More recently, I've heard of the M-Disc standard for optical discs,
which are supposedly more durable, and the data is supposed to last
1000 years.

I chuckle every time I see or hear something like that. There is no way you could know how close to 1000 years it could last. I've seen to many
premature failures to take that without a half a cup of salt.

Aside from that I'm with you on the rest of the message. You've also got things like win98 vintage cd's that can't be read on anything other than a win98 age machine, after that they just behave like corrupt unreadable disc, so just lasting time is in itself no guarantee.

Spec


--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: < Scrawled in blood at The Lower Planes > (21:3/101)

watchable. These days, I can often tell a difference between 720 and
1080 on a TV though. And 1080 should upscale to 4K better than 720 because 4K (3840x2160) is an exact multiple of 1920x1080.

And because its a lot closer to the actual resolution too... otherwise its like stretching 640x480 out to 1280x1024 its going to get inherently blocky.

you keep the data rate up, anything around 96+ on the mp3

In the late 90s, I always used to hear 128kbit should be good enough
for MP3 audio, but now I heard people say it should be higher.
I often see MP3s of 320kbit, or down to maybe 160 or 192. And a
while ago, I heard variable bitrate was good, and I re-encoded
my music library (which I've saved in FLAC format) to variable
bitrate MP3 (varying from 112 to 320).

If I'm saving music, these days I'll probably encode somewhere around the 128kb mark, and yes you can definitely tell the difference. However with the accompanying audio for video, I can't talk for anyone else, but my ear is a lot more forgiving. To some degree its going to depend on the sound track to the movie, but usually, if its primarily voice, people talking, anything over 96kb will do me, if its noisier or more musical, then start cranking it up a bit. Mind you audio is a relativtively small component in the data stream these days.

Spec


--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: < Scrawled in blood at The Lower Planes > (21:3/101)

I haven't experienced that, but I also haven't tried reading many
old discs. However, pretty much all of my old CDs can still be
read, last time I tried. I have a backup of my original BBS on a CD-R

My personal experience was with hmmm what year did Baldur's Gate come out, I think it was an early multi cd adopter, ahh 1998... thats about the time we got a burner... needed his n her copies pretty badly back then. Anyway these are the discs that burnt fine, I hung onto those for years.. there was a
level of sentimental attachement to those, fast forward to... might be about 2000 I had trouble with them, but the originals were still about so no drama. Move forward to windows XP somewhere, and they had an intact directory, you could examine most files, and they'd past muster, but there was some bug in either the burner firmware or the burning software or 98 or the combo of all three rendered the discs unusable after hunting around for a while trying to find an answer, it was determined, you had to go back to win98, in order to try and use them, or toss them.

I've also had disc's that didn't want to burn, but thats a different issue, and I never got to the bottom of that.

Anything else from me, is really hearsay, some I'd trust, a lot not much, but the stories float here from time to time. Faulty pressed DVD's.. CD's.. persoanlly I've not seen anything pressed fail, it defies my logic a little, unless the back's trying to delaminate but that's storage issues.. heat, moisture..

Spec


--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: < Scrawled in blood at The Lower Planes > (21:3/101)

It seems to think I'm coming out of iprimus, whic is a tad

interesting

Who are you with?

AustraliaOnline, used to call themselves Ozonline once.. used to be a relatively small dialup crowd once. I don't know any relationship with
Iprimus but who knows in this day and age. The service has always been good, run and do what you want no questions asked.

Thats beside the point though, the only other interest I've had is that someone that keeps an eye on addresses that send him mail, because his server drops all mail that comes from any hierarchy that sends him junk mail once. Strange but true. So he won't accept mail from gmail for arguments sake,
to much spam. Anyway he had the IP address pegged as a block that had some strange origins...I can't remember the details now, but at least I could use it to get him mail :)

Spec


--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: < Scrawled in blood at The Lower Planes > (21:3/101)