This post is not about movies.

So I rented a movie on DVD last week, and I popped it into the machine, and Leen and I got half way through, and it stopped. Couldn't fast forward. I could rewind. I advanced to the next chapter and tried to rewind from there, but it wasn't playing in that next chapter either. The DVD had been horribly scratched and was unplayable past the first hour.

Like I said, this post is not about movies. It's about the future of audio-video technology. I love DVDs. I love the definition. I love that the quality doesn't degrade over time. I love how things are divided up into tracks and chapters and how you can code menus in them and simple programs and so on.

With the march of progress, I think it's pretty apparent that DVDs will be increasingly used for home movies and other personal projects. It would be analogous to the recent victory of CDs over tapes: CDs came out several years ago, but only with the recent advent of CD-writers did CDs obviate the last outstanding use for cassettes, namely the "mix tape." Now that we can write all our favorite songs to our own CDs, what use for cassettes is left?

When DVD-writers become cheaper, it's reasonable to expect that camcorders will right to DVDs instead of tapes. But it's the fragility of the physical DVD itself that concerns me.

I rented a damaged DVD and couldn't watch the movie on it. Had it been a damaged video tape, I could have fast forwarded past the crinkled part. Even if the tape had broken, it could be taped back together with the damaged parts removed, and *most* of the movie would have been left intact. Even if a rogue VCR creases the tape as it plays, damaging the whole thing, you can still salvage most of an image by playing it, whereas a DVD would simply refuse to display anything.

Of course, salvaging "most" of a movie isn't good enough for a readily available and replaceable release of a popular film by a major studio. But if dear little Johnny's kindergarden graduation gets damaged, who wouldn't be content with "most" over "nothing" if those were the only two choices?

This is where the analogy between video tapes and DVDs with audio tapes and CDs breaks down. What people record on audio mediums for their own personal use tends not to be as highly sentimental and irreplaceable as what people tend to record on video tapes.

So my question is, does the fragibility of DVDs mean that video tapes are going to hold on for longer than they would otherwise? Or will DVDs become more resilient? Or will DVDs become cheap enough and people aware enough that they'll develop the habit of burning backup DVDs for their critical data?

The digital age is great. I love how data storage is being done in increasingly portable ways. I like that I can play a DVD in a computer and a CD in a DVD player and, ignoring for the moment DVD copy protection, copy the data from CDs or DVDs or my hard drive or my digital camera back and forth and back again, and especially since data loss does not occur with each transition, as is the case with analog mediums. But all this seems to come at the price of making data easier to lose. Who hasn't lost data of some kind with an accidental erasure of a file or a faulty hard drive? And you don't lose some of it, either: if you lose something, you tend to lose all of it, unlike with "lossy" analog mediums.

Further thoughts, tangential or otherwise, are welcome.