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April 3, 2024 • 18 mins

On the April 3, 2024 episode of /Film Daily, /Film editor Ben Pearson is joined by /Film editor Brad Oman to talk about the latest film and TV news.

In The News:



Listener email from YiFeng from Boston, Mass:


I hate to bug you, but the recent podcast conversations about disc rot & backing up physical media have some misinformation that I'm hoping other listeners will write in and correct, but here are my corrections:


1. Hollywood/MPA issue commercial discs that are copyrighted protected by CSS, AACS, BD+, ROM Mark and probably many more techniques. You can't insert a disc into your computer and use a file explorer and just copy the disc - you will get an error.


2. If you want to backup ANYTHING from the disc, you will need to bypass copyright protection by using tools such as Redfox and DVDfab. Please note that at the time of this writing, US DMCA laws stipulates that you *DO* have a right to backup, but the tools used to rip discs are illegal, which is why all of them are from outside of America:

https://lifehacker.com/is-it-legal-to-rip-a-dvd-that-i-own-5978326


It's a bit of a gray/catch-22 type of scenario. Just a warning there.


3. Handbrake.fr is only a tool that will re-compress & shrink your disc files. For example a Blu-ray may contain a movie file that is 35 gigabytes, but you can use Handbrake to compress that down to 10 gigabytes - that is what the tool does. Handbrake and compression tools do *NOT* rip discs as they do not bypass the copyright protections put in place by the MPA.


4. Finally, regarding disc rot, the Library of Congress has a study on that from ~14+yrs ago but it's still relevant: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/scientists/projects/cd_longevity.html#:~:text=Statistical%20analysis%20of%20the%20EOL,reach%20EOL%20within%2010%20years


Basically the net sum is it is extremely small and that study encompassed computer CD ROM (beyond just movie discs). If anything, the disc qualities of today's Quality Assessment far surpasses that. I'd wager to say it's probably less than 1% if the library of Congress performs a study today. Most of the time, if you read the study, the rot has to do with users storing in high humidity, non-environmentally controlled locations. If you care for it, the disc will outlast humanity. It is (after all) plastic and we all know now that plastic is basically not going to degrade for hundreds of years (g

Mark as Played

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