of its losses, detailed in a March 2009 document marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” put the number of “assets destroyed” at 118,230. Randy Aronson considers that estimate low: The real number, he surmises, was “in the 175,000 range.” If you extrapolate from either figure, tallying songs on album and singles masters, the number of destroyed recordings stretches into the hundreds of thousands. In another confidential report, issued later in 2009, UMG asserted that “an estimated 500K song titles” were lost.

Virtually all of Buddy Holly’s masters were lost in the fire. Most of John Coltrane’s Impulse masters were lost, as were masters for treasured Impulse releases by Ellington, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders and other jazz greats. Also apparently destroyed were the masters for dozens of canonical hit singles, including Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats’ “Rocket 88,” Bo Diddley’s “Bo Diddley/I’m A Man,” Etta James’s “At Last,” the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” and the Impressions’ “People Get Ready.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/m...ecordings.html

[chuft]

Nothing worthwhile then, phew.

[boredjedi]

List is more extensive than that. Elton John, Tom Petty, REM....

[chuft]

Yeah I have CD's from the 1980's that still play fine. I've never had an issue pulling an old CD off the shelf and ripping it or playing it. In my experience problems with optical media tend to be with DVDs, particularly dual layer ones.

It's kind of interesting, I have had and used a lot of analog media in my life, such as vinyl records, magnetic cassettes, and magnetic VHS tapes. They all deteriorate (vinyl can get scratched, or warp, and the magnetic media just degrades over time as magnetic charges flip) but they more or less work. Analog deterioration lowers the quality and introduces noise but it doesn't "stop the show." When I have a digital file get corrupted or a disc rot or a hard drive fail, it tends to stop the show, rendering the data totally inaccessible.

[chuft]

I tested my Blade Runners and they are corrupted. What a bummer. My favorite is the theatrical release/international release with the Harrison Ford voiceovers and those are no longer available anywhere now as far as I can tell.