Looking for most inexpensive universal disc player recommendations...NOT SONY!

[Sonik Wiz]

There’s a disc format known as “M-disc” that supposedly will last 1000 years. My burners are supposedly capable of burning them, but they are not cheap, and frankly I’ve only had a couple of CDs age out, and those were kept in a car for a decade or so. Since I made the first ones, the replacements were simple.

I've also had very good luck with the discs I've burned over the years, and never had a commercial disc go bad. From the earliest days of recording DVD (Win XP/P4) I still have regular DVD's from Laserdiscs that work like new.

However I am a big fan of the M Disc also. Great results in burning & compatibility with playback equipment. I use CD, DVD, & Blu-ray M Discs as needed. I am selective... material that I couldn't easily restore today, projects that are simply very important to me, and much family history. I figure some how, some way, there will be a way for a long time to playback these discs & this is the kind of stuff I want to be available for my grand kids & beyond, if they care.

As for cost they are as noted more expensive than regular media. But the cost has come way, way down since they first came out. And to me it's worth it.

 

[barfle]

I've also had very good luck with the discs I've burned over the years, and never had a commercial disc go bad. From the earliest days of recording DVD (Win XP/P4) I still have regular DVD's from Laserdiscs that work like new.

However I am a big fan of the M Disc also. Great results in burning & compatibility with playback equipment. I use CD, DVD, & Blu-ray M Discs as needed. I am selective... material that I couldn't easily restore today, projects that are simply very important to me, and much family history. I figure some how, some way, there will be a way for a long time to playback these discs & this is the kind of stuff I want to be available for my grand kids & beyond, if they care.

As for cost they are as noted more expensive than regular media. But the cost has come way, way down since they first came out. And to me it's worth it.

I have sent out a handful of videos of parties and other events, but frankly, the rest of my family isn’t into media like I am, and I don’t really expect my only grand-niece to ever have kids, and she doesn’t seem to care much about the family anyway, so family archives isn’t an issue for me. That’s neither good nor bad, but affects whether I purchase archival quality storage media.

So, for me, it’s technically intriguing, as so many things are, but with all that I already have on my plate, it’s a rabbit hole I don’t think I’ll go down.

 

[jimfisheye]

M-disc... Wasn't that the one that cost even more than 2" tape?

Pretty sure I've read the 1000 years claim from nearly every CDR, DVDR, and BDR brand ever made at some point.

I remember Verbatim being a favored brand for a long time. Taiyo Yuden came along with a new formula for CDRs. I don't recall ever having a bad one... anecdotal along with everyone else. I remember the store bought (eg. Home Depot, Worst Purchase) branded CDRs and DVDrs were DOA products to avoid. I don't remember seeing many of these that were readable! So that seemed to follow too.

Then Verbatim came back in favor with DVDRs again and that continued with BDRs. That's what I thought I knew. I never tried M-disc BDRs because they cost more than 2" tape and my bs detector was making noise.

 

[mandrix]

Verbatim used to be top notch, as well as Panasonic. Panasonic harder to find BD's and often pricey.
I seldom buy Verbatim anymore - I've had too many coasters with BD50 discs. I stopped buying verbatim double layer DVD's (98319) when the prices went insanely high a few years ago. But Verbatim's top of the line inkjet printable DVD-DL are great discs, if you want to pay the price.
(I see they are about 20$ cheaper per 50 pack now)
Now I buy Ritek, or PlexDisc, which is made by Ritek, in white inkjet printable glossy versions.

 

[hafquark]

I've also had very good luck with the discs I've burned over the years, and never had a commercial disc go bad. From the earliest days of recording DVD (Win XP/P4) I still have regular DVD's from Laserdiscs that work like new.

However I am a big fan of the M Disc also. Great results in burning & compatibility with playback equipment. I use CD, DVD, & Blu-ray M Discs as needed. I am selective... material that I couldn't easily restore today, projects that are simply very important to me, and much family history. I figure some how, some way, there will be a way for a long time to playback these discs & this is the kind of stuff I want to be available for my grand kids & beyond, if they care.

As for cost they are as noted more expensive than regular media. But the cost has come way, way down since they first came out. And to me it's worth it.

I bought an M-Disc capable Pioneer BDKS13UBK a year ago. I've never burned to an M-Disc, but plan on doing hi-res scans of several hundred old family slides (early 60s to early 70s). I've read that the M-Disc format "engraves" to an inorganic layer, rather than burning to a dye as with conventional writable BD, DVD, or CD media.

I have thousands of commercial and burned optical discs. The writeable discs are high-quality, mostly Verbatim and Taiyo-Yuden. I can count my failed discs on one hand. None of the commercial discs have gone bad, going back to CDs purchased in the mid-eighties.

I agree with you that it's worthwhile to spend the extra money on M-Discs to preserve the most cherished data that might be handed down to kids and grandkids.

 

[Mr. Afternoon]

Clearly the REAL solution is to buy an industrial LTO tape machine and 50 million LTO tapes and scatter them across the continent. TRUE data preservation!

Although the "preservation" convo is a good one and probably warrants its own thread, I do wanna ask how tedious it is to archive data on DVDs and Blu-rays if you have large amounts of data? Wouldn't properly managed hard disks be more efficient? For example, it would take at least 20 Blu-ray discs for ONE COPY of the family photos and videos I have for the past decade...

 

[stoopid]

Clearly the REAL solution is to buy an industrial LTO tape machine and 50 million LTO tapes and scatter them across the continent. TRUE data preservation!

Although the "preservation" convo is a good one and probably warrants its own thread, I do wanna ask how tedious it is to archive data on DVDs and Blu-rays if you have large amounts of data? Wouldn't properly managed hard disks be more efficient? For example, it would take at least 20 Blu-ray discs for ONE COPY of the family photos and videos I have for the past decade...

Magnetic media (tape, hard drives) are more susceptible to failures and random data corruption. Burned/pressed media is more robust overall, and for those of us who don't have our music playback equipment connected online for streaming, it's convenient and consistent with out existing workflows and experience to have the burned discs.

We're living history, so how long things last and how easily this or that fails is still being determined. From a business support IT side of things, magnetic media is the lesser of two evils and the most commonly used means of preserving current and archived data. The full on evil would be no backups.

There's a growing amount of (mostly) good information for this topic on the internet, so no need to trust the words of some randos on a audiophile forum.

 

[stoopid]

I've also had very good luck with the discs I've burned over the years, and never had a commercial disc go bad. From the earliest days of recording DVD (Win XP/P4) I still have regular DVD's from Laserdiscs that work like new.

However I am a big fan of the M Disc also. Great results in burning & compatibility with playback equipment. I use CD, DVD, & Blu-ray M Discs as needed. I am selective... material that I couldn't easily restore today, projects that are simply very important to me, and much family history. I figure some how, some way, there will be a way for a long time to playback these discs & this is the kind of stuff I want to be available for my grand kids & beyond, if they care.

As for cost they are as noted more expensive than regular media. But the cost has come way, way down since they first came out. And to me it's worth it.

I had some blurays go bad, this was many years back when burned blurays were fairly new and it became a known thing for that specific bluray company (I forget who, I'm not sure they make BR discs anymore). I personally had several discs become unplayable on anything but one bluray drive I had at the time, which fortunately was my computer's BD ROM drive (non burner) so I was able to make new ISOs and burn them to better/different blanks. The issue with the defective blurays was the rate of failure being at like 20%, but worse they wouldn't degrade enough to notice until somewhere after 2 years. I happened to want to watch something I had burned and that's when I discovered the issue, and only then discovered others online complaining about the same media only lasting them 1-2 years.

There's really no way to be 100% certain the backup strategy we incorporate will be sufficient. If the data is important enough, keep a few replicas on different media. All my music projects, photos, etc are burned to DVDs and Blurays, as well as kept digitally on my data drive which is backed up to another hard disk regularly. Then every few months I take another hard disk I keep here at my office home, and make a fresh snapshot, to bring back to my office as my "offsite" backup. It's a lot of data so trying to manage all that online using a cloud backup service would be expensive, but cloud backups certainly count as a valid backup alternative. It sounds like a lot of effort, but the weekly backup is scheduled and I just need to read the email to confirm it succeeded. Taking a portable hard drive home every few months and clicking with the mouse a few times is also not very time consuming, and only cost me the hard drive. Much cheaper (especially over a year or two time) than monthly cloud storage subscriptions.

 

[jimfisheye]

Tape is direct. Fragile, yes! But direct analog data storage.

Digital formats still use analog storage! Yes they do! The ones and zeros are either stored magnetically or etched into dye or some material. The analog part of the storage in the nuts and bolts of the system is hidden from the user. You only see the ones and zeros played back. Until the ones start coming in at 0.5 and the noise in the zeros starts hitting 0.5 and now all you see is a cryptic error message.

You could put your hands on the tape medium. You could even cut it apart and put it back together with some skill. You could directly observe the beginnings of media damage that would lead to data loss and take action. The digital medium is taken out of our hands as it were and that freaks people out. You don't see media damage until it's too late and some device starts returning error messages.

And that leads me to ponder if there is reasonable surface scan imaging tech that could work around some of this. It would have to have a magnitude greater resolution than the purpose built digital media drive to make sense. ie. It can't be harder to achieve than the laser reader tech currently used.

 

[hafquark]

Clearly the REAL solution is to buy an industrial LTO tape machine and 50 million LTO tapes and scatter them across the continent. TRUE data preservation!

Although the "preservation" convo is a good one and probably warrants its own thread, I do wanna ask how tedious it is to archive data on DVDs and Blu-rays if you have large amounts of data? Wouldn't properly managed hard disks be more efficient? For example, it would take at least 20 Blu-ray discs for ONE COPY of the family photos and videos I have for the past decade...

Uh oh, a thread has drifted way off topic. Gotta be a first

If the OP can forgo 4K (use a cheap modern player for those discs) I recommend finding a used Oppo BDP95 or 93. They go for way less than the 100/200 series and play everything but UHD BD, and the OPPO repair service is still around.

I have a lot of stuff on HDDs, but still prefer optical discs for long-term storage. Burn it, file it, done.

My family photos would easily fit on a single 25GB disc. In the olden days we had to take pictures or slides with cameras, and after a few weeks take the film in to be developed. It was a drawn-out and rather expensive process. No selfies, snapshots of what you had for dinner, hundreds of b-day pictures, etc.

Here's Norm Macdonald's explanation:

 

[inspclouseau]

Uh oh, a thread has drifted way off topic. Gotta be a first

If the OP can forgo 4K (use a cheap modern player for those discs) I recommend finding a used Oppo BDP95 or 93. They go for way less than the 100/200 series and play everything but UHD BD, and the OPPO repair service is still around.

I have a lot of stuff on HDDs, but still prefer optical discs for long-term storage. Burn it, file it, done.

My family photos would easily fit on a single 25GB disc. In the olden days we had to take pictures or slides with cameras, and after a few weeks take the film in to be developed. It was a drawn-out and rather expensive process. No selfies, snapshots of what you had for dinner, hundreds of b-day pictures, etc.

Here's Norm Macdonald's explanation:

We have bdp-93 in the bedroom. A bdp-103 as the only source in a Tube amp (Decware) set-up, and a Udp-203 in our front room, main theater surround set-up. I hope they all continue play 'nice'. No problems at all for years now. Fantastic machines. Shame Oppo no longer manufactures them. They obviously saw what was coming. Internet streaming/rental music. etc... shame..shame.. shame...

 

[Sal1950]

FYI, I burned a DVD -R and a DVD +R with a DVD-A ISO image.
Neither my Sony X800M2 or older Sammy could recognize it.
Just sayin,

 

[mandrix]

There's a growing amount of (mostly) good information for this topic on the internet, so no need to trust the words of some randos on a audiophile forum.

For sure! We wouldn't know anything at all about preserving media, especially those of us with thousands of disc rips.

 

[Owen Smith]

FYI, I burned a DVD -R and a DVD +R with a DVD-A ISO image.
Neither my Sony X800M2 or older Sammy could recognize it.
Just sayin,

But was that a commercial DVD-A copy? If so the problem could have been watermarking.

 

[mandrix]

Clearly the REAL solution is to buy an industrial LTO tape machine and 50 million LTO tapes and scatter them across the continent. TRUE data preservation!

Although the "preservation" convo is a good one and probably warrants its own thread, I do wanna ask how tedious it is to archive data on DVDs and Blu-rays if you have large amounts of data? Wouldn't properly managed hard disks be more efficient? For example, it would take at least 20 Blu-ray discs for ONE COPY of the family photos and videos I have for the past decade...

HDD's with backup.

But was that a commercial DVD-A copy? If so the problem could have been watermarking.

No watermarking. I authored it.

 

[Owen Smith]

No watermarking. I authored it.

Lack of DVD-R or +R support in X800M2 is a deal breaker for me, I have loads of authored DVD-As.

 

[Sal1950]

Lack of DVD-R or +R support in X800M2 is a deal breaker for me, I have loads of authored DVD-As.

Just to be clear, It's not the DVD media but the DVD-A file structure that creates the problem.

 

[Owen Smith]

Just to be clear, It's not the DVD media but the DVD-A file structure that creates the problem.

That would still be an issue, I have loads of authored DVD-As.

 

[stoopid]

For sure! We wouldn't know anything at all about preserving media, especially those of us with thousands of disc rips.

You'll have to trust this one rando when I say there's industries with a lot more at stake than your burned music files that are working diligently day in and out on this subject, for the sake of theirs and others data long term.

 

[stoopid]

Just to be clear, It's not the DVD media but the DVD-A file structure that creates the problem.

Yup, as stated previously in this thread -- it's a authoring issue, not the fact it's a DVD-A on a burned disc.

I have DVD-A on burned DVDs that play in the X800M2. I also have at least one that won't, for seemingly random reasons as we are all aware and seemingly frustrated. I keep my old Oppo around for those stubborn discs, but most (95% ?) of my collection (store bought and burned) plays on the X800M2.