More on optical disc longevity

▼ Two years ago, I wrote a blog post on the longevity of optical media. Today, I found out that the Canadian government also has an interest in this topic and produced the following article: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays.

Much recommended if you're interested in the topic. However...

Although I'm sure their findings that a gold reflective layer is much, much better than silver / silver alloy / aluminium, I find their conclusions for "regular" CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVD-RWs and DVD+RWs, based on accelerated aging tests, clash with my own experiences.

CD-RWs are rated for 20 to 50 years, but in my experience, those are not reliable at all, with most of them failing in well under 20 years. Rewritable DVDs are even worse, regularly failing immediately.

Mass manufactured read-only DVDs and BRs are listed as 10 - 20 years. I can't think of any of the about 200 that I have that fall in that age range failing to play because the disc was unreadable.

BD-REs (rewritable blu-ray discs) are listed as 10 - 20 years, which is not too bad, but BD-Rs only 5 - 10 years. I'm glad to report that my oldest ones, both two years old, still read without trouble, but this seems a very low number... especially for HTL discs that don't use organic dyes. Can it be right?

Also see this on M-DISC longevity.

Permalink - posted 2024-05-09

How movie/TV watching has changed

▼ Back in the 1990s, for a good number of years, I would go to see the "sneak preview" every week. One show a week would be dedicated to showing a movie that hadn't been released yet. And which movie would be a surprise. This meant I ended up seeing all big ticket movies, as well as a good number of additional smaller movies. And with rare exceptions, I would be happy to sit through them.

These days, I very often find myself getting bored with a movie that I'm watching. Now obviously a lot has changed in the intermediate almost 30 years. Have movies gotten worse? I'd say they have. But not so much that this explains me happily watching pretty much any movie in the 1990s vs getting bored by about half of them in the 2020s. Do we have a shorter attention span and more distractions today than we had 30 years ago? Again, yes. But I don't think that's the full explanation.

I think the reason it's so hard to focus on any movie or TV show/episode is that we have so much more choice today. Back in the 1990s I would have a choice between maybe a handful of movies that seemed decent prospects. Or when watching TV, there were about a dozen channels with limited VCR-based time shifting. So unless something was completely terminally boring, we'd sit through it.

These days, I subscribe to three streaming services and I have around 100 movies and TV show seasons on DVD. So how much time should I give a movie or TV show before giving up and giving something else a try? Definitely not the full 90 (or 140...) minutes for movies. For TV shows, why would I give something with a poor pilot a second chance? "Slow burn", sure, have me waste hours and then decide it sucks. I don't think so.

The grass is always greener on the other side.

Or is it? Should we give our content more time to grab our interest?

Back in the 1990s and before we definitely gave boring and/or slow content too much of our time. It seems obvious we went too far in the other direction these days. But where do we draw the line?

The past few days I watched "No Time to Die" and "The Age of Adeline". The former is a bond flick which was way too long. There was definitely some good stuff there, but 2 hours and 43 minutes worth. With "The Age of Adeline", everything was slow to begin with and didn't pick up speed later. The science fiction element where we ask ourselves what happens if you grow older but physically stay young forever are interesting, but handled in a boring way.

In these days where hundreds of other movies and TV shows are competing for our attention (not to mention video games), being boring is a deadly sin. I finished both these movies by ignoring the sunken cost fallacy, but in retrospect, I should have bailed out at some point.

Two things that don't help here are the increasing length of blockbusters. I recently saw Schindler's List at 3:15. It was painful. I needed a bunch of 25-minute sessions to get through it. Yes, because of the subject matter. But also the length.

Permalink - posted 2024-02-19

Myhthbusters

▼ 20 years ago today, the TV show Mythbusters aired its first regular episode on the Discovery Channel, after three earlier pilot episodes. And soon after, I had found a new favorite TV show.

What Mythbusters did between 2003 and 2016 was investigate whether (urban) myths, viral videos, movie stunts and idioms had some truth to them or not. The usual outcomes were: confirmed (results replicated without issue), plausible (results replicated but possibly some liberties taken) and busted (results could not be reasonably duplicated). If a myth was busted, they would often see what it took to replicate the results, going to extremes as needed.

I think the first episode I saw was "penny drop". That was the seventh episode, with the main myth being that a penny (one cent coin) dropped from the Empire State Building would kill you if it hit you down on the street. The big question here was how fast a penny would be traveling after being dropped from the iconic skyscraper.

At this point, we only had the two main hosts, Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage. Adam had built a rig with a tube with holes in it and air being blown in from the bottom with the airspeed in the tube going down with increasing height from 100 km/h to about 60 km/h. As the pennies stayed in the tube, their terminal velocity must match a speed between those two numbers.

With the always exuberant Adam annoyed by the usually stoic Jamie:

Jamie:

Works for me.

Adam:

This is excited Jamie? This is a world first going out on television that we showed exactly how fast a penny goes. No math, no ideas, no timing off a building, we got it right here in the lab.

Jamie:

It's great. Good job.

Turns out those falling pennies aren't lethal. Adam and Jamie both have one fired at their hand with no damage, and...

Adam:

Come on, shoot me in the ass, come on. I can take it.

The interaction between the hosts was what made Mythbusters so funny.

That dynamic wouldn't change very much over the following almost decade and a half. For most of the run of the show, the "build team" consisting of Grant Imahara, Kari Byron and Tony Belleci would usually bust separate myths, but sometimes the main and secondary hosts would team up.

They really caught lighning in a bottle here. The interactions between the hosts were almost always fun, and as experienced builders with some notion of the scientific method, the Mythbusters weren't completely lost when it came to attacking myths, but they were also not so knowledgeable that they could predict the results very well in advance.

A few more quotes:

Adam:

I reject your reality and substitute my own.

Jamie:

I love it when common materials are dangerous.

Narrator Robert Lee:

This thing that looks like a maximum security bird house, is actually the vital fulcrum.

Adam, about to go through a carwash with Jamie on the roof of his car:

As long as we're testing methods for removing unwanted pests from the outside of your car, we couldn't finish this without going through the carwash.

Tory:

It's not the prettiest thing but I think it's going to work.

That’s what they said when they hired me.

Great stuff.

Permalink - posted 2023-09-23