Is the DVD Dead in 2019? No, it is Not!
There are still many uses for DVD in 2019. DVD used to be the gold standard for transferring media between individuals. Yet, with increasing internet upload and download speeds, they are no longer necessary. Now to watch the latest episodes of your favorite show or the new hit movie, you can go online to any number of streaming sites. But, is the DVD dead? I propose that in the age of ten terabyte drives and gigabit internet that the DVD still has its uses.
The Golden Age of Spinning Discs
The DVD was developed in 1995. Its original purpose was to store larger files than the compact discs that came before it. Over time the disc developed and gained the ability to become re-writable. This lets the same disc get data put on and taken off many different times. This technology is like modern HDD drives used in modern computers. Yet opposed to the new ten terabyte internal drives, these discs at max were 17.08 gigabytes. The DVDs were later made obsolete by HD DVD and Blu-ray, each having a maximum capacity of 30 gigabytes and 50 gigabytes respectively.
The increased size of new media forced the storage industry to expand. With the demand for 1080p and 4k media growing, people wanted to leverage their expensive televisions to get the best quality out of their favorite media. Thus, older DVD models don’t make the cut the same way. This was especially clear with modern-day video gaming. Around the era of the original PlayStation and early PC gaming, it was not uncommon to buy a game and get two or more discs. This was due to how the discs did not have the requisite capacity for the desired media. The problem of keeping all content together in one file was ever-present. Yet, higher capacity storage mediums and direct download clients now solve the problems.
So What About All the Discs in Your Closet?
I am sure that many of you have a pack of writable discs in your closet. Perhaps, you have a bunch of old DVDs underneath the television or filling up a bookcase. So what can be done about this? Luckily, there are plenty of tools designed to help remove the need for discs you don’t need. Furthermore, there are ways to optimally store and organize the ones that you do.
First, we can deal with the old DVDs of movies and TV shows. Many people in specific communities like to talk about Handbrake. This program allows individuals to make “completely legal” copies of their home videos. The copied media can be transferred to hard drives or burned onto other discs. With this, you can have yet another copy of your 3rd grade musical. Of course, you need to be sure that you don’t use such a powerful tool for anything malicious in nature. Once you have digital copies of all those precious memories, what you do with the old discs are up to you. Some may be re-writable and can be used for what I am going to talk about next.
Make Your Own Library
Discs have one advantage over modern storage media, resilience. An HDD for computers underuse is estimated to fail in three to four years. The probability of failure further increases over the proceeding years. DVD-R discs, which are re-writable DVDs, are estimated to have a lifespan of one hundred to two hundred years under optimal conditions. You can see which medium would be the best for maintaining a copy of your important documents.
But, wouldn’t using many discs instead of a higher capacity hard drive be expensive. The answer, yes and no. The truth is that it depends on the type of media you are trying to store. If you are meaning to keep a backup of important documents such as word documents and pdfs, then you do not need terabytes of storage. Word documents are only kilobytes of storage if not full of photos or implanted videos. Where you would begin to see limitations would be if you started trying to put 4k media files on discs. Those files can be gigabytes for minutes of footage. The way around this would be to transcode media down into a smaller resolution. By doing this the visual quality is reduced, but so is the storage requirements. Thus, if you insist on storing video on DVD’s you can make them go a lot farther.
With your new backups on DVDs, you can consider keeping the files you need accessible on a home server. This allows you to not only have your backups available on the DVDs offline, but you can have all your data more readily available on high capacity internal hard drives. The best of both worlds.
So How Do I Get the Files on the Disc?
The primary method is to get a DVD drive for a computer that supports burning. There are many you can find on Amazon which plugs into a USB port on a PC. Once you have that and some DVD-R discs, you can get the software necessary to burn the files you want onto your blank discs. You can use Imgburn to do this. Having used the program before, I can attest that even though the user interface looks simplistic, it is one of the most functional burning programs I have used.
How Do I Store the Discs
Discs while resilient should be kept in optimal conditions to maintain their lifespan. It is important to put these discs into something that will not scratch them. Scratches will cause the data to be lost if they are deep enough. It is also important to try and keep them in dry and temperature constant environments. It would not be good if the discs begin to corrode and get warn even when in storage. To store discs, there are many cases you can buy that can hold hundreds of discs and are portable. Ultimately, the storage solution depends on the scale of the operation.
Spinning Into Eternity
DVDs may seem obsolete, but they maintain a specific part of the market share. While it may not be the best technology for the casual user, if your intention is data preservation, it is invaluable. Furthermore, who would think that all your most important files are on DVDs? While generally obsolete, DVDs are still one of the best ways of archiving, distributing, and protecting important information. Thus, they are unlikely to be fully replaced anytime soon.
