Life Expectancy of DVD's?

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• sinbad8982 Posts: 1,627

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  24/07/14 - 20:35 #2

  Well i have cds that are between 25 and 30 years old and still work fine, as do my first dvds which are around 15 years old. If looked after and stored correctly I would say a good quality disc will last 30 years

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• sinbad8982 Posts: 1,627

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  24/07/14 - 20:37 #3

  Ripping dvds to your computer will take up between 5 and 8gb (per film) in the original format. Much less compressed to a smaller high quality format

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• FusionFury Posts: 14,121

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  24/07/14 - 20:38 #4

  sinbad8982 wrote: »

  Well i have cds that are between 25 and 30 years old and still work fine, as do my first dvds which are around 15 years old. If looked after and stored correctly I would say a good quality disc will last 30 years

  
  Gracias
  
  I imagine Blu-Rays would last longer?

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• FusionFury Posts: 14,121

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  24/07/14 - 20:40 #5

  sinbad8982 wrote: »

  Ripping dvds to your computer will take up between 5 and 8gb (per film) in the original format. Much less compressed to a smaller high quality format

  
  Does that include all the bonus content on the DVD such as deleted scenes, alternate endings, and commentary?

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• sinbad8982 Posts: 1,627

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  24/07/14 - 20:44 #6

  Yes that would there are tools that will rip just the movie too, as a rule the movientakes up 70-80% of the data on a dvd.

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• sinbad8982 Posts: 1,627

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  24/07/14 - 20:45 #7

  Yes blu rays are more durable than dvds

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• Metal Mickey Posts: 1,606

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  25/07/14 - 13:04 #8

  Barring any actual disc faults and mistreatment of manufactured CDs and DVDs, they mostly could/should effectively last "forever", or until they're no longer of any use. There are scattered tales across the nets of people "wearing out" CDs with constant play, but this is generally thought to be a side-effect of a hi-fi overheating from being in constant use, and hence slightly melting the outer plastic layers of the disc, rendering it unplayable...
  
  There were widespread pressing errors in the late-80's/early-90's, which mean that a relatively large number of CDs are now showing "bronzing" or "tea-staining" discolourations as the data layer slowly rots. Most of them still play OK, but will almost certainly become faulty sooner or later. There are also instances from the early days of full colour label printing on disks, where the screenprinting inks & process "ate into" the plastic layer over time, affecting the data layer.
  
  Those error-based instances aside, the vast majority of CDs from the first days of the format over 30 years ago still play fine, and there's no reason to believe they won't continue to do so for decades to come, DVDs likewise, ironically enough almost certainly lasting at least until the formats eventually become obsolete in themselves. (NB this doesn't apply to recordable media, which is proving to have an average shelf-life in the region of 5 years or less!!)
  
  Probably best to start ripping your DVD collection though - as anyone who still owns floppy computer disks will tell you, you never know when you might wake up one morning and find you've nothing to play them on!

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• Chris1964 Posts: 19,784

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  27/07/14 - 15:39 #9

  I once bought a BBC box set of Life On Earth, played them once then stored them for a year. When I tried them again it was weird, seemed like they had become "infected" for want of a better word. Very brittle and stained, cracked and splintered easily and totally unplayable. I also had the same problem with a couple of computer game discs. All my other dvds are fine.

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• starry_rune Posts: 9,006

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  27/07/14 - 17:18 #10

  There are still cassettes and vinals working in good order!

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