There does not seem to be much info regarding the lifespan of a DvD disc. I was curious if any one here could shed some light on the subject.

Thanks

Quoting DJ Doena:

Quote:
Self-burned live much shorter than pressed. Personally I wouldn't expect much more than 20 years out of  regular store DVD. The glue holding the layers together will diminish, air will get between the plastic layers and it will oxidate the data layer.

So our collections are due to rot to nothing more than plastic by 20 years?

I was talking about pressed DvD's. The kind we buy our films on.

The manufacturing process is identical to CDs, they just have to keep tighter tolerances on the metal disc stamping side of things because of the sensitivity of the laser.  I'm still playing CDs I bought in the eighties so we're approaching 30 years on those.  In theory, when your earliest music CDs start biting the dust enmass, that's your expected lifespan.

Burnt discs are a whole different ball of wax as any number of factors can contribute to the dye degrading.

During the process of transcribing all my DVDs onto a NAS last year, I found about 5 commercial disks which had become unplayable.  In all cases this was because glue had leaked out from between the layers and polluted the playing surface.  I don't think any of them were more than about 5 years old and since they had been stored with all the other disks I don't think you can blame the conditions they were kept in.  Two of the disks I was able to recover eventually with much application of alcohol and elbow juice, but the other three were beyoind help.  This was from a collection of about 1000 disks.

Oddly, I don't think I've ever had a commecial CD go bad.

Warner Archive discs aren't pressed, they're burnt on demand.

Thanks guys for the info. Im only 24 so my experince with disc based media and it's longevity, is pretty much nil.

So it's good to here from the older members who have old CD's and such.

I'd think they could last practically forever as long as they are treated well and don't have manufacturing defects.

So far I've never had a CD or DVD that played fine, then went bad. Every disc I've ever had a problem with had issues right from the start. Strangely enough, the two worst were both Disney titles: The Nightmare Before Christmas (first DVD issue), and The Great Mouse Detective.

A month or so back I was watching a show that was talking about, among other things, archival footage of classic films (the original reels themselves,) important documents, etc, and they eventually got to talking about digital storage on multiple medias including DVD.

They were running accelerated tests on warping and rot among other things, and it was interesting to see how they all eventually rotted down to a clear plastic disc. The time span varied greatly between brands and types (though they did not mention any specifics) with some lasting only an estimated 5 years before noticing degradation and other lasting as much as an estimated 60 years.