I’ve been cleaning out the attic storage lately, and yesterday I found two big spindles of DVD-Rs.
I’d totally forgotten about this, but in the 90s I had a moderate VHS collection of films (mostly recorded from TV or pirated from rental VHS films). In 2006 I bought a VHS/DVD-R combo machine and transferred all the tapes to DVD-R so that I could throw away all the tapes. Which I did.
(Remember that period where it was much cheaper to store data on DVD-Rs than on hard disks? Yeah, I’d almost forgotten, too.)
And now I can throw away the DVD-Rs, too, because all these movies are now readily available on bluray. The system works! It’s like putting leftovers into the fridge for a week before throwing them out. Only slower.
I did rip some of them where I didn’t quite know whether I have them or not. Of the about 20 discs I ripped (I’ve got several DVD readers, so I can rip in parallel) two failed, so I guess there’s a 10% failure rate on DVD-Rs over a twenty year period.
What’s the video quality, you ask? Well… it’s VHS. But not too awful, actually.