The confusion portion can’t be overstated. All of those incompatible DVD formats were the very reason I never bothered to invest in a re-writable DVD drive for my PC in the early 2000s. I just stayed with my rewritable CDs for the most part and jumped to USB sticks as they became more viable as the floppy replacement.
In the end, I’m glad I never bothered with any DVD burners. CD-RWs were a good-enough substitute for floppy disks for me in the early 2000s. Nowadays, USB sticks are far more convenient than burning CDs or DVDs anyway.
@@DavidWonn I’ve got a micro-sd card reader that’s like a thumb drive, except it’s got a USB type-a connector on one end, and a type-c connector on the other. I actually take the card out to put it into my Surface Pro. It’s like the best of 3 worlds.
I was in college at the time when people switched from floppies to flash drives. In 2003/2004 everybody used floppies for study-related files (to plug into college PCs), but around 2005 I remember buying myself my first 500mb flash drive. I still have it to this day somewhere, although without the plastic cover with exposed PCB. When I finished education in 2007, EVERYBODY switched to flash drives already.
My dad's first 100 MHz Pentium PC in 1995 had an 850 MB hard drive. Unless you had a mainframe or a server in an office, there was no need to have a drive bigger than a couple of gigabytes.
I'm assuming your talking about OSX 8.6.. Mac OS 8.6 came out in May 1999.. :) Edit: No.. You were talking about proper Mac OS.. Not this silly new *NIX one they have been running of late.
The 1999 Power Macintosh G3 Blue & White had an optional DVD-RAM drive, which is why support was added in MacOS 8.6. Overall a well-detailed video, but he really should've mentioned this as well. My 2000 Power Mac G4 also has one of these DVD-RAM drives with support for the cartridges, and hence the tray is a bit unusual. It can accept normal CDs or DVDs as well.
i remember my mom getting a dvd-ram recorder really late. like past 2010 because she could record weeks worth of her daily TV shows in decent quality on olny 1-2 discs and re-use them as much as she wanted. That's when i learned about the technology since it was waaaaay better than any other options for this specific task.
Huh... interesting. Back in the 2010s, everyone I knew already had a DVR. And also, never knew anyone besides my uncle who had a set-top DVD recorder. Also knew people who still recorded on VHS then, but never DVD... Maybe in different areas, they were reversed. But I always considered DVRs pretty common by then. With most cable providers throwing them in with packages quite readily.
@@braelinmichelus yeah might just be a difference between Europe and America, I'm not entirely sure how widespread DVRs were here in Germany during that time. My mom just one day came home with this giant VHS / DVD-RAM combo Recorder she got sold at the store.
@@nonAehT Since around year 2005 Topfield TF5100PVRc / TF5100PVRt was the total winner solution here in Finland. It had normal IDE hard drive and hobbyists created superb software for it to replace the official EPG and UI (it supported running user created software from the factory!). Even today, all devices you can connect to a TV set still have worse features for timeshifting and recording TV. The biggest problem with these devices was that it only supported 576i50 so no HD of any kind was possible.
@@braelinmichelus wow, I actually remember having a vhs/dvd recorder as a kid. it was a cool gadget, but id bet we never recorded more then 3 dvds with it.
DVD-RAM was my jam back in the day! I used a single disc to get me through most of my junior school years and convinced many teachers and other students to use em. Everyone at that time had gotten used to burning through 50 packs of expensive CD Roms for single word documents. It was magical to have a rewritable disic.
In the time where DVD burner where around 40 bucks, you got a DVD-Ram version for 60. These where the golden times of DVD-RAM. I never had a lot of disc (maybe 5?), but they where more then enough. But the convience, speed and accesibility of USB Sticks kinda made them obsolete.
do u mean ice tire? i think a rubber tire on a ice rim or wheel would get just as much traction as a rubber tire on a conventional wheel at the appropriate tempature
Some success/fail stories are like holding a glorious torch raised high in the sky on top of a mountain, and... there is nobody around you. You feel proud and excited and saddened and at the end you realize nobody needs that amazing fire at the top of the mountain anyways. It's still a great achievement worth telling. So thanks for telling it.
most optical drives will still read and write these, thou you may need a special driver for that ability, i bought a firewire drive that could read and write these for 600 dollars back in the late 90's when it first came out, it took the cartridge type disk. it still works
Same! I picked up a $500 Que! drive back in ~98-99, and having an external drive was soooo cool! Could have the tower off in the corner, and the drive up on the desk, and that was neat! Only problem with FireWire was the Fire bit, and I burned out the enclosure in a couple months, and after that it was an internal drive lol. But I thought those cartridges were pretty neat! My drive did those and the plain naked DVD RAM discs, and due to price I think I only ever bought 2 more of those cartridge discs before giving up and just buying normal discs. Wish I had kept some of those... lost them in a small basement flood a while back and pitched them all. Even not working it was a neat bit of history that I wish I had held on to. I still have (and use) the little tote bag that the drive came in though! I mean, I paid $500 for that bag! I'm going to use that thing until the end of days!
The disks were between $26-30 each in the beginning. Pricing was not the issue. It was the ability to use it all over the place. A lot of drives could not read a ram that was not written in the drive.
@@eng3d Indeed it was. When I was studying computer programming, DVDs were very much the norm. During that time, I touched one and only one DVD-RAM. My uncle had it, and it was like having a Ferrari. It was like touching and handling a Ferrari. Price was very much the issue because if something is not affordable, you will be reluctant to use it. I don't think my uncle ever used it. He had it as a novelty. He did his work mainly on DVD RWs, instead.
Please tell me a DVD-R vs DVD+R video is coming... I never did really understand all that mess, and your vids are like educational crack to me man! I know you'll make it easy to understand!
Minus is just a copy of plus, with slight patent diferences. Philips Sony fell out with JVC Toshiba. Plus is the original patent? minus is the patent copy..... hence why minus discs have more read write errors ( as do not conform to the colour books standards). Same situation with Bluray and HD. JVC (- Victor companies, ie RCA - now known as Sony BMG and Serco) Toshiba (AOL Tinewarner / Bush family) which are Westernhouse JPMC companies ( which these companies are natorious for stealing patents ie Tesla, Mallard, radio etc. So no difference is stealing v2000, plus CD DVD R, and bluray patents.
See so many people requesting video about the differences between -R and +R. There's not very much of a technical difference. Basically, it only has to do with how the player knows where it is on the disc. The pits on record-once discs are created by "burning" the dye that is contained in a groove that was created during manufacturing. That groove is mostly a concentric spiral, but it has a "wobble" superimposed on it. (The spiral moves left and right as seen from the perspective of the writing spot) For CD-R, it uses ATIP, (absolute Time In Pre-groove). Time is encoded in the frequency modulation of the "wobble" in the Pre-groove. For DVD-R, the wobble in the Pre-groove is not frequency modulated. The write spot of your burner gets location information from pits that are placed periodically right next to the spiral track. The pits create a temporary disturbance on the tracking signal significant enough to be detected, but not significant enough to cause actual tracking errors. DVD +R also has a Pre-groove with a constant wobble frequency. But where you would find pits next to the groove in -R, the wobble in the +R groove suddenly makes a phase jump. (If the wobble was moving towards the outside of the disc, it will suddenly jump towards inside) The jump is less than half of the distance between tracks, so the jump will not cause the track to cross with itself. This again causes a disturbance in the tracking signal. For both the -R and the +R, the exact location along the groove is encoded in the pattern of these disturbances.
The format wars? DVD-RAM lost that outright (Panasonic) wile DVD-R is RCA? and DVD+R is Memorex? if I remember correctly.....basically formats from different Companies and in the end DVD+/- R,DvD-/+rw drives were standard. when a 4 way tie resulted
By former boss who wrote the influental CD burning program cdrecord told me that the differences were minor and very technical, but one of the formats was able to make copies of encrypted DVDs while the other one was not (I hope I remember this correctly).
I do find it takes a very particular presenter with a very particular speech pattern to make no background music work. Most channels that don’t use (low, not distracting) background music can end up with an odd "creepy, uncanny valley" feeling for me.
That would have been interesting! You could share save files by swapping disks. Like that one feature some GBA games has with the link cable. Then again, it's kind of unnecessary when wireless is available
But that was one of the advatages of consoles back then You could take your memory card with you to a friend's house and continue where you left pff Nowadays with cloud saves it's kind a pain to do that.
My first self-purchased camcorder recorded on these mini discs, on R, RW's and RAM. Was the first time I ever heard of DVD-RAM! And now I've learned they had full sized ones!
Dude, when I bought my first DVD drive (just a 60€ LG writer, RAM capable) I asked about what DVD-RAM were and a F#&@G guy told me they were special for surveillance or whatever... If I had known they were cheap "usb drives"... I would have liked to ride the incredible DVD-RAM train :(
I got this thing called betamax if you want to get in on the wrong side of history! No really, this feels like blurays, the Reader/Burner was many times more expensive vs dvd variant, with limited functionality over the cheap reader (10x the data, and so slow). And that expense compounds with each device. USB won the storage wars because it was easy to implement, every motherboard had some usb ports, most cases included 2 ports on the top/front, nobody had to spend extra for basic file transfer.
@@ilovefunnyamv2nd Yes, at the end USB drives are way better, but I forgot to mention I live in Spain=tv color broadcast were 100% only in 1978 (no the receptors they took even more years to see TV color as a real mainstream appliance in homes). Here everything take years upon years to have a reasonable price. Personal example, in my house we managed to have a Microwave pass the 2000 (and just because it was "free"), in USA microwaves were mainstream ages ago.
Probably just goes to show how misunderstood they were by the public. He likely didn't mislead you on purpose, but rather, didn't know what they were himself. DVD-RAM, even though it was technically what they were, was likely a very poor brand name for them.
@@dacypher22 In my brain, I associated them with RAM chips in computers, which were wiped when the system shut down. So I, somehow, assumed DVD-RAM were similar, and were not meant for long-term storage. Those little cartridges had batteries maintaining the data or something. It sounds stupid now, but I think the fact that there was no marketing contradicting this theory is part of the problem.
@@theblackwidower I would say even that is above the typical man-on-the-street technical understanding since you knew what RAM was and generally how it worked. Most non-tech people I talk to, if they know about RAM at all, they only recognize it from the small plaque that was next to the computer they bought and someone told them that the higher the number, the better. So yeah, I agree that there was either a confusing or completely non-existent marketing narrative on these.
I fell upon this video a couple of days ago. I wish I had seen it when you released it. My father is a retired Large Systems/ Mainframe and Network Engineer from Unisys Corporation (1981-2019). He was originally hired by Burroughs before the 1986 Burroughs & Sperry merger. After watching this video, I asked him if he had customers that used DVD-RAM. He told me many banks attempted to use them for archival storage. It was his experience that the drives were unreliable in constant use. Apparently the laser heads had issues. Additionally, he said the media quality was questionable. Customers complained of discs being unwritable out of the box. Moreover, the discs in cartridges had known issues of the shutters jamming. He said that at the time tape still proved to be the best medium for archival storage. My Dad a Parallel Zip Drive when I was growing up. Damn was it slow. He told me the reason he stuck with Zip disks was because of his negative exposure to DVD-RAM. I love your videos! Thank you for doing the research and sharing with us!
The tape readers are insanely expensive, tape itslef it's pretty cheap, but the reados just make you want to forget that you were interested in tape. I would also love archiving data in storage, but nope with thoser prices.
@@sbrazenor2 Exactly. For tape backup to be viable, you need to have literal hundreds of terabytes of mission-critical data you don't need immediate fast access to. That's a stretch even for most companies.
I'm something of a tech dinosaur - it took me a year and a half to learn what "copy-and-paste" was - and I appreciate your approach to technology. It's helped me learn a lot, thanks very much.
Those exact gold colored Panasonic DVD-RAM disks are currently used in mobile air traffic control towers (and maybe the stationary ones too, not sure) in the US Marines. They are used to record all radio communications between the tower and planes real time. That's usually multiple audio channels, since there is more than one air traffic controller in the tower. Optical media is still ultra-robust in harsh conditions, way more so then anything else now days.
Are you kidding? Solid state storage is much more robust. There are lots of examples of old storage formats used in different industrial settings (like planes using floppies) but it's more about all the layers of bureaucracy to get through to update the systems, not to mention capital to do so.😮
@@whatever999ization True their is a lot of bureaucracy, but there is also the concept of proven technologies. It's similar concept to why NASA uses old processors and even black and white cameras on some modern probes. They've been around for a long time, and are very well characterized. Optical can also be made more robust against, moisture, chemicals, radiation, etc. You can definitely make some solid state stuff rad-hardened etc... but again it goes back to the already proven technology... and bureaucracy.
@Shadow8t4, the gubm't would be too slow and retarded to even contemplate using DVDs to store data. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised one bit if they still use those worthless 1.44 MB floppies... At one point, the US gubm't was so far behind the times that the Soviets were able to infiltrate various sectors of the Pentagon with the oldest freaking spy techniques such as planting a mini camera in plain sight. One building had a bug hidden behind the US seal in the main lobby of a major office building!! And the drunks at the front desk have no idea how long it had been there or how it got there.
@@largol33t1 Umm... No. The seal bug was a passive bugging device presented to the US ambassador in Soviet Union as a gift and it was placed in his Moscow residence's study. Back in 1945, predating formation of CIA by 2 years. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) As for cameras inside Pentagon, no. That's just stupid. Cameras need regular servicing (film, storage, power, fixing) and/or radio or laser transmission (these days). Even should Soviets (or Russians) had had access to Pentagon offices they would have been picked up as soon as they started transmitting. That's just nonsense. Besides, Soviets got most of their stuff by cultivating human assets. James Jesus Angleton's paranoia about "spies everywhere" stemmed in great part from discovery of the Cambridge Five. Another source Soviets used extensively were public and corporate sources - patent offices and research labs. They figured out that, ruble for ruble, it was FAR more profitable to the Soviet Union to conduct industrial espionage than to spy on western government and military agencies. After all, NATO military and communications equipment was developed and built by commercial entities. Whose security was nowhere near the match to the assets of a hostile government.
There was a predecessor to DVD RAM, called "Phase Drive", with the same 640 mb capacity as a CD, but random access capability just like DVD RAM. It was also cartridge based. Done in by the more common CD RW, and the higher capacity and higher speed of DVD RAM.
If you're ever low on video ideas, I'd love to see one on how those old VHS cleaning tapes worked. Did they actually do anything or just show a weird video and lie to me as a child?
The tape is coated with a cleaning solution that cleans up the magnetic read heads as it is ran across it. The cleaning solution would be expended after a run, hence why the labels say "do not rewind and reuse".
@@zchen27 There were also dry ones that were little more than a slightly abrasive surface that your video heads would grind against, in theory dislodging wedged magnetic tape particles. Yes, this was as potentially destructive to your video heads as it sounds.
I had a reusable one that has a thin cloth tape inside. Before use you would add isopropyl alcohol into a container and it wicked into the cloth as it exited the vhs.
I once pulled the cover off a beat up second-hand vcr that had stopped working even after the same second-hand cleaning tape had been run for the umpteenth time. I noticed that some silver spinny thing was sitting at a weird angle. I decided that was the problem and set about correcting it.
Waaaait. You ask me to pretend it's 2005 and yet show Windows 10 when formatting your DVD-RW? I'm floored by your lack of attention to detail. FLOORED, I tell you!
Check out magneto optical drives or MODs. They're exactly what they sound like! They saw heavy use in the medical industry but tripped me out the first time I saw and used them. Super neat tech!
I was wondering if they were ever used anywhere else. I've only ever seen one magneto optical drive, a Maxoptix drive with 1.2GB disks. I don't know how old the system is but the computer it connects to is running OS/2. Still seems to work pretty well to this day. Not sure why they didn't catch on either.
@@alfonso1954 I think they were crazy expensive. Gears kept dying in the units we maintained for a cardiology clinic that used some ultrasound machines that saved hear scans to them to transfer between he machine and their DICOM server. The computer component (not exposed to the user, there was a custom screen and UI but NT ran the file system and some comms protocols) ran windows NT These machines are like 25k for a 10 year old used model, so I'd have to guess that MODs were just crazy expensive. They were a tad slow too IIRC. But maybe fast for the time? And way better than the only other alternative the ultrasounds had; recording to a standard VHS tapes 😱 LGR has a video on MODs I believe, worth checking out! The cardiologist office wound up upgrading to newer machines that we network directly to the DICOM server so we phased out the use of the drives.
Dude, I haven't heard someone call a USB Drive a "thumbdrive" in actual YEARS. You really do have a way with words and being able to bring us back to years gone by, even ones we may not have been around for! Keep up the good work!
plus + is Philips Sony genuine iso standard, Jvc and Toshiba got kicked out of the media group and made a copy called minus -. Now JVC started the vhs war, ie philips 2000 and sony beta. Next Toshiba is AOL ie Bush family owned and financed by JPMC. This is why minus disc mostly have more read and write issues over plus disc. Philips sued Toshibq and JVC and won them not to have DVD logo on their players writers, Next toshiba jvc moaned about HD on a disc for Hollywood. Philips made bluray and refused JVC and Toshiba to use it... Hence HD-disc was born but this time Philips Bluray won the format war.
To be, plus was always the one that seemed to fail burning and make more coasters than discs and minus was the reliable version. Maybe I'm wrong, but when I notice blank DVDs in stores, they all seem to be the - minus version anymore.
Amazing. 10 years ago, most storage devices were meassured in Gigabytes for size and Megabytes/second for speed. Now, we meassure in GB/s and Terabytes. When this trend goes on, in 2030 we will meassure speeds in TB/s and have sizes of Petabytes.
Our family owned a DVD-RAM camcorder. It was a wonderful device and performed exactly as you described. Easily add/delete clips, great image quality, and software for converting and editing video. Ours was a Hitachi. We used it for years and years. Cost $300-400 but was worlds better than DV or MiniVHS competition in terms of features. It DID however skip if you weren’t careful to hold it somewhat steady.
Microsoft rubbished the driver, and took to long to sort it out. By that time UDF multi open DVD was possible. Issues then became of playing these UDF disc on different drives. Dvdram only then took of in cctv recording. SD and CF cards took off in the consumer market and thus killed of the DVD RAM and really DVDRW as well. Its the same for FDD if LS 120 drives where put in every PC desktop and laptop at the start. But no people bought Zip drives instead, as Omega swamped the market place quick as possible, leaving LS120 dead.
Firewire died because of Microsoft invention called USB (a virtual hardware ). DVDRam really was killed off by Microsoft s blunder of bad driver. Nero tried to resolve it - but this was only in the paid Nero version?, so people didnt pay so people didnt know what DVDram was. Panasonic many kept it on by making dvdram tuner recorders
@@pqrstzxerty1296 USB wasn't invented by Microsoft(though they were involved). Apple was the first system vendor to adopt it in earnest, ditching all their "legacy" ADB, RS-488, and SCSI ports for USB and "FireWire" ports across their entire model line virtually overnight. And IEEE 1394(to use the name of the standard instead of the Apple trademark, or Sony's i.Link trademark for the same interface) died largely because of Apple, not Microsoft. Picture this: It is the dawn of the twenty-first century. We survived Y2K, and we've decided that it is time to take on other challenges. We need new interfaces, because the ones we have are being used for tasks that could not be imagined when they were created. And we decide that "one-size-fits-all" is more accurately "jack of all trades, master of none". So we develop TWO standards. IEEE 1394 for high-speed applications like external storage and video cameras, and USB for low-bandwidth tasks like mice and keyboards and printers. And then, right after the first IBM-compatibles with 1394 come out, Apple announces that they're going to charge a per-port royalty fee for their share of the patents on the standard. Everyone else promptly went "What the HELL, Apple?" and then announced their intention to charge Apple a per-port royalty for the USB ports that were festooning every iMac, which was selling about as fast as Apple could make them. Apple rapidly backed off on the 1394 ransom, because they really didn't want to write all those USB checks, but the damage was done. Their shakedown attempt left peripheral manufacturers scared to make 1394 devices and system manufacturers scared to include 1394 ports. So the USB-IF, realizing that the high-speed interface was now dead, designed USB2 and it's "high-speed" mode to fill the role that 1394 had been intended for(a task that USB2 accomplished passably, if not spectacularly). IEEE 1394 was forever doomed to be "that weird port no one but Apple uses", and we got a jack of all trades interface that was good enough, but not great. THANKS, APPLE.
FireWire was made to fix the problems people were having with SCSI. Thick, heavy cables? Here’s a thin, 6-conductor one! ID conflicts? No IDs needed! Termination wizardry? Nope, that’s gone too. Not enough devices? Upgrade from 7 to 63! Stupid little power adapters for portable drives? FireWire supplies power! Not enough ports? Most FireWire devices had two of them, so you could plug one into the next. And there was only one type of connector, so it didn’t matter which way the cable was turned around. Oh, devices could advertise how much bandwidth they were going to use, to avoid that slowdown problem on USB
@@colinpye1430 It wasn't "rebranded" to 1394 by anyone. That's the actual name of the interface, IEEE 1394. FireWire is as much of a cute nickname as iLink. And just as much trademarked. No license fee is required to call it IEEE 1394, but you owe Apple if you say FireWire.
There's another idea. Please review the JAZ Drive, which was a drive that read cartridges that essentially provided 1GB removable hard drive platters. Later versions increased capacity to 2GB. They were pretty amazing for the time.
Only trouble with camcorders and optical media would be the shock issue while handling the camera... most likely one of the reasons why they didn’t pursue this idea. As always, great video :)
DV tape was alot better for camcorders. Much better quality. You could do 1:1 digital copies of your tape over FireWire, and you simply record over the tapes and reuse them.
@@KylesDigitalLab And you had to copy those at 1:1 speeds, had recording heads, tape transport mechanisms, etc. Some DVD camcorders were also able to use DVD-RW. Only reason why optical media didn't catch on in video cameras was the advent of solid state memory of sufficient capacity.
See so many people requesting video about the differences between -R and +R. There's not very much of a technical difference. Basically, it only has to do with how the player knows where it is on the disc. The pits on record-once discs are created by "burning" the dye that is contained in a groove that was created during manufacturing. That groove is mostly a concentric spiral, but it has a "wobble" superimposed on it. (The spiral moves left and right as seen from the perspective of the writing spot) For CD-R, it uses ATIP, (absolute Time In Pre-groove). Time is encoded in the frequency modulation of the "wobble" in the Pre-groove. For DVD-R, the wobble in the Pre-groove is not frequency modulated. The write spot of your burner gets location information from pits that are placed periodically right next to the spiral track. The pits create a temporary disturbance on the tracking signal significant enough to be detected, but not significant enough to cause actual tracking errors. DVD +R also has a Pre-groove with a constant wobble frequency. But where you would find pits next to the groove in -R, the wobble in the +R groove suddenly makes a phase jump. (If the wobble was moving towards the outside of the disc, it will suddenly jump towards inside) The jump is less than half of the distance between tracks, so the jump will not cause the track to cross with itself. This again causes a disturbance in the tracking signal. For both the -R and the +R, the exact location along the groove is encoded in the pattern of these disturbances.
Different trade-offs. The - type was more readable in early stand-alone DVD players, so good for making DVD video. The + type had more precise addressing, so faster for random data access, more reliable to write, more reliable for making multisession disks. IIRC it had the ability to mark bad blocks and continue when write errors occurred rather than scrap the whole disc.
I had a DVR that was like a VCR, not a TIVO. If you wanted to start recording the 8 PM show and begin watching at 8:15 so you could skip the commercials, you had to use a DVD-RAM disc. It supported all 5 kinds of DVD.
I had a dvd ram video recorder. It was way ahead of its time. I always had struggles finding computers that it would run on. I got it at circuit city 😂
zachzacharyzak: I have a Panasonic DMR-EZ28 DVD Recorder with tuner which records and plays All DVD formats including DVD-RAM.The beauty of the DVD-RAM disk is you can begin recording a TV program, then start watching the beginning of the show even while still recording the program. Or, you can begin recording one program while watching another program that was recorded earlier on the same DVD-RAM disk. Of all formats, DVD-RAM is my choice.
As with any media format, it’s always possible you could end up with duds, due a manufacturing defect, especially if the discs in question are the same brand and from the same production batch. It’s also possible you have a hardware (did you get other DVD-RAM discs to work?). From everything I have read, they did appear much more stable/reliable in terms of being readable decades down the road (vs DVD-R/RW) though obviously we’ll have to wait another 6 years or so to see how long these first gen 1x DVD-RAM media hold up but so far not many complaints but then again it as much more of a niche product so I wouldn’t expect many complaints regardless.
@@Charlesb88 I did say they stopped working, meaning they did work. I can't remember why I didn't use DVD-RAM more, but I think it was a compatibility problem. Probably didn't help that I was a student at the time and only had one PC with limited use for file transfer.
lollandster When I said you might have had faulty discs, what I meant to say was that your discs has some fault that shorten there working lifespan such the way their where manufactured or the materials used having some flaw that mean their lifespan was less the it should have been. For example, early CD-R discs from the 90’s have a notorious habit of becoming unreadable and/or unwritable much sooner they should because of the issue of “disc rot” where poor early manufacturing techniques lead to disc physical or chemical deterioration of the disc over time at a rate sooner then neccesary, something they later corrected for. Even later cheap no-name brands of CD-R can suffer disc rot as they cut to many corners in their production to sell them cheaply. How long a particle medium will last still be readable (or writable where applicable) depends on the quality of the medium your using. For example, Laserdiscs got a somewhat underserved reputation for “laser rot”, a older form of disc rot, due to issues with oxidation in the aluminum layers by poor quality adhesives used to bond the disc halves together with some discs. This problem was mostly limited laserdisc from few pressing plants, with the Sony laserdisc pressing plant in Indiana being notorious for this issue (in America) and one plant in the U.K. Having this issue in Europe.
I had a G4 tower with a DVDRAM drive, and yeah I had nothing but trouble with that thing. 100% of the discs failed within a handful of uses, and many wouldn't even work out of the box.
Late thank you for remind. I had ONE mini dvd-ram, when I was a university student, but wasn't aware of it's capabilities and longetivity. Now DVD-RAM is going to take part in my backup procedures. You are doing great job for our generation.
Panasonic did make camcorders that used mini DVD-RAM discs - we occasionally have customers bring in the discs. They play in our Panasonic DMR series video recorders - you can transfer them to the internal hard drive, edit, and then burn to a regular DVD-R. Have to agree with you that the DVD-RAM discs found their biggest (and maybe only) success in the video market. Panasonic also had software that would let you transfer video files to the PC using a DVD-RAM drive - huge for 2003. Video capture cards have gotten so much better since then but we're still using many of the DMR units we bought 15+ years ago for simple transfers.
I love that you can plug any firewire device, such as a digital 8 camcorder into the DMR recorders and record to DVD-RAM. Very easy to archive to a "current"ly supported media.....
@@AaronSaks I transferred my home movies to DVD-RAM with firewire, copied the file to the hard drive, renamed it *.mpg and it worked fine. Nice when the plan works.
Plot twist: Iomega ZIP drives were utter garbage. I had one, and the damn thing destroyed every disk with the Click Of Death. I had the option of using DVD-RAM or DVD-R, but by the time DVD-R drives dropped to around $500, DVD-RAM was very rare and the discs were almost unobtainable.
Those were great; it was always wonderful to have a bad disk destroy the head in such a way that it then destroyed every other disk you inserted to see if it was just that "one bad disk."
Why the hell did manufacturers of all external storage devices of this kind end up with a click-of-death-style problem? I remember the SparQ by Syquest having the same problem and a cursory search leads me to believe that so did Jaz drives. The worst part is that, for the SparQ at least, but I believe it may have been the case of the Zip and Jaz too, any damaged drive would damage any disk inserted in it in a way that would immediately damage any other SparQ drive if the damaged disk was inserted in it, damaging the disks in the same way and so on. Basically, a hardware virus. And it seems this problem plagued pretty much all the solutions of this era, by no less than three different manufacturers. What the hell?
@@Liam3072 It was the result of trying to adapt hard drive technology to removables. The removable media, if damaged, would actually damage the drive hardware in a way it would damage all further disks inserted into the drive. As a sealed unit, hard drives didn't have these issues or the media or hardware were only damaged once. :-)
I still remember my sense of amazement when I switched from floppy discs to DVD-RAM to store my computer science projects. A few weeks ago, I backed up all of my old DVDs. Decades later, the DVD-RAM discs all read perfectly.
Panasonic VDR-M30 video recorder uses a mini RAM disk as shown at 14:30. Also had SD card, but only for still photos. Worked great. SD cards are much more convenient, although you can loose those microSD cards under your car seat.
I have a copy of knights to the old Republic that came on one of these discs. I remember specifically because my best friend's copy came in four discs and I thought it was so cool that this HUGE game could fit on one.
I still have both my DVD-RAM video recorders. They were great at the time. I didn't understand why they weren't more popular. I could record one program while watching another.
Nice video as usual, dude. I was a semi-early adopter of DVD-RAM for video recording in the early 2000s and loved it. The no session stuff was extremely nice for home theater use, as you could just eject it and know it was fine. Still have a bunch of these (double-sided in the caddies) lying around with shows and stuff but I think my last DVD-RAM recorder is dead. Replaced it not long after with D-VHS, another fun forgotten format I'd love to see your take on some day.
Honestly I think optical media should have adopted/kept the caddy system, even if as an option (like, a drive where you can drop a caddy or disc-only). It's so much more practical despite the added size, I get it tho that it made the media a lot cheaper to not have it.
You can always crack open the cartridge if needed. Some allow you to easily swap the disc, others you have to break a tab off first. There were 4 types of cartridges - types 1 - 4, which told you if the discs were made to be opened and if they were single or double sided.
OMG I had the exact same Mac Performa 6200 CD at 2:10 in my bedroom as a teen... A whole gigabyte of hard drive storage, can you imagine! Mine had a TV card in it, and I used to stay up late watching late-night re-runs of "Ripley's Believe It Or Not". Seeing it brings back a lot of memories!
This seems spot on. In that weird period between when Zip was dying out and when flash storage wasn't terribly cheap, I ended up just using CD-Rs and then DVD-Rs. That "use as removable storage" option was dead useful. Losing space vs using rewritable discs wasn't an issue either because the discs were cheap, and I really did just use it to just throw some small files on, so even if I lost a few MB just from rewrites, I still had hundreds more to burn. Mostly ended up using CD-Rs too, because I didn't have a DVD burner for a while and blank CDs were like 50 cents.
I'd be interested in a video about the "VR mode" on DVD recorders from the mid-2000's. I don't really know how popular it was, but I used it a lot back then, because I loved being able to dynamically edit my recorded material right on the DVD. But of course, I can't play them on any other device, without some tricks.
I wrote my PhD dissertation and saved it on them. Also made CDROM backups constantly. I still have the CDs, but the Zip drive and zip disks got thrown out years ago. The zip drive did well for me even though I know a lot of people had issues with them.
Thanks for sharing ! I do have that Panasonic VCR/DVD recorder combo .It was ahead of it's time ! If you were lucky to find blank DVD RAM discs online ( very expensive now) it lets you start a playback of a program while you're recording it . I believe it's called chasing or slipping playback.
this is a silly thing to appreciate but, I like that your videos don't have music in them. It lets me play my own music in the background, so I can actually focus. thank you
I remember hearing about an optical media formatted like hard/floppy drives but then I didn't hear anymore. I guess I blame pc magazines, I was still reading them back then. When the disks became out of sight, out of mind, I forgot about them. Shame, back then I probably would have bought one and used the hell out of it for backup. Too late now though; I backup to cloud drives so I don't have to manage it.
Always interesting to see the price versus amount of storage space, from years ago. I remember hard drives costing $1 per MB....if they were on a great sale.
im so happy my 13 year old son just shared this video with me, im a new subscriber now, thank you! i used to have a kazillion zip drives ... on another note, if someone at work asks you where the fax machine is at, you gotta chuckle and tell them its in the basement between the mimeo and the printing press, then give a nerdy snort really loudly so everyone can hear
DVD Ram seems like confusing nomenclature because Ram in any computer terms isn’t accessible to to the user only to the processor DVD-HS (DVD-Hard Sector) would have been more appropriate
Can you do a video investigating the reasons why an optical disc was used for some logos on solid state memory formats like SD cards? I'd really love it if you did sometime.
I'm dying at the closed captions at the end.😂 Clearly someone spent some time transcribing. Thought I noticed the "smooth jazz" at the beginning, but the" terrifyingly smooth jazz" at the end sent me over!
Hell, I paid $2500 for an original Bernoulli Box with 2 drives and 10 (or 20?) Megabyte disk cartridges; that was a lot of space for my IBM XT and DOS 2 and later DOS 3. Bleeding edge can be expensive!
I paid £1495 for a 2 x speed cd writer it come with a caddy (you have to put the cd in the caddy then the caddy go in the cd drive) take almost 1 hour to burn a cd full ouch. and £420 for a 20MB hardisk that the price you paid for early adopt off new technology
That's kinda like when Americans use the imperial system, the rest of the world just nod their heads while trying to converted that gibberish to a real unit of measurement in our heads via 2 degrees of separation. Like, it's cute that these people use a measure from pre the industrial revolution...
I remember back when I got my DVD-RAM drive, thinking that I was all cutting-edge and just waiting for all my friends to follow suit in the following years... and they never did. >_
@@stellarfirefly I had a friend once try to convince me to buy a minidisc player, but I’d already bought an mp3 player at that point. It could only hold 20 songs, but I knew a sinking ship when I saw it.
@@atimholt For prerecorded music, MP3 players were a better choice. I bought a portable MiniDisc recorder just to make live recordings. It was very good for that purpose, except it didn't permit digital copying. I only cared about digitally cloning my live recordings. That was one of the things that hampered the format. Sony dropped the format years ago.
Good thing they did not. Most probably they would not have been able to read your disks anyway. They could format it and write it, yes. But read what you put on it? No.
@@atimholt I "invested" pretty heavily in mini-disc, including a table top recording unit, portable player (came with table top recorder), and a portable player/writer. The portable player is capable of playing wma files from the discs, (net MD Walkman) meaning you could have much more music on each disc.
parents had a dvd camcorder that used dvd-ram disks, and i was always confused by the weird stripes on them, and my parent's obsession with making me help them review them on the tv, then erase them instead of just getting new ones. but with this video, i've got a little more context, and just needing a dozen or so disks to import them to pc and make dvds, though i don't remember how we did so, makes a lot more sense now. Thanks!
Great video that took me back in time. I still have 10 brand new and boxed Verbatim 3x DVD-RAMs, as well as at least two brand new burners: an LG GH22NS50 (2011) and an LG GH24NS90 (2012). Not to mention all the other partially used DVD-RAMs and burners from the early 2000s...
"the mac os to first support it was 8.6... 8.6!!" thats nice, dear. i have absolutely no idea when that was. i couldnt even tell you what its up to now.
I hope someday you can delve into Super Audio CD, and DAT (digital audio tape), both of which I have owned. (I think my DAT machine was Devon, and the SACD was Pioneer, but I could be wrong.) Great video, Alec!
I know Techmoan made a pretty good video on DAT, but it'd be neat to see Alec's take on it as well. Perhaps we could also get a video about DAT's data-storing sister, DDS, given that Techmoan's video only covered the audio variant.
I have wanted to know the answer to the mystery of DVD-RAM for nearly 20 years. Thanks for filling me in on the details. I saw it advertised briefly before the other formats took off and I was always puzzled why this seemingly superior format dropped out of sight.
Hey, my dudes. New viewer to this channel. I just wanted to say that this channel is excellent. Love the long videos and the nerdy details this dude puts into the production. Yeah, the video is long, but it's filled with engaging content the whole way through. He's covering so many great topics. Keep up the excellent work, my dude.
Thanks for that blast from the past, I certainly did like DVD-RAM for my Panasonic DVD recorder & used them all the time to make backup copies of the content of my series 1 UK TiVo. Because I did not have a PC DVD-RAM drive I never discovered its other amazing benefits which would have only made me love them more.
4 роки тому+6
Am I the only one coming back to this video sometimes? Actually I'm kind of sad that BD-RAM is not a thing :(
Thank you for reminding me how much better life was circa '05. Back when reality wasn't so bleak we needed gritty reboots of children's cartoons to cope.
Unfortunately using DVD-RAM discs is not the reason for needing to change to a new PVR. My old Panasonic doesn't support HD TV and over recent years I've needed to fix it several times due to failed electronic components. It's now over 10 years old now and does have it's moments so is unfortunately living is on borrowed time :(
**Coming soon:**
USB-ROM
All the speed of a flash drive, all the inconvenience of a DVD
That actually exist.
What?
cdrom except that’s not USB... r/whooosh
@@bizzzzzzle Lol it wasn't even a whooosh...
you mean an EEPROM?
Panasonic just ended DVD-RAM production in May 2019.
RIP DVD-RAM
1996-2019
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The confusion portion can’t be overstated.
All of those incompatible DVD formats were the very reason I never bothered to invest in a re-writable DVD drive for my PC in the early 2000s. I just stayed with my rewritable CDs for the most part and jumped to USB sticks as they became more viable as the floppy replacement.
Too bad since then technology _thrives_ off confusion rather than suffers for it.
In the end, I’m glad I never bothered with any DVD burners. CD-RWs were a good-enough substitute for floppy disks for me in the early 2000s. Nowadays, USB sticks are far more convenient than burning CDs or DVDs anyway.
@@DavidWonn I’ve got a micro-sd card reader that’s like a thumb drive, except it’s got a USB type-a connector on one end, and a type-c connector on the other. I actually take the card out to put it into my Surface Pro. It’s like the best of 3 worlds.
I also have some of those converters so that the micro-SD cards can be treated like regular SD or USB. Quite handy.
I was in college at the time when people switched from floppies to flash drives. In 2003/2004 everybody used floppies for study-related files (to plug into college PCs), but around 2005 I remember buying myself my first 500mb flash drive. I still have it to this day somewhere, although without the plastic cover with exposed PCB. When I finished education in 2007, EVERYBODY switched to flash drives already.
4.7GB of storage in 1998 was more than double my total HD capacity at the time.
That's one major reason it didn't take off. Nobody needed that amount of storage, at least, not your normal home user
@@silverXnoise lol you sure about that? I'm willing to bet it was 4.0gb
My dad's first 100 MHz Pentium PC in 1995 had an 850 MB hard drive. Unless you had a mainframe or a server in an office, there was no need to have a drive bigger than a couple of gigabytes.
silver & noise wrong the 1995 hp pavilion only shipped with an 850mb hard drive
Good to know alucard learned a lot about PCs
"Mac OS 8.6"...
92% of people can't associate that with a date.
Probably not, but anyone even vaguely familiar with MacOS knows that we've been on OSX for _years_ and anything before 9 must be hella old.
I'm assuming your talking about OSX 8.6.. Mac OS 8.6 came out in May 1999.. :)
Edit: No.. You were talking about proper Mac OS.. Not this silly new *NIX one they have been running of late.
@@TechnologyConnections It was worth it for us 8%'ers. Good thing I was already sitting down!
The 1999 Power Macintosh G3 Blue & White had an optional DVD-RAM drive, which is why support was added in MacOS 8.6. Overall a well-detailed video, but he really should've mentioned this as well.
My 2000 Power Mac G4 also has one of these DVD-RAM drives with support for the cartridges, and hence the tray is a bit unusual. It can accept normal CDs or DVDs as well.
i own a mac and i can't associate 8.6 with a date, i don't even know the version number of my macos i just know that it's called mojave
Data storage has become stunningly cheap these days, and small too. Terabyte capacity micro-SD cards!
Yeah, I remember not so long ago that the mere idea of a terabyte micro sd had me laughing and saying "scam". Nowadays I have one.
I wouldn't even bothering getting a TB micro SD card, or a SD card at all
@@lynxfirenze4994 lol
I speculate soon we might even have some kind of external NVMe storage for fast and stable long term storage.
@@coaxill4059 Flash memory would like a word with you.
i remember my mom getting a dvd-ram recorder really late. like past 2010 because she could record weeks worth of her daily TV shows in decent quality on olny 1-2 discs and re-use them as much as she wanted. That's when i learned about the technology since it was waaaaay better than any other options for this specific task.
Huh... interesting.
Back in the 2010s, everyone I knew already had a DVR.
And also, never knew anyone besides my uncle who had a set-top DVD recorder.
Also knew people who still recorded on VHS then, but never DVD...
Maybe in different areas, they were reversed. But I always considered DVRs pretty common by then.
With most cable providers throwing them in with packages quite readily.
@@braelinmichelus yeah might just be a difference between Europe and America, I'm not entirely sure how widespread DVRs were here in Germany during that time. My mom just one day came home with this giant VHS / DVD-RAM combo Recorder she got sold at the store.
@@nonAehT Since around year 2005 Topfield TF5100PVRc / TF5100PVRt was the total winner solution here in Finland. It had normal IDE hard drive and hobbyists created superb software for it to replace the official EPG and UI (it supported running user created software from the factory!). Even today, all devices you can connect to a TV set still have worse features for timeshifting and recording TV. The biggest problem with these devices was that it only supported 576i50 so no HD of any kind was possible.
@@braelinmichelus wow, I actually remember having a vhs/dvd recorder as a kid. it was a cool gadget, but id bet we never recorded more then 3 dvds with it.
DVD-RAM was my jam back in the day! I used a single disc to get me through most of my junior school years and convinced many teachers and other students to use em. Everyone at that time had gotten used to burning through 50 packs of expensive CD Roms for single word documents. It was magical to have a rewritable disic.
In the time where DVD burner where around 40 bucks, you got a DVD-Ram version for 60. These where the golden times of DVD-RAM. I never had a lot of disc (maybe 5?), but they where more then enough. But the convience, speed and accesibility of USB Sticks kinda made them obsolete.
like dvd-ram, my idea for car wheels made of ice also never got any traction
do u mean ice tire? i think a rubber tire on a ice rim or wheel would get just as much traction as a rubber tire on a conventional wheel at the appropriate tempature
So... if we build roads out of studded rubber mats, we can save money by making ice wheels!
get out
@@nyandyn Makes so much sense!
Plz go away terrible dad joke person
A CCTV system we used regularly back in 2009 at my old post used DVD RAM disks.
The disks cost a small fortune.
i wonder if the cost stayed high because they were primarily used to record cable TV?
@Pyroman / I imagine on a CCTV syystem that could be recording 24/7 or close too it that could very quickly add up.
I was thinking CCTV would have been a perfect use for DVD-RAM!
Some success/fail stories are like holding a glorious torch raised high in the sky on top of a mountain, and... there is nobody around you.
You feel proud and excited and saddened and at the end you realize nobody needs that amazing fire at the top of the mountain anyways.
It's still a great achievement worth telling. So thanks for telling it.
That's kind of a brilliant analogy. And also funny at the end. Like something Terry Pratchett would write.
It's like pissing yourself in black pants. No one can really see it ,and you alone feel the warmth.
most optical drives will still read and write these, thou you may need a special driver for that ability, i bought a firewire drive that could read and write these for 600 dollars back in the late 90's when it first came out, it took the cartridge type disk. it still works
Same! I picked up a $500 Que! drive back in ~98-99, and having an external drive was soooo cool! Could have the tower off in the corner, and the drive up on the desk, and that was neat!
Only problem with FireWire was the Fire bit, and I burned out the enclosure in a couple months, and after that it was an internal drive lol. But I thought those cartridges were pretty neat! My drive did those and the plain naked DVD RAM discs, and due to price I think I only ever bought 2 more of those cartridge discs before giving up and just buying normal discs. Wish I had kept some of those... lost them in a small basement flood a while back and pitched them all. Even not working it was a neat bit of history that I wish I had held on to. I still have (and use) the little tote bag that the drive came in though! I mean, I paid $500 for that bag! I'm going to use that thing until the end of days!
The disks were between $26-30 each in the beginning. Pricing was not the issue. It was the ability to use it all over the place. A lot of drives could not read a ram that was not written in the drive.
Pricing was an issue. I remember purchasing 50 dvdr for the same price
Well.. ram was probably pretty dead by that time. I do know I have seen some still being used in some papa johns servers as nightly backup
@@eng3d Indeed it was.
When I was studying computer programming, DVDs were very much the norm. During that time, I touched one and only one DVD-RAM. My uncle had it, and it was like having a Ferrari. It was like touching and handling a Ferrari.
Price was very much the issue because if something is not affordable, you will be reluctant to use it. I don't think my uncle ever used it. He had it as a novelty. He did his work mainly on DVD RWs, instead.
Please tell me a DVD-R vs DVD+R video is coming... I never did really understand all that mess, and your vids are like educational crack to me man! I know you'll make it easy to understand!
Minus is just a copy of plus, with slight patent diferences. Philips Sony fell out with JVC Toshiba. Plus is the original patent? minus is the patent copy..... hence why minus discs have more read write errors ( as do not conform to the colour books standards).
Same situation with Bluray and HD. JVC (- Victor companies, ie RCA - now known as Sony BMG and Serco) Toshiba (AOL Tinewarner / Bush family) which are Westernhouse JPMC companies ( which these companies are natorious for stealing patents ie Tesla, Mallard, radio etc.
So no difference is stealing v2000, plus CD DVD R, and bluray patents.
See so many people requesting video about the differences between -R and +R.
There's not very much of a technical difference.
Basically, it only has to do with how the player knows where it is on the disc.
The pits on record-once discs are created by "burning" the dye that is contained in a groove that was created during manufacturing. That groove is mostly a concentric spiral, but it has a "wobble" superimposed on it. (The spiral moves left and right as seen from the perspective of the writing spot)
For CD-R, it uses ATIP, (absolute Time In Pre-groove). Time is encoded in the frequency modulation of the "wobble" in the Pre-groove.
For DVD-R, the wobble in the Pre-groove is not frequency modulated. The write spot of your burner gets location information from pits that are placed periodically right next to the spiral track.
The pits create a temporary disturbance on the tracking signal significant enough to be detected, but not significant enough to cause actual tracking errors.
DVD +R also has a Pre-groove with a constant wobble frequency. But where you would find pits next to the groove in -R, the wobble in the +R groove suddenly makes a phase jump. (If the wobble was moving towards the outside of the disc, it will suddenly jump towards inside) The jump is less than half of the distance between tracks, so the jump will not cause the track to cross with itself.
This again causes a disturbance in the tracking signal.
For both the -R and the +R, the exact location along the groove is encoded in the pattern of these disturbances.
The format wars?
DVD-RAM lost that outright (Panasonic) wile DVD-R is RCA? and DVD+R is Memorex? if I remember correctly.....basically formats from different Companies and in the end DVD+/- R,DvD-/+rw drives were standard. when a 4 way tie resulted
Gimme dat educrack, man! I need it!
By former boss who wrote the influental CD burning program cdrecord told me that the differences were minor and very technical, but one of the formats was able to make copies of encrypted DVDs while the other one was not (I hope I remember this correctly).
Pure info, no distracting background music or generic tech intros, loving it
I can't emphasize enough how much I hate when UA-cam videos have others m pointless background music
I do find it takes a very particular presenter with a very particular speech pattern to make no background music work. Most channels that don’t use (low, not distracting) background music can end up with an odd "creepy, uncanny valley" feeling for me.
LGR's Jazz is fitting his vibe
@@doubtful_seer I hate the "Matter of fact" streamer react fodder voice that Tiktok based their voice off. Edit: Like the channel Interesting Facts.
oh man let's put them in RAID!
I actually want to see that now.
I mean, should be 100% doable if you can actually get enough DVD-RAM compatible drives
@name2 Any drive with the DVD-multi logo and read and write DVD-RAM disks. So, pretty much any drive works with them.
lol. I actually tried to do that except the HD prices came down before it was economical to do.
James Harris No, don’t banish them to RAID SHADOW LEGENDS, they did nothing wrong!
Oh, lord. Take me back to the 90's, calculating cost per MB of storage.
and today, we shit MBs on a daily basis.
We kinda went back to that when SSDs started to become a thing haha, just not on the mass consumer market.
@@YeOldeKamikaze now we don't calculating MB for ssd as well, and 1, 2 and 8 Tb SSD on the market...
Why do you want that?
i mean today you calculate the price per terrabyte, it's the same concept
DVD-RAM could've been the standard in video game consoles. Instead of saving into a separate memory card, you could just save to the disc instead.
That would have been interesting! You could share save files by swapping disks. Like that one feature some GBA games has with the link cable. Then again, it's kind of unnecessary when wireless is available
You could also install game updates onto the discs
But that was one of the advatages of consoles back then
You could take your memory card with you to a friend's house and continue where you left pff
Nowadays with cloud saves it's kind a pain to do that.
@@tristan6509 Eh, it's not bad. At least on PS5 and Switch.
Much too expensive compared to pressing disks
My first self-purchased camcorder recorded on these mini discs, on R, RW's and RAM. Was the first time I ever heard of DVD-RAM! And now I've learned they had full sized ones!
Bro don't ask about penis lol
My first camcorder was VHS. It was huge!
"pretend it's 2005"
*uses windows 10*
My immersion is ruined
@Opecuted Xp was soooo good, it's amazing how Microdicks is able to fuck up their OS twice in a row kekw
I’m not the only one 🤣
@340bärgarN *recorded with Bandicam*
@@KnocksOfficial unregistered hypercam 3
@Opecuted Or if you want nightmares Vista
4:19 "Because they are!"
The amount of sass is why I love this channel. Alongside the learning part.
DVD - RAM?
*Google Chrome wants to know your location*
Is Google Chrome & RAM the new USA & oil?
Google wants to know everything.
4:25 FAT 32
@@cemsengul16 Google knows everthing
My name goes with this comment very well
Dude, when I bought my first DVD drive (just a 60€ LG writer, RAM capable) I asked about what DVD-RAM were and a F#&@G guy told me they were special for surveillance or whatever... If I had known they were cheap "usb drives"... I would have liked to ride the incredible DVD-RAM train :(
I got this thing called betamax if you want to get in on the wrong side of history!
No really, this feels like blurays, the Reader/Burner was many times more expensive vs dvd variant, with limited functionality over the cheap reader (10x the data, and so slow). And that expense compounds with each device. USB won the storage wars because it was easy to implement, every motherboard had some usb ports, most cases included 2 ports on the top/front, nobody had to spend extra for basic file transfer.
@@ilovefunnyamv2nd Yes, at the end USB drives are way better, but I forgot to mention I live in Spain=tv color broadcast were 100% only in 1978 (no the receptors they took even more years to see TV color as a real mainstream appliance in homes). Here everything take years upon years to have a reasonable price.
Personal example, in my house we managed to have a Microwave pass the 2000 (and just because it was "free"), in USA microwaves were mainstream ages ago.
Probably just goes to show how misunderstood they were by the public. He likely didn't mislead you on purpose, but rather, didn't know what they were himself. DVD-RAM, even though it was technically what they were, was likely a very poor brand name for them.
@@dacypher22 In my brain, I associated them with RAM chips in computers, which were wiped when the system shut down. So I, somehow, assumed DVD-RAM were similar, and were not meant for long-term storage. Those little cartridges had batteries maintaining the data or something.
It sounds stupid now, but I think the fact that there was no marketing contradicting this theory is part of the problem.
@@theblackwidower I would say even that is above the typical man-on-the-street technical understanding since you knew what RAM was and generally how it worked. Most non-tech people I talk to, if they know about RAM at all, they only recognize it from the small plaque that was next to the computer they bought and someone told them that the higher the number, the better. So yeah, I agree that there was either a confusing or completely non-existent marketing narrative on these.
I fell upon this video a couple of days ago. I wish I had seen it when you released it.
My father is a retired Large Systems/ Mainframe and Network Engineer from Unisys Corporation (1981-2019). He was originally hired by Burroughs before the 1986 Burroughs & Sperry merger.
After watching this video, I asked him if he had customers that used DVD-RAM.
He told me many banks attempted to use them for archival storage. It was his experience that the drives were unreliable in constant use. Apparently the laser heads had issues. Additionally, he said the media quality was questionable. Customers complained of discs being unwritable out of the box. Moreover, the discs in cartridges had known issues of the shutters jamming.
He said that at the time tape still proved to be the best medium for archival storage.
My Dad a Parallel Zip Drive when I was growing up. Damn was it slow. He told me the reason he stuck with Zip disks was because of his negative exposure to DVD-RAM.
I love your videos! Thank you for doing the research and sharing with us!
..... And tape backup continues at a high price
I would love consumer tape backup.
The tape readers are insanely expensive, tape itslef it's pretty cheap, but the reados just make you want to forget that you were interested in tape. I would also love archiving data in storage, but nope with thoser prices.
It's called supply and demand. The average consumer doesn't have enough data to archive that it makes a tape drive economically viable.
@@pukalo I have terabytes of it, but it's just cheaper to throw another HDD into the chain and let that be my backup.
@@sbrazenor2 Exactly. For tape backup to be viable, you need to have literal hundreds of terabytes of mission-critical data you don't need immediate fast access to. That's a stretch even for most companies.
I'm something of a tech dinosaur - it took me a year and a half to learn what "copy-and-paste" was - and I appreciate your approach to technology. It's helped me learn a lot, thanks very much.
tech trilobite
Those exact gold colored Panasonic DVD-RAM disks are currently used in mobile air traffic control towers (and maybe the stationary ones too, not sure) in the US Marines. They are used to record all radio communications between the tower and planes real time. That's usually multiple audio channels, since there is more than one air traffic controller in the tower. Optical media is still ultra-robust in harsh conditions, way more so then anything else now days.
Are you kidding? Solid state storage is much more robust. There are lots of examples of old storage formats used in different industrial settings (like planes using floppies) but it's more about all the layers of bureaucracy to get through to update the systems, not to mention capital to do so.😮
@@whatever999ization True their is a lot of bureaucracy, but there is also the concept of proven technologies. It's similar concept to why NASA uses old processors and even black and white cameras on some modern probes. They've been around for a long time, and are very well characterized. Optical can also be made more robust against, moisture, chemicals, radiation, etc. You can definitely make some solid state stuff rad-hardened etc... but again it goes back to the already proven technology... and bureaucracy.
@dundermiflinpaper Fair.
Why would people buy DVD-RAM when with any computer and phone they can just download more RAM and be done with it?
For the last time, you cannot download RAM.
You have to torrent it.
Waiting for someone who genuinely wants this! 😂
ive downloaded a 32GB dual channel stick for free!
Who on the earth has space on their phone to download stuff from the internet?
@@raafmaat Damn, got link?
"Buying 841 DVDs doesn't make much sense."
You obviously haven't worked for the government before. XD
@@toastcrunch9387 👻
Working for the government? Do you seriously know what a government is, and all of the levels of workers that comprise a government?
*851
XD
@Shadow8t4, the gubm't would be too slow and retarded to even contemplate using DVDs to store data. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised one bit if they still use those worthless 1.44 MB floppies... At one point, the US gubm't was so far behind the times that the Soviets were able to infiltrate various sectors of the Pentagon with the oldest freaking spy techniques such as planting a mini camera in plain sight. One building had a bug hidden behind the US seal in the main lobby of a major office building!! And the drunks at the front desk have no idea how long it had been there or how it got there.
@@largol33t1 Umm... No.
The seal bug was a passive bugging device presented to the US ambassador in Soviet Union as a gift and it was placed in his Moscow residence's study. Back in 1945, predating formation of CIA by 2 years.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
As for cameras inside Pentagon, no. That's just stupid.
Cameras need regular servicing (film, storage, power, fixing) and/or radio or laser transmission (these days).
Even should Soviets (or Russians) had had access to Pentagon offices they would have been picked up as soon as they started transmitting.
That's just nonsense.
Besides, Soviets got most of their stuff by cultivating human assets. James Jesus Angleton's paranoia about "spies everywhere" stemmed in great part from discovery of the Cambridge Five.
Another source Soviets used extensively were public and corporate sources - patent offices and research labs.
They figured out that, ruble for ruble, it was FAR more profitable to the Soviet Union to conduct industrial espionage than to spy on western government and military agencies.
After all, NATO military and communications equipment was developed and built by commercial entities.
Whose security was nowhere near the match to the assets of a hostile government.
There was a predecessor to DVD RAM, called "Phase Drive", with the same 640 mb capacity as a CD, but random access capability just like DVD RAM. It was also cartridge based. Done in by the more common CD RW, and the higher capacity and higher speed of DVD RAM.
If you're ever low on video ideas, I'd love to see one on how those old VHS cleaning tapes worked. Did they actually do anything or just show a weird video and lie to me as a child?
The tape is coated with a cleaning solution that cleans up the magnetic read heads as it is ran across it. The cleaning solution would be expended after a run, hence why the labels say "do not rewind and reuse".
@@zchen27 There were also dry ones that were little more than a slightly abrasive surface that your video heads would grind against, in theory dislodging wedged magnetic tape particles.
Yes, this was as potentially destructive to your video heads as it sounds.
I had a reusable one that has a thin cloth tape inside.
Before use you would add isopropyl alcohol into a container and it wicked into the cloth as it exited the vhs.
@@ttomkins4867 it had to smell nice after it's done
I once pulled the cover off a beat up second-hand vcr that had stopped working even after the same second-hand cleaning tape had been run for the umpteenth time. I noticed that some silver spinny thing was sitting at a weird angle. I decided that was the problem and set about correcting it.
Please make a video on the - vs + nonsense.
Yes, excellent idea. I don't think I understood the difference then, and if I did I've forgotten it now!
Here's the summary: it was a pain in the ass for a lot of people until they just made drives that could do both.
He did 😂😂 ...........one yr later
ua-cam.com/video/e1mJv9pxm7M/v-deo.html
Waaaait. You ask me to pretend it's 2005 and yet show Windows 10 when formatting your DVD-RW? I'm floored by your lack of attention to detail. FLOORED, I tell you!
Not even going to talk about the blu ray drive
But, those blue usb 3.0 ports look suspect 🧐
@@Curlywhrly Blu-Ray existed, but likely not a pc drive version.
That explains why I had a seizure watching this video!
it be witchcraft of the highest order
"These CD's are a bunch of poopy nonsense" -Me Circa 2005
Check out magneto optical drives or MODs.
They're exactly what they sound like! They saw heavy use in the medical industry but tripped me out the first time I saw and used them. Super neat tech!
ua-cam.com/video/sYiP47Jy3HA/v-deo.html
MiniDiscs were MO too, I think. Very impressive stuff.
@@danijel-ch2gk You're right, recordable MiniDiscs were MO.
I always loved the ones in caddies and would go out of my way to purchase them when I could.
I was wondering if they were ever used anywhere else. I've only ever seen one magneto optical drive, a Maxoptix drive with 1.2GB disks. I don't know how old the system is but the computer it connects to is running OS/2. Still seems to work pretty well to this day. Not sure why they didn't catch on either.
@@alfonso1954 I think they were crazy expensive. Gears kept dying in the units we maintained for a cardiology clinic that used some ultrasound machines that saved hear scans to them to transfer between he machine and their DICOM server. The computer component (not exposed to the user, there was a custom screen and UI but NT ran the file system and some comms protocols) ran windows NT
These machines are like 25k for a 10 year old used model, so I'd have to guess that MODs were just crazy expensive. They were a tad slow too IIRC. But maybe fast for the time? And way better than the only other alternative the ultrasounds had; recording to a standard VHS tapes 😱
LGR has a video on MODs I believe, worth checking out!
The cardiologist office wound up upgrading to newer machines that we network directly to the DICOM server so we phased out the use of the drives.
Dude, I haven't heard someone call a USB Drive a "thumbdrive" in actual YEARS. You really do have a way with words and being able to bring us back to years gone by, even ones we may not have been around for! Keep up the good work!
Doesn't Linus call them that regularly?
Please do the difference between +/- DVD formats!
plus + is Philips Sony genuine iso standard, Jvc and Toshiba got kicked out of the media group and made a copy called minus -. Now JVC started the vhs war, ie philips 2000 and sony beta. Next Toshiba is AOL ie Bush family owned and financed by JPMC. This is why minus disc mostly have more read and write issues over plus disc. Philips sued Toshibq and JVC and won them not to have DVD logo on their players writers, Next toshiba jvc moaned about HD on a disc for Hollywood. Philips made bluray and refused JVC and Toshiba to use it... Hence HD-disc was born but this time Philips Bluray won the format war.
To be, plus was always the one that seemed to fail burning and make more coasters than discs and minus was the reliable version. Maybe I'm wrong, but when I notice blank DVDs in stores, they all seem to be the - minus version anymore.
Maybe I was just oblivious at the time, but I honestly never noticed the + and -
@@lwvmobile i certainly had the same impression.
I wish Bluray-ram was a thing.
Same
Blu-ram
Ram-ray
HD DVD-RAM
VHS-RAM (I know it's not possible)
Amazing. 10 years ago, most storage devices were meassured in Gigabytes for size and Megabytes/second for speed.
Now, we meassure in GB/s and Terabytes. When this trend goes on, in 2030 we will meassure speeds in TB/s and have sizes of Petabytes.
yet my fiber optic internet is still 5 mb/s
@@Polar_Onyx Then you have a bad ISP.
Madd the Sane naw, It's just google fibers free plan
The first jumps are always the biggest.
Unfortunately.
It's funny how we talk about terrabytes all the time, unless we talk about mobile cellphone data. Then suddenly 100MB is a lot.
Our family owned a DVD-RAM camcorder. It was a wonderful device and performed exactly as you described. Easily add/delete clips, great image quality, and software for converting and editing video. Ours was a Hitachi. We used it for years and years. Cost $300-400 but was worlds better than DV or MiniVHS competition in terms of features. It DID however skip if you weren’t careful to hold it somewhat steady.
"Why didn't DVD RAM become the new super floppy?"
words I had never thought i'd hear.
Microsoft rubbished the driver, and took to long to sort it out. By that time UDF multi open DVD was possible. Issues then became of playing these UDF disc on different drives. Dvdram only then took of in cctv recording. SD and CF cards took off in the consumer market and thus killed of the DVD RAM and really DVDRW as well. Its the same for FDD if LS 120 drives where put in every PC desktop and laptop at the start. But no people bought Zip drives instead, as Omega swamped the market place quick as possible, leaving LS120 dead.
Firewire died because of Microsoft invention called USB (a virtual hardware ). DVDRam really was killed off by Microsoft s blunder of bad driver. Nero tried to resolve it - but this was only in the paid Nero version?, so people didnt pay so people didnt know what DVDram was.
Panasonic many kept it on by making dvdram tuner recorders
@@pqrstzxerty1296 USB wasn't invented by Microsoft(though they were involved). Apple was the first system vendor to adopt it in earnest, ditching all their "legacy" ADB, RS-488, and SCSI ports for USB and "FireWire" ports across their entire model line virtually overnight.
And IEEE 1394(to use the name of the standard instead of the Apple trademark, or Sony's i.Link trademark for the same interface) died largely because of Apple, not Microsoft.
Picture this: It is the dawn of the twenty-first century. We survived Y2K, and we've decided that it is time to take on other challenges. We need new interfaces, because the ones we have are being used for tasks that could not be imagined when they were created. And we decide that "one-size-fits-all" is more accurately "jack of all trades, master of none". So we develop TWO standards. IEEE 1394 for high-speed applications like external storage and video cameras, and USB for low-bandwidth tasks like mice and keyboards and printers.
And then, right after the first IBM-compatibles with 1394 come out, Apple announces that they're going to charge a per-port royalty fee for their share of the patents on the standard.
Everyone else promptly went "What the HELL, Apple?" and then announced their intention to charge Apple a per-port royalty for the USB ports that were festooning every iMac, which was selling about as fast as Apple could make them. Apple rapidly backed off on the 1394 ransom, because they really didn't want to write all those USB checks, but the damage was done. Their shakedown attempt left peripheral manufacturers scared to make 1394 devices and system manufacturers scared to include 1394 ports. So the USB-IF, realizing that the high-speed interface was now dead, designed USB2 and it's "high-speed" mode to fill the role that 1394 had been intended for(a task that USB2 accomplished passably, if not spectacularly). IEEE 1394 was forever doomed to be "that weird port no one but Apple uses", and we got a jack of all trades interface that was good enough, but not great.
THANKS, APPLE.
FireWire was made to fix the problems people were having with SCSI. Thick, heavy cables? Here’s a thin, 6-conductor one! ID conflicts? No IDs needed! Termination wizardry? Nope, that’s gone too. Not enough devices? Upgrade from 7 to 63! Stupid little power adapters for portable drives? FireWire supplies power! Not enough ports? Most FireWire devices had two of them, so you could plug one into the next. And there was only one type of connector, so it didn’t matter which way the cable was turned around. Oh, devices could advertise how much bandwidth they were going to use, to avoid that slowdown problem on USB
@@colinpye1430 It wasn't "rebranded" to 1394 by anyone. That's the actual name of the interface, IEEE 1394. FireWire is as much of a cute nickname as iLink. And just as much trademarked. No license fee is required to call it IEEE 1394, but you owe Apple if you say FireWire.
I loved all the weird intermediary storage stuff that came out in the early to mid 2000's. A very interesting time!
🎵 terrifyingly smooth jazz 🎵
There's another idea. Please review the JAZ Drive, which was a drive that read cartridges that essentially provided 1GB removable hard drive platters. Later versions increased capacity to 2GB. They were pretty amazing for the time.
Omg 🤣🤣🤣
I love it though!
This would have been perfect after his closed-captions episode.
Nice. I'm not the only one who notices it.
More easy listening jazz.
Good stuff, innit!?!?
Only trouble with camcorders and optical media would be the shock issue while handling the camera... most likely one of the reasons why they didn’t pursue this idea.
As always, great video :)
DV tape was alot better for camcorders. Much better quality. You could do 1:1 digital copies of your tape over FireWire, and you simply record over the tapes and reuse them.
With a large buffer shouldn't be a problem I guess, depends on the amount of shaking and the bps tho
There was a lot of camcorders using writable optical media. Error correction and buffer memory were the solution, just like in cd players.
@@KylesDigitalLab Same would've applied to DVD RAM too, and better quality
@@KylesDigitalLab And you had to copy those at 1:1 speeds, had recording heads, tape transport mechanisms, etc. Some DVD camcorders were also able to use DVD-RW. Only reason why optical media didn't catch on in video cameras was the advent of solid state memory of sufficient capacity.
I still use my old Maxell DVD-RAM discs occasionally. 😊👍
Please, do get into that -/+ nonsense! x2
Harry Yeung ohh boy do I have a surprise for you
See so many people requesting video about the differences between -R and +R.
There's not very much of a technical difference.
Basically, it only has to do with how the player knows where it is on the disc.
The pits on record-once discs are created by "burning" the dye that is contained in a groove that was created during manufacturing. That groove is mostly a concentric spiral, but it has a "wobble" superimposed on it. (The spiral moves left and right as seen from the perspective of the writing spot)
For CD-R, it uses ATIP, (absolute Time In Pre-groove). Time is encoded in the frequency modulation of the "wobble" in the Pre-groove.
For DVD-R, the wobble in the Pre-groove is not frequency modulated. The write spot of your burner gets location information from pits that are placed periodically right next to the spiral track.
The pits create a temporary disturbance on the tracking signal significant enough to be detected, but not significant enough to cause actual tracking errors.
DVD +R also has a Pre-groove with a constant wobble frequency. But where you would find pits next to the groove in -R, the wobble in the +R groove suddenly makes a phase jump. (If the wobble was moving towards the outside of the disc, it will suddenly jump towards inside) The jump is less than half of the distance between tracks, so the jump will not cause the track to cross with itself.
This again causes a disturbance in the tracking signal.
For both the -R and the +R, the exact location along the groove is encoded in the pattern of these disturbances.
Then why two standards?
Different trade-offs.
The - type was more readable in early stand-alone DVD players, so good for making DVD video.
The + type had more precise addressing, so faster for random data access, more reliable to write, more reliable for making multisession disks. IIRC it had the ability to mark bad blocks and continue when write errors occurred rather than scrap the whole disc.
I had a DVR that was like a VCR, not a TIVO. If you wanted to start recording the 8 PM show and begin watching at 8:15 so you could skip the commercials, you had to use a DVD-RAM disc. It supported all 5 kinds of DVD.
Those DVD-RAMs remind me of when I was a kid. The First CD-ROM I was amazed by was put into a CD Caddy. An Encyclopedia on a CD-ROM!
500 documents, 50 music files, or 10 videos!
I had a dvd ram video recorder. It was way ahead of its time. I always had struggles finding computers that it would run on. I got it at circuit city 😂
Same with me. A Panasonic, I suppose?
Mario Weiss that’s the one!
zachzacharyzak: I have a Panasonic DMR-EZ28 DVD Recorder with tuner which records and plays All DVD formats including DVD-RAM.The beauty of the DVD-RAM disk is you can begin recording a TV program, then start watching the beginning of the show even while still recording the program. Or, you can begin recording one program while watching another program that was recorded earlier on the same DVD-RAM disk. Of all formats, DVD-RAM is my choice.
Circuit city was the place back then.
At this time I was 13 and I used my DVD-RW as removable storage, I had one DVD RAM disc but i broke it, I could never find DVD-RAM on store shelves
I had a couple of DVD-RAM discs and I believe I threw them away because they stopped working, so I wouldn't be so quick to believe the 30 year claim.
Stopped working doing what? Reading them or rewriting? I have >10yo DVD-RAM discs that are still reading fine.
As with any media format, it’s always possible you could end up with duds, due a manufacturing defect, especially if the discs in question are the same brand and from the same production batch. It’s also possible you have a hardware (did you get other DVD-RAM discs to work?). From everything I have read, they did appear much more stable/reliable in terms of being readable decades down the road (vs DVD-R/RW) though obviously we’ll have to wait another 6 years or so to see how long these first gen 1x DVD-RAM media hold up but so far not many complaints but then again it as much more of a niche product so I wouldn’t expect many complaints regardless.
@@Charlesb88 I did say they stopped working, meaning they did work. I can't remember why I didn't use DVD-RAM more, but I think it was a compatibility problem. Probably didn't help that I was a student at the time and only had one PC with limited use for file transfer.
lollandster When I said you might have had faulty discs, what I meant to say was that your discs has some fault that shorten there working lifespan such the way their where manufactured or the materials used having some flaw that mean their lifespan was less the it should have been. For example, early CD-R discs from the 90’s have a notorious habit of becoming unreadable and/or unwritable much sooner they should because of the issue of “disc rot” where poor early manufacturing techniques lead to disc physical or chemical deterioration of the disc over time at a rate sooner then neccesary, something they later corrected for. Even later cheap no-name brands of CD-R can suffer disc rot as they cut to many corners in their production to sell them cheaply. How long a particle medium will last still be readable (or writable where applicable) depends on the quality of the medium your using. For example, Laserdiscs got a somewhat underserved reputation for “laser rot”, a older form of disc rot, due to issues with oxidation in the aluminum layers by poor quality adhesives used to bond the disc halves together with some discs. This problem was mostly limited laserdisc from few pressing plants, with the Sony laserdisc pressing plant in Indiana being notorious for this issue (in America) and one plant in the U.K. Having this issue in Europe.
I had a G4 tower with a DVDRAM drive, and yeah I had nothing but trouble with that thing. 100% of the discs failed within a handful of uses, and many wouldn't even work out of the box.
"Your Motorola Razr is the envy of the neighborhood."
Man I actually had one of those, still miss it.
Late thank you for remind. I had ONE mini dvd-ram, when I was a university student, but wasn't aware of it's capabilities and longetivity. Now DVD-RAM is going to take part in my backup procedures. You are doing great job for our generation.
Panasonic did make camcorders that used mini DVD-RAM discs - we occasionally have customers bring in the discs. They play in our Panasonic DMR series video recorders - you can transfer them to the internal hard drive, edit, and then burn to a regular DVD-R. Have to agree with you that the DVD-RAM discs found their biggest (and maybe only) success in the video market. Panasonic also had software that would let you transfer video files to the PC using a DVD-RAM drive - huge for 2003. Video capture cards have gotten so much better since then but we're still using many of the DMR units we bought 15+ years ago for simple transfers.
I love that you can plug any firewire device, such as a digital 8 camcorder into the DMR recorders and record to DVD-RAM. Very easy to archive to a "current"ly supported media.....
@@AaronSaks I transferred my home movies to DVD-RAM with firewire, copied the file to the hard drive, renamed it *.mpg and it worked fine. Nice when the plan works.
@@cowboybob7093 yeah. That works. But to play in a standard DVD set top player, you need to remaster it, but you don't need to reencode the video.
@@AaronSaks Sure thing, I was going to finish up with "at that point it's clay in the hands of the artist."
Plot twist: Iomega ZIP drives were utter garbage. I had one, and the damn thing destroyed every disk with the Click Of Death. I had the option of using DVD-RAM or DVD-R, but by the time DVD-R drives dropped to around $500, DVD-RAM was very rare and the discs were almost unobtainable.
This is why their click drive (the tiny ones) got renamed to PocketZip, because of the Click Of Death scandal
@@mspeter97 LGR had a few "oddware" episodes about that, highly recommend.
Those were great; it was always wonderful to have a bad disk destroy the head in such a way that it then destroyed every other disk you inserted to see if it was just that "one bad disk."
Why the hell did manufacturers of all external storage devices of this kind end up with a click-of-death-style problem? I remember the SparQ by Syquest having the same problem and a cursory search leads me to believe that so did Jaz drives. The worst part is that, for the SparQ at least, but I believe it may have been the case of the Zip and Jaz too, any damaged drive would damage any disk inserted in it in a way that would immediately damage any other SparQ drive if the damaged disk was inserted in it, damaging the disks in the same way and so on. Basically, a hardware virus.
And it seems this problem plagued pretty much all the solutions of this era, by no less than three different manufacturers. What the hell?
@@Liam3072 It was the result of trying to adapt hard drive technology to removables. The removable media, if damaged, would actually damage the drive hardware in a way it would damage all further disks inserted into the drive.
As a sealed unit, hard drives didn't have these issues or the media or hardware were only damaged once. :-)
I still remember my sense of amazement when I switched from floppy discs to DVD-RAM to store my computer science projects. A few weeks ago, I backed up all of my old DVDs. Decades later, the DVD-RAM discs all read perfectly.
I will always fondly remember my multi write drive that came with a pair of DVD RAM discs
Panasonic VDR-M30 video recorder uses a mini RAM disk as shown at 14:30. Also had SD card, but only for still photos. Worked great. SD cards are much more convenient, although you can loose those microSD cards under your car seat.
I have a copy of knights to the old Republic that came on one of these discs. I remember specifically because my best friend's copy came in four discs and I thought it was so cool that this HUGE game could fit on one.
I still have both my DVD-RAM video recorders. They were great at the time. I didn't understand why they weren't more popular. I could record one program while watching another.
Nice video as usual, dude. I was a semi-early adopter of DVD-RAM for video recording in the early 2000s and loved it. The no session stuff was extremely nice for home theater use, as you could just eject it and know it was fine. Still have a bunch of these (double-sided in the caddies) lying around with shows and stuff but I think my last DVD-RAM recorder is dead. Replaced it not long after with D-VHS, another fun forgotten format I'd love to see your take on some day.
Honestly I think optical media should have adopted/kept the caddy system, even if as an option (like, a drive where you can drop a caddy or disc-only). It's so much more practical despite the added size, I get it tho that it made the media a lot cheaper to not have it.
You can always crack open the cartridge if needed. Some allow you to easily swap the disc, others you have to break a tab off first. There were 4 types of cartridges - types 1 - 4, which told you if the discs were made to be opened and if they were single or double sided.
OMG I had the exact same Mac Performa 6200 CD at 2:10 in my bedroom as a teen... A whole gigabyte of hard drive storage, can you imagine! Mine had a TV card in it, and I used to stay up late watching late-night re-runs of "Ripley's Believe It Or Not". Seeing it brings back a lot of memories!
This seems spot on.
In that weird period between when Zip was dying out and when flash storage wasn't terribly cheap, I ended up just using CD-Rs and then DVD-Rs. That "use as removable storage" option was dead useful. Losing space vs using rewritable discs wasn't an issue either because the discs were cheap, and I really did just use it to just throw some small files on, so even if I lost a few MB just from rewrites, I still had hundreds more to burn. Mostly ended up using CD-Rs too, because I didn't have a DVD burner for a while and blank CDs were like 50 cents.
You should do a video on digital video like MPEG.
Yes! Evolution of professional, then consumer digital video formats.
Yesss
And later maybe the story behind DivX and Xvid.
@@SirCrest MPEG-4
@@SirCrest Xvideos
Oh I am learning, I love these videos! Thank you,easy to understand, relatable videos. Your voice is lovely I understand and this make me happy
I'd be interested in a video about the "VR mode" on DVD recorders from the mid-2000's. I don't really know how popular it was, but I used it a lot back then, because I loved being able to dynamically edit my recorded material right on the DVD. But of course, I can't play them on any other device, without some tricks.
I would love to see a video on the legendary “Zip disk”
zip disks bad !
I had to pause the video and google what that was
I'll sum it up for you: [click-click-click] Your files are gone.
I wrote my PhD dissertation and saved it on them. Also made CDROM backups constantly. I still have the CDs, but the Zip drive and zip disks got thrown out years ago. The zip drive did well for me even though I know a lot of people had issues with them.
Thanks for sharing ! I do have that Panasonic VCR/DVD recorder combo .It was ahead of it's time ! If you were lucky to find blank DVD RAM discs online ( very expensive now) it lets you start a playback of a program while you're recording it . I believe it's called chasing or slipping playback.
Fascinating look at a technology I'd never heard of - great work!
I like that you included the ps2 memory card. I wasn't expecting it do be in there.
Technically, it is a flash medium. Just vendor-specific.
@@MaddTheSane and with its own custom filesystem!
I never paid so much money for 8MB of storage.
this is a silly thing to appreciate but, I like that your videos don't have music in them. It lets me play my own music in the background, so I can actually focus. thank you
I remember hearing about an optical media formatted like hard/floppy drives but then I didn't hear anymore. I guess I blame pc magazines, I was still reading them back then. When the disks became out of sight, out of mind, I forgot about them. Shame, back then I probably would have bought one and used the hell out of it for backup. Too late now though; I backup to cloud drives so I don't have to manage it.
Always interesting to see the price versus amount of storage space, from years ago. I remember hard drives costing $1 per MB....if they were on a great sale.
im so happy my 13 year old son just shared this video with me, im a new subscriber now, thank you! i used to have a kazillion zip drives ... on another note, if someone at work asks you where the fax machine is at, you gotta chuckle and tell them its in the basement between the mimeo and the printing press, then give a nerdy snort really loudly so everyone can hear
DVD Ram seems like confusing nomenclature because Ram in any computer terms isn’t accessible to to the user only to the processor DVD-HS (DVD-Hard Sector) would have been more appropriate
Tell that to Amiga.
Can you do a video investigating the reasons why an optical disc was used for some logos on solid state memory formats like SD cards? I'd really love it if you did sometime.
1x, 2x, 4x are just write speeds.
It has nothing to do with optical disks.
Alex mentioned in a past video that he'd probably do a video on that topic sometime. (Also, the term for optical discs is _discs,_ not _disks._
@@williamreid6255 Yeah I know of the rule where Disk is for magnetic media and Disc is for optical drive media.
But disc and disk are interchangeable
@@IIGrayfoxII en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_disc just in case someone needs a reference.
@@IIGrayfoxII The D in the SD Card logo looks like a disc, I am pretty sure that's what this comment was talking about
Thanks for including the credit on the photos. It's helping me find more cool disc formats.
You said “DVD” 276 times.
4:10 Oooo...this would make for a nice desktop background!
I'm dying at the closed captions at the end.😂 Clearly someone spent some time transcribing.
Thought I noticed the "smooth jazz" at the beginning, but the" terrifyingly smooth jazz" at the end sent me over!
$17000 for a DVD-R drive. Jesus!
Hell, I paid $2500 for an original Bernoulli Box with 2 drives and 10 (or 20?) Megabyte disk cartridges; that was a lot of space for my IBM XT and DOS 2 and later DOS 3. Bleeding edge can be expensive!
And it was DVD-R(A) too - not even capable of writing the DVD-R(G) discs we have today.
I paid £1495 for a 2 x speed cd writer it come with a caddy (you have to put the cd in the caddy then the caddy go in the cd drive) take almost 1 hour to burn a cd full ouch. and £420 for a 20MB hardisk
that the price you paid for early adopt off new technology
Thats 1997 for you
25" flat screens used to cost $25,000.
I love how you used Mac os as time reference as if anyone uses it
When was that?
1998
That's kinda like when Americans use the imperial system, the rest of the world just nod their heads while trying to converted that gibberish to a real unit of measurement in our heads via 2 degrees of separation. Like, it's cute that these people use a measure from pre the industrial revolution...
@@Ben-Rogue Pretty sure the English brought the imperial system to America when they were in their "own every bit of land" phase.
@@M50A1 and they realised their mistake and switched to the superior system unlike USA
YES! YOU HAVE ALREADY DONE AN EPISODE ON DVD-RAM!
My father had a DVD-RAM DVR. It was amazing.
"Pretend it's 2005"
_Has a 3TB HDD_
I have a 256 gig SSD. But I also have a 4 terabyte portable hard drive so it's all good.
Just be happy he's not using the Windows Metro UI. Young kids know nothing about immersion
I remember back when I got my DVD-RAM drive, thinking that I was all cutting-edge and just waiting for all my friends to follow suit in the following years... and they never did. >_
But then, I could say exactly the same for my laserdisc and minidisc units.
@@stellarfirefly I had a friend once try to convince me to buy a minidisc player, but I’d already bought an mp3 player at that point. It could only hold 20 songs, but I knew a sinking ship when I saw it.
@@atimholt For prerecorded music, MP3 players were a better choice. I bought a portable MiniDisc recorder just to make live recordings. It was very good for that purpose, except it didn't permit digital copying. I only cared about digitally cloning my live recordings. That was one of the things that hampered the format. Sony dropped the format years ago.
Good thing they did not. Most probably they would not have been able to read your disks anyway. They could format it and write it, yes. But read what you put on it? No.
@@atimholt I "invested" pretty heavily in mini-disc, including a table top recording unit, portable player (came with table top recorder), and a portable player/writer. The portable player is capable of playing wma files from the discs, (net MD Walkman) meaning you could have much more music on each disc.
parents had a dvd camcorder that used dvd-ram disks, and i was always confused by the weird stripes on them, and my parent's obsession with making me help them review them on the tv, then erase them instead of just getting new ones. but with this video, i've got a little more context, and just needing a dozen or so disks to import them to pc and make dvds, though i don't remember how we did so, makes a lot more sense now. Thanks!
How much dedotated DVD-WAM do I need for a swerver?
As a hard-drive substitute? It'd be cheaper to use a SATA SSD.
@@MaddTheSane r/wooosh
(it's a joke about RAM, not about storage)
Being born in 2004, I feel like I just barely missed all the cool old tech and formats.
I don't know if it was cool and amusing at the time. Now we have
NVME vs SATA
UEFI vs BIOS
LED vs OLED
Thermal Paste vs Pad
Comes immediately to mind
Great video that took me back in time. I still have 10 brand new and boxed Verbatim 3x DVD-RAMs, as well as at least two brand new burners: an LG GH22NS50 (2011) and an LG GH24NS90 (2012).
Not to mention all the other partially used DVD-RAMs and burners from the early 2000s...
"the mac os to first support it was 8.6... 8.6!!" thats nice, dear. i have absolutely no idea when that was. i couldnt even tell you what its up to now.
1999 is when it released
@@dianagarcia6336 i grew up on System 7 lol
I hope someday you can delve into Super Audio CD, and DAT (digital audio tape), both of which I have owned. (I think my DAT machine was Devon, and the SACD was Pioneer, but I could be wrong.) Great video, Alec!
I know Techmoan made a pretty good video on DAT, but it'd be neat to see Alec's take on it as well. Perhaps we could also get a video about DAT's data-storing sister, DDS, given that Techmoan's video only covered the audio variant.
@@VinchVolt Same answer. Techmoan is a great channel. How do you link a channel on here? lol
I have wanted to know the answer to the mystery of DVD-RAM for nearly 20 years. Thanks for filling me in on the details. I saw it advertised briefly before the other formats took off and I was always puzzled why this seemingly superior format dropped out of sight.
birb
Hey, my dudes. New viewer to this channel.
I just wanted to say that this channel is excellent. Love the long videos and the nerdy details this dude puts into the production. Yeah, the video is long, but it's filled with engaging content the whole way through. He's covering so many great topics. Keep up the excellent work, my dude.
Oh, I remember these! Thought they were super cool as a kid.
Thanks for that blast from the past, I certainly did like DVD-RAM for my Panasonic DVD recorder & used them all the time to make backup copies of the content of my series 1 UK TiVo. Because I did not have a PC DVD-RAM drive I never discovered its other amazing benefits which would have only made me love them more.
Am I the only one coming back to this video sometimes?
Actually I'm kind of sad that BD-RAM is not a thing :(
So if there's ram on a DVD, then why isn't DVD-CPU a thing yet?
Because Intel and AMD (Advanced micro devices) wants you to not know about it. Otherwise you can just download a CPU from a torrent site.
justinl458 I downloaded an extra monitor
lol
Because it means you'd need a DVD-MOTHERBOARD, and DVD-PSU
I want an ISO of that
Thank you for reminding me how much better life was circa '05.
Back when reality wasn't so bleak we needed gritty reboots of children's cartoons to cope.
I still use DVD-RAM discs frequently as is the only way I can transfer recordings from my Panasonic PVR onto my PC... I really must upgrade my PVR :-D
Well if it still works and you are not annoyed by th elack of speed when pulling off files, I don't really see a reason to switch :D
Unfortunately using DVD-RAM discs is not the reason for needing to change to a new PVR.
My old Panasonic doesn't support HD TV and over recent years I've needed to fix it several times due to failed electronic components. It's now over 10 years old now and does have it's moments so is unfortunately living is on borrowed time :(