FUD on the care and cleaning of DVDs?

[Nick Burns]

Take care -- DVDs aren't indestructible

As use of DVDs continues to grow, more and more consumers will discover that these shiny plastic discs are even more fragile than their CD cousins.

Both digital versatile discs and compact discs should carry a warning label: Handle With Care.

Many consumers will realize the truth the hard way -- by losing big bucks invested in a full-length feature film sold in DVD format or digital data "burned" to a DVD on their computer.

DVD burners are becoming widely available on personal computers. With an enormous capacity, DVDs are the best way to store large digital image, audio and video files. A DVD can hold about 4.7 gigabytes of data, compared with about 700 megabytes on a CD. That's 4.7 billion vs. 700 million.

With a predicted lifespan of 30 to 50 years, write-once DVDs and CDs are the closest thing to "permanent" data storage for archiving files.

You'd better handle those DVDs with care, however, if you want to reminisce over those digital images 10 years from now, enjoy a digital music collection or watch that favorite film again next month.

Everyone knows that the plastic surface on a CD, although very tough and durable, can be scratched. A scratch can throw off the laser mechanism that reads a CD, causing skips or other distortion in the playback. Big scratches can stop the playback. Fingerprints, grease, dust and other debris can have the same effects.

DVDs are more vulnerable because their data is packed more densely. A small scratch that wouldn't affect a CD could disrupt enough data to put a DVD out of commission.

Take extra care in handling and storing DVDs. Avoid anything that might scratch either surface of the disc. That includes laying the disc down on a table, for instance, touching the surface, or writing on it with a ballpoint pen or pencil.

Avoid anything that might require cleaning the disc. Keep DVDs clean, away from dust and dirt, in an individual plastic jewel case or a special storage case. When handling a DVD, hold it by the edges, or with two fingers -- one on the edge and one in the hole.

If you must clean one, use a can of compressed air for dust, or a commercial cleaner available in stores for smudges. Clean in gentle strokes from the disc's center hole to its outer perimeter. Never wipe around the disc in a circular direction.

Avoid exposing the disc to intense direct light, which can affect the dye layers inside and make the disc unreadable. Store at room temperature. Intense heat, like that in an attic or parked car during summer, can warp and wreck a disc.

Don't panic if a disc won't play properly. Hold it at an angle and check for smudges or scratches. Commercial cleaning or scratch-repair products are inexpensive and often can fix a problem disc.

[garryheather]

What that article tactfully misses, is that the error correction mechanism on a DVD is roughly 10x more efficient than that of a CD.

And that DVD's are less susceptable to surface damage, unless you physically distort the polycarbonate, which takes some doing.

So long as you don't use them as a cutting mat or bung them in the microwave, you should be OK. Usual, common sense handling rules apply.

Something it should have said is that the DVD-/+R is most "fragile" in its unburnt state, because the error correction relies on correcting the reading of data on the disc. If you try to burn to a dirty disc, the data might not be there in order to correct in the first place, and there is only so much error corrction yu can do bfor th contnt bcms unrdbl a yr fd.

[SLK001]

Well, the author of this article is seriously miss-informed. First off, DVDs are not more fragile than CDs but are instead must less fragile (and susceptible to damage) than a CD.

Just because the data is packed in at about 7 times the density of a CD doesn't mean that it is more susceptible to errors. The error correction scheme on a DVD is such that errors up to about a millimeter can be corrected, where a CD can only correct about 1/20th of that. Hell, I've been able to play a DVD flawlessly that was cracked - try doing that with a CD. (This data is from memory, and may be slightly off.)

Obviously, the people here are far more informed that this author.

But, he was correct on one thing - DVDs are NOT indestructable, but who would have ever thought that a piece of plastic could be?