So my family has a few containers of unused blank dvds that are just lying around collecting dust. i know dvds are almost useless because of streaming, but can they still be used. Theses dvds can only be written to once and they only have like 3 gb of storage on them, can they still be used?, do they have a use?
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Position them at the perfect angles, and you can light up your whole house by just turning on one light bulb
I’m pretty sure this one specifically requires a DVD-R, but you can burn FreeDVDBoot and insert it into most PS2 models, will allow you to boot whatever you want.
When I was a kid we used to hurl them as high as we could straight up in the air. The fun was trying to avoid being hit by it on the way down!
coasters for coffee mugs.
This has been the classic answer since free demo CDs back ik the 90s.
I guess it qualifies as retro now, so they are not nerdy but stylish.
You will need to double check the specific DVDs you are working with. They can be useful for backups and if you don’t store them in sunlight or acid or something they basically last forever. You can copy your important data onto a DVD and leave it in your closet for the rest of your life. Of course, as with all backup strategies, you need to test it very regularly.
Edited to add nitpicks: if you decide to do this back up across multiple DVDs and use encryption. Borg is a fantastic tool for encrypted backups and if you are just mounting your DVDs as cdrom0 and such it can handle that as easily as any other block device.
Hmm my experience with DVD storage is mostly negative. They were all put in cases in closed shelves but after ~10 years there were either unreadable or with errors. I know there are DVD-Rs that are specifically rated for archival but most are not.
Here are the most common mistakes people used to make when writing DVDs:
- Not buying a decent brand (low quality blanks).
- Writing the blanks at high speeds (highest that their optical drive could do). The depth and definition of the burned tracks was better the slower you went. It was commonly recommended to not go over 4x speed.
- Storing the written DVDs in their original spindles. This means that the discs would rest on each other and the ones on the bottom would be pressed down by all of those above. Over 10 years this would negatively affect the tracks. Ideally the discs should be stored in disc binders, in vertical position.
By following these precautions I still have 20-year old backup DVDs that I can read without a problem. In fact most of my CD blanks have survived and are readable – and the ones that didn’t owe it mostly to scratches (CDs were a lot more delicate than DVDs and nowhere near Blu Ray durability).
Yes, they can still be used in a variety of ways:
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Data storage: You can still use them for storage of your files, photos, or videos. They’re excellent for backup purposes. Especially in the case of important documents or cherished pictures, having a physical copy can be more lasting and more resistant to loss caused by computer malfunctions.
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Home video or audio disc: You can use the DVD to store old recorded home videos with a DVD burner for Mac or Windows, or create a music disc for vehicles or players that still have DVD players.
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DIY projects: Some people use them as coasters, window deterrents for birds, or even as part of a Halloween costume.
Although DVDs may feel like a thing of the past, there are still a number of uses you can repurpose them for.
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Coasters and craft projects
They make excellent bird-scarers. Stick of bamboo, thicker end shoved firmly in the ground, slip a disc over the thinner end, shiny side up.
Drinks coasters also. Maybe an abstract art installation.
If you have a BluRay player most will read BluRay content burned to a DVD (a.k.a. BD5), and others will do AVCHD (a related but more simple format). You’ll be much more limited in terms of space obviously, but you can still put video on there at far better than DVD quality.
Also if you’re like me and have a rotating set of games you install and uninstall, you can copy installation backups to a series of DVDs. Steam even has a built-in option to break installation backup files into 4.3 gig files specifically for burning to DVD.
I had no idea you could put (limited) Blu-ray content on DVDs. That’s actually pretty amazing (though I don’t really have a use case).
Yeah, there were even efforts to make factory-pressed “BD9” BluRay-on-DVD discs a mass produced cheaper alternative when BluRay was being launched, though it never actually went anywhere. They kept the format though just because it made sense to give people a way to make home media without having to spend an arm and a leg on blank discs.
That said, the “requirement” for players to support BD5/BD9 has been dropped as of a few years ago, not that all of them did in the first place. Most players still support it, but you can’t count on it.
That’s cool, I never heard of this! I remember following the HD-DVD format war at the time.
Funnily enough the format war is why I know about it, since I decided to do a good long look into the pros and cons of each format, especially in terms of backwards compatibility and format support. HD DVD actually had an advantage in that regard: Blu-Ray only supports 480p and up, whereas HD DVD mandated support for damn near every resolution used by an existing disc-based format (VCD, SVCD) from 240p up. HD DVD players were also supposed to support content burned to CDs as well, meaning you could fit a fair chunk of lower resolution highly compressed HD DVD content on a CD and have it play in any HD DVD player, with subtitles and the like even.
Not really that relevant now obviously, but at the time I was kinda bummed that HD DVD didn’t win the format war.
I thought Blu-ray was technically superior? Due to having higher capacity and more features.
I don’t see supporting 240p as a big advantage, and I doubt you could fit much HD content on a CD.
HD DVD was 15/30 gig versus Blu-Ray being 25/50 gig storage, yeah. For mainstream use that was far more important, so that played a large part in why it won, though a lot of it was also Sony making the PS3 Blu-Ray-based and giving adoption rates a huge boost as a result. In terms of actual video codec support though the two were identical: H.262 MPEG-2, H.264 AVC, and VC-1.
As for how much content you could store on a CD, there were a lot of video resolutions supported in between 240p and HD, and H.264 can compress video quite a bit while still looking decent. For the die-hard video enthusiast, not much of a draw. For someone wanting to distribute stuff on the cheap, especially in poorer areas and “emerging markets” where SVCD players were (at the time) still commonly sold? Huge draw.
EDIT: Also of minor note was that the video (but not audio) formats from previous CD-based formats were completely compatible with the HD DVD standard, meaning in a pinch someone could just take the existing video from an SVCD/CVD release and drop it into a HD DVD. Of course why one would do that is a valid question, but nonetheless the standard was set up to allow it. For whatever reason.
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1080p movies can be encoded down to < 3 GB
kinda nice to just pop a disc in the bluray player and know that you won’t be shown ads, recommendations for the latest capeshit, or be upsold to the next tier… just the movie and nothing else
If ya got a DVD player that can read MP4 or Mkv files I’d drop an entire season of 1080p encoded TV shows on a disc. Something that isn’t High Def to begin with like DS9 or old shows so you aren’t missing out on pixel quality.
My mom’s standalone Blu-ray player can read discs with a bunch of files on it and play it and so does my Xbox a bit. Just figure out what it likes and try to download that OR re encode it with Handbrake or something.
Put em in a CD binder for a rainy day when the Internet is out or don’t wanna pay for streaming for a bit.
Something that isn’t High Def to begin with like DS9
Dont mind me, I’ll be crying in the corner here with my dashed hopes of DS9 ever getting re-mastered.
Iirc, part of the problem is that DS9 was filmed on standard definition video, which you can’t really upscale without things getting weird or ugly. TNG was recorded on film, which can be scanned in high resolution.
Hot glue em and make some cool art thing
I used them as extra photo backups in case my device and server and backup were to be destroyed. They are cheap and provide an extra option just in case. They are not great for really long but ive found if taken care of they can last for years and they are cheap too so why not take advantage.
If you have a DVD player or your desktop and/or laptop has a disc drive (or you got a USB disc drive) you can turn them into CDs if you are feeling retro.
Or if you happen to have some videos, you can use some DVD authoring software to make a DVD of them. It’s good if you happen to somehow have the episode files for your favorite TV show. ;)
I haven’t bought a CD in well over a decade but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to think of CDs as retro lol
Considering there are children out there that don’t know what a CD is because of streaming, I’d assume that DVDs and CDs are old enough to be retro.
And I only know there are some that don’t know what a CD/DVD is because of r€ddit posts.
*cries in vinyl*
I’m not old, you’re old!
