Burnt DVDs = bunk? - What the, I/O error

[William Wallet]

Hiya
to cut a long story short, if I've used 2 or 3 DVDs from a batch of 25 and they act funny (if I go too many folders deep they slow right down and give me jip if I try to copy from them) is there any way I can get at the stuff on these?
Mac OS9 barely reads them at all, but OSX at least acknowledges that there's stuff in there - I'm just not allowed to use it, it seems. I get fed I/O errors and long waiting times.

Is my stuff lost? I was kind of... writing a story (not with David) and I think I may have just consigned it to a fate worse than DVD.

[capital]

Is my stuff lost? I was kind of... writing a story (not with David) and I think I may have just consigned it to a fate worse than DVD.

One thing that might help is making an image of the DVD and accessing the image from your hard drive. Sometimes the image making program can read past file system errors because its just reading bits and not traversing a directory. I've been successful doing this with a CD recently, getting the data off.

[William Wallet]

Aye. I'll give it a go, thanks cap!

[Archer]

Burnt anything is bunk. Only pressed media here!

~J

[William Wallet]

The day we go back to vinyl, I'll be a happy man.

Actually I got to thinking the other day - if a vinyl record can store sound information, is it too much of a stretch for it to store visual stuff? Maybe you'd need a far wider disc, and probably it would have to spin at a much faster rate to accomodate the rapid feeding in of complex video information.... but I still reckon DVDs should be thrown out the window in favour of the more advanced kickarse methods of the past.

I mean if vinyl records *sound* better than CD's (or so they say) then surely a vinyl movie would *look* better! Let's get this shit happening!

[Archer]

A vinyl record can definitely store visual information, because you can store visual information as sound information (with a proper translator, of course). I can think of no reason why it would be better, however, and it would be size-prohibitive (large amounts of vinyl surface area to store meaningful lengths of video).

There are other issues with it, like transfer rates, but let's just leave it as "it's impractical".

~J

[Death's Avatar]

People just say vinyl sounds better because you can't get Zeppelin on iTunes.

[William Wallet]

It'd be prohibitive of course... just some basic math in my head indicates one freakin' huge disc spinning at some high speeds.
Still. There's always laserdisc.

[capital]

Aye. I'll give it a go, thanks cap!

Enough rambling! So what's the outcome?

[William Wallet]

Not sure. Haven't had time to sit down and make a disk image yet. I'll leave it running as I sleep to-night.

[vinylrake]

A couple of obvious problems with storing digital info on vinyl would be

a) Inconvenient. It's not practical($ or sizewise) for personal use to have a record pressing machine in your house.

b) Everytime a record is played/read the needle scrapes at the vinyl - with audio you end up with hiss and crackle, with digital data you would lose bits making the file unreadable.

If you meant that we should use an optical reading technology (laser - CD/DVD) and just change the storage medium itself from CD/DVD to vinyl - now THAT's an interesting idea - though of course you have the same issues around storing the data in a small enough footprint to be practical. ["Here's my 600 record collection of my last hard drive backup"]

[William Wallet]

Heheh there's a thought. You could always use it as a coffee table after it's effective life as a video storage unit is over.

[William Wallet]

Hey uh, whoever it was who suggested I make an image:
It didn't work it wouldn't finish writing the dmg for some reason. So what's the deal, is my shit lost forever? That seems ludicrous to me... if it was fucked, why didn't it tell me during verification???