When optical disks suck…

I recently purchased a brand new Pioneer Ultra HD compliant Blu-ray writer for my PC. In terms of optical media capabilities, I believe it’s capable of reading and writing to anything that is still relevant on these kinds of disks in 2022, which makes it a great backup unit for my decade old LG XL drive. What is the point of this intro? Simply put, anything but Blu-ray in optical media terms is dead to me.

I have a spindle of burned DVD-R disks that contains many older games (pirated from my younger days to be honest) and I thought that it would be a good idea to consolidate many physical DVD’s down to 1 or 2 Blu-ray disks. Near a decade ago, most of these games were burned to CD and I simply created ISO images of each disk, which was then burned to DVD to save physical space. I have long been aware of the issues with burned media failing to read after some time had passed, but as usual I didn’t think the problem would hit me personally until a few more years had passed. Sadly, the issue has hit me and it hit me a lot harder than I was expecting.

So far, 3 of the disks in the spindle have developed unreadable sectors, causing those disks to be unsalvageable. As mentioned, the content is old PC games, most of which I can now legally purchase from a site like GOG.com – not only would that be supporting a good company, but it would also ensure that the games actually work on modern PC’s and have no horrible and possibly non-working with more modern Windows copy protection on them. The problem however is for games that aren’t available on GOG and there’s no other real legal source for them, but then again I am not going to be going back to pirating the games and to be honest, most of them are so old that it’s not even worth my time and effort in the end.

This little experience though has shown me why optical media in general has basically fallen by the wayside and won’t be having a come back the way vinyl or photographic film has. CD-R and RW disks are basically limited to 700MB and dual layer DVD to about 8.5GB. Not only is that capacity seriously low in this modern era, read and write speeds are also really frustrating. Even a good USB 2.0 flash drive will read and write files faster than any DVD drive and will also be silent when doing so, not to mention being able to have stupidly large capacities.

That being said, I’m still a fan of Blu-ray – mostly for movies but I am coming around to it on the PC side as well. Granted I don’t know the long term stability of burned Blu-ray media just yet, but by all accounts it has got to better than DVD and CD, formats that date back from the 90’s and 80’s respectively. I must admit though that the process of burning my 1st BD-RE disk wasn’t a lot of fun. I copied and pasted files onto the disk as if it were a giant flash drive and whilst Windows had no problem doing this and burning the disk, the write speeds were slow and both my drives did a lot of spinning up and down whilst creating the BD-RE. It doesn’t help that the disk I was using was limited to only 2x speed. I’ve burned a BD-R before at close to 6x and that was a much better experience. Nonetheless, I managed to consolidate a large pile of DVD-R disks down to 1 BD-RE disk.

Whilst burned media is far more likely to cause the issues with readability like I mentioned above, commercially pressed disks aren’t immune. I’m currently struggling to make an image of my store bought copy of Medal of Honor Airborne for example. According to ImgBurn, layer 0 of the disk read just fine, but transitioning over to layer 1 and the read speeds have cratered. The disk is thrashing a lot in the drive and whilst there are no read errors currently, the disk is reading files 32 sectors at a time or roughly 44 kB/s. This makes me wonder just how many of my other disks may have developed issues that I don’t know about…

In closing, I’m feeling a mixed bag of emotions about optical media. Having a game or movie or TV series on disk means that you own the contents and that it can’t be arbitrarily taken away from you like media content on a streaming service can be when the rights owners decide they want to build their own platform or want more licensing money. Games and software that require activation is another story as if those activation servers go offline, you are sitting with a piece of useless polycarbonate plastic. Most people don’t miss optical disks anymore and with good reason. Optical disks can be good, but when they suck, man do they suck.