What's the shelf life of a burned VCD?

[tgpo]

What's the average shelf life of a burned VCD?

[andybno1]

a vcd doesn't have a shelf life, it should be good unless the cd is majorly scratch or cracked

[tenders]

or melted

[marcusaxavier]

I thought that most burned CD's have a shelf life of 10 years. The ink inside of a CD-R/RW is not the same that is in a commercial CD, so they last less. I'll have to find that article.

[Greg12]

Depends on the dye.

Verbatium quotes their datalife plus CD-R"s lifetime at 100-120 years.

[vitualis]

If you treat your VCDs well, they should last longer than you are likely to use them...

Regards.

[nfl2k2]

vitualis is right. Besides who cares if they are still good 15 years from now anyways?

[tgpo]

I do. The movies I burn I wanna keep, just like all my VHS and DVD movies.

[Amit K.]

I had used some Kodak media about three years back. Now many of the files I distinctly remember having worked on from the CD, are "not found". While the HP media I used about five years back (when I had bought my first writer) still has all the files intact.

I guess it depends on the media.

regards,

[devinemi83]

Protect your media and they will last a long time. probably longer than you need. Since most of us dont listen to the same music we did 5-10 years ago. From what I've heard


Commercial CDs: 100-300 years
Verbatim(blue metal azo dye) 75-120 years
TDK metal stabilized 75-100 years



In general the dye is more important than brand. That cheap green dye is a short life. from 20-50 years I hear. But if you get a green disc that is metal stabilizd,(like TDK) they say that it goes to average 70 years. Green dye is also VERY sensitive to the sun. People have told me that if you leave a cheap(pny or other cheapo brand) in sunlight for an hour it will become unreadable or give errors during read.Blue CDr(verbatim) are more durable in the sun and heat, they have a darker dye.


Overall, dont throw your cds at the dog or leave them on your dashboard or generally abuse them and they will be there for you for a Looooooong time.



Whats the odds you'll even be needing them in that long anyways. Take on average 50 years. Just for myself, I'm 18 now that means my cds will deffinately work by the time I retire, at that age I cant see meself listening to sugar ray, blink 182, and so on. And these videos I have now, probably wont mean a thing to me then. Same thing for the music. And in 50 years, we may not even have this medium anymore, it may go like the floppy. Now we have DVD with tons more storage, after that a pidly little 700MB will be comparable to a floppy when we have discs in a few years bigger than our current hard drives.