"Arny Krueger" wrote in message ...
"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...


I've seen a similar thing happen with CDs.

So I guess that *does* make vinyl superior in the end, whereas such a
scratch would cause a "click" at most, and nowhere near anything on
the order of 30 min of missed music. On a CD, the most I've "lost"
from a scratch was 3.5 minutes for a single song track. More
seriously though, fine, you want to argue that DVD's are just as
useable as CD's when the surface has been scratched or abrased. I'm
just arguing that making them protected from scratches and abrasions
in the first place makes a lot of sense (or making the data recovery
that much more robust), considering the amount of data that will
reside on these future formats. It will make for a more robust format
for the rental store, as well as for original owners. In a perfect
world, none of this would matter, and all discs would be pristine for
playback. In the real world, something more would be desirable, IMO,
to cover the "$hit happens" factor.


It's really frustrating. I'm sure you will be
quick to point out that my DVD player must be "trash" for me to have
such experiences, as I don't deny that the sophistication of
error-contingency and thus player quality enters into the scenario
somewhere along the line.

I've never pictured my Pioneer DV-525 as a paragon of sophistication.


Just heading off potential wisecrack comments at the pass.

I did not mean to give the impression that
I've had problem after problem with my setup. I haven't. In fact, it
is quite reliable and troublefree. However, there have been few
occasions in the past where seemingly surmountable disc blemishes turn
out to be anything but.

Nothing's perfect.

Exactly, so maybe there is another level of quality control that is
worthwhile to address here.


That's when I wonder if the format could have
been made just a bit more bulletproof.

It could have been, at a cost in playing time.


It's not like a "5 hr movie" couldn't use *some* editing, anyway. The
sheer capacity of the formats involved here would seem to suggest that
giving some of it up shouldn't cause that much pain at all.

Then you compare that to the
worstly abused rental disc you've ever seen (which ends up playing
rather uneventfully, ironically), and you realize that DVD's are far
too naked to be safe from the careless rental customer (that got there
before you).

It's up to the rental store to make sure that the product they rent is
usable.


[falls off chair laughing] You would think they should. In actuality,
they don't care until the hapless customer returns to the store to
point out an obviously damaged disc, and they just issue a rental
credit (and you *hope* they don't just turn around and put that disc
right back up on the shelf). There is no way to replace the lost
opportunity to watch the movie the night you originally rented it, but
could not play it, due to a needless scratch.


So it's pointless to worry about DVD, as the cat is
already out of the bag, but I hope future, more data-dense medium
formats are born with greater "abuse-contingency" in mind.

I think we've seen a lot of progress in making distribution formats more
reliable and abuse-proof. Compare and contrast the LP and the CD. Compare
and contrast VHS tape and DVD.

See above. Similarly, a drop-out on VHS tape would yield a
momentarily noisey image, whereas the DVD may suffer a 15-30 min
drop-out of the movie (essentially killing the movie). You could
argue anything you want with such a comparison, so asking about
comparisons is a pretty pointless notion. Each format is better and
worse in certain ways, and in response to different failures.

The bottomline is still that it would be nice to see continued
improvements with future formats in data integrity assurance (by
whatever means) in addition to de rigeur improvements to video and
sound performance. Of all, at least make recovery from a "single
scratch" situation a bit more seamless than scenarios such as a
pixel-fubarred frame or outright loss of 15 minutes of video
(essentially a scene chapter as most movies are logically segmented).
I don't think that should be seen as so much to ask for.