This channel is so absurdly technically specific but somehow manages to be completely entertaining and understandable. I still have no idea how you're able to do it!
"CD-R, a pirate's favorite kind of CD" ... First thought: Because of the pirated software etc. 10 seconds later it drops: "AARRRRR" XD This really is my favorite channel on TH-cam! :D Great work!
The little details in your videos, such as the ever changing desktop background color in this one to match the "book color" being discussed, makes them all the more awesome. Thank you, sir!
Wow. Mentioning the dye on a CD-R dug up some long-forgotten memories of burning discs as a kid in the mid 90s. I'd totally forgotten being interested in how part of the discs would turn darker from the center outwards the more data was burned. I thought that was such an oddly analogue detail on a digital system.
@@codycast Sure, I also have several channels that I happen to watch constantly, but never subscribed to them. I also understand that his content is kind of niche... If you're a content creator and want a million subs, you have to speak about mindless youtube drama, or steal content from other people. That's just how things are.
Only when he got to "scarlet" near the end of the friggin' video did I notice the background color on the monitor changes according to what "book" he talks about :))))
"Can't help but feel sorry for [Kodak]" Kodak didn't miss the digital photography trend, they were hoping it would die. Film was a huge source of revenue for them, selling for dollars but costing pennies to manufacture. Digital photography removed that revenue stream, so they avoided it
A few quick things: Somehow I never managed to say that ROM stands for Read Only Memory. You probably knew that, but for the sake of completion... As pointed out a few times now, which admittedly I hadn't realized, the -ebibyte suffix is relatively new so saying that a CD is "mislabeling" its capacity as MB when it should be MiB is not strictly true. The definitions have changed since their introduction--but for good reason. The confusion between base 10 and base 2 data classification is annoying and real. Each successive prefix will increase the error between base 2 and base 10 calculation, and since all we really care about is the number of files of X size that we can keep in a given data store, switching to easier-to-understand base-10 prefixes makes sense to me. As you can see in the video, Windows acknowledges that the drive is 2,000,000,000,000 bytes, and yet that becomes 1.81 TB. The problem comes when, if you buy a drive of 1,000 times the capacity, Windows will make it seem like it's not 1,000 times as large. But it is. Other thing: 80min/700MB discs weren't around as early as I had thought. Sure, "not long into the development of the CD" is a flexible statement, but still.
Also, Apple also dropped binary prefixes and quotes all data sizes in decimal units. If you plug a 2TB drive into a newer Mac it will say it has 2TB of space. Yes, it also quotes the files on that drive as larger than a Windows machine would quote them.
we could have had trinary, you really want to deal with factors of 3 instead of factors of 2! just be happy that whole numbers are alot easier to deal with XD... just going to throw this out there, Computerphile has some pretty good videos that give you a glimpse as to WHY base 2 is the thing and why every thing is square. from what I understand alot of it has to do with rounding and overflow errors and the way you count on a bit level as well the logistical nightmare that comes along with doing it another way... but I am not going to say too much more than that because I can already feel myself oosing with technicalities.
The thing is, 80 minute audio-CDs had been out for a while in the early days of CD-R while CD-Rs were still available at only 74 minutes capacity. So sometimes when you were copying an audio-CD you had to sacrifice a track, which sucked.
The -ebibytes suffix is relatively new. Normal kilobytes, megabytes, etc used to be powers of two, but the general public did not understand why 1000 wasn't kilo, but 1024 was. For me, 1 kilobyte is still 1024 bytes.
I realize this is kind of the whole problem, but it's getting increasingly frustrating as time goes on because the error is getting larger with each prefix. Shortly I'm going to pin a comment with better thoughts (because labeling it as "misrepresenting" as I did in the video really isn't fair) but I do think it would be wise to stop equating GiB and TiB with their base-10 equivalencies. If I were to buy a 1 terabyte drive, it holds 1000 times as much data as a 1 gigabyte flash drive (how quaint). But my computer won't say that because it's still using base 2 math, which is rather archaic in this day and age when files are routinely gigabytes large. And of course there's the horrible mixing that has occasionally occurred as in the 1.44 MB floppy. We're dealing with large files now and why Windows is still using base 2 math for data stores is beyond me. You can even see in the screenshot that Windows is like "Yeah this drive is 2,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 1.81 TB". That alone is maddening!
But kilo- mega- and giga-prefixes are much older than computers and bytes, and are used all over engineering and science. Having those prefixes be subtly incompatible for just one unit just leads to all sorts of problems.
Totally agree, using 'ebibytes' just legitimises the storage manufacturers' trick of switching to powers of 10 for storage so it looked like you were getting value for money.
Using the SI prefixes is naughty as they represent powers of 10 for all the other units. Imagine you have bags full of different currency notes (say, euros, dollars and pounds). You group them in 1000 units groups, except for one, which you group in 1024 units groups, but marking them with the same label. How is someone supposed to know how you counted them? It's the same problem, except with units instead of currencies.
I've got to say, it was really amazing how you managed to say Megabyte and Mebibyte that many times right after one another. There is a bit of historical context I would like to add, though. In the days that the CD-ROM and CD-R standards were created, MiB didn't exist as a unit. So, for the most part, it wasn't a case of mislabeling. At the time, everyone was happily using MB to refer to (2^10)^2 bytes. Sure, it was a little weird that the "kilo" in kilobyte was different from the "kilo" in kilogram, but they were still pretty similar and it wasn't like you would ever have to convert from the one unit to the other. However, then came the harddisk manufacturers which realized that they could produce (10^3)^3 byte hard drives and market them to people who will think they're buying (2^10)^3 byte drives, thus getting more apparent value than they actually spent the resources on producing. They were allowed to do this because they were the ones that pointed to the SI and said "look, we're using the correct definition of a gigabyte"). That's why only in the late 90s, the kiB, MiB, GiB, and their companions were added to the SI so the two systems could be distinguished. So, yeah, technically, someone labeling a MiB as an MB is mislabeling it. On the other hand, it's the people who insisted on using MB for (10^3)^3 bytes who were originally *intentionally* deviating from the commonly accepted meaning of the word...
On the other hand, networking stuff has always used SI prefixes for transfer speed. But given the right context, it was not an issue that a megabyte was more than eight times a megabit.
I absolutely loved the Minidisc. I worked in sound design for theatre at the time, and the ability to rearrange tracks and re-record individual tracks without re-recording the entire disc was invaluable. I had two MD record decks and two portable players, one of which also acted as a portable digital recorder. It was fantastic hardware with only a limited appeal, but appeal to me it did.
I was wondering what that was from. I Googled it, and found a few other uses: Reddit Department of Pedantry 69 Relentless Drive 42069 Los Quejas, CA Anyone know the source of this?
I had no idea what "cerc error correction" was until I realized you were actually referring to CRC. This is the first time I've heard anyone try to pronounce that as a word rather than just the letters.
Ah, Cross-Interleaved Reed-Solomon coding -- or what he usually just called "Reed-Solomon". Taking a few seconds to spell out the acronym would've been helpful.
Yes that was an oversight--I often foolishly assume that everyone will watch these in order and will sometimes fail to reiterate. That said, I do put captions on nearly all of my main channel videos. If there's ever confusion, you can check there.
Their typing game is how I learned to touch-type. I only played it for one session (during which I learned where to put my hands and how to move my fingers from there) and then just got faster over the years by typing whatever I had to type.
I grew up with the Jump Start games, and 3rd Grade was the absolute best of the lot. I didn't think anybody else remembered them! Incidentally, they were all pirated copies I got from my uncle, the only one in our family who had a CD burner.
@@Kajifox all the articles i saw said the standards body that made the switch blamed salesmen for not being able to do the maths. Quite believable based on the computer sales staff I've met.
@@kinetkraygunn9432 My rules are follow the money, follow the money and follow the money, so pardon my cynicism. I remember the articles being top down rather than bottom up. Marketing people like big numbers.
Taking into consideration that SI (International System Of Units) has been standarised in 1960, did they ever swap? Or were the units just misused as in case of kilobytes and megabytes it didn't do much of a difference. When we came to thinking in gigabytes and terabytes, the problem was already there striking us more and more with every year of development.
I don't have solid proof, but I assume that the "bi" in "Mebibyte" signifies "binary". So I don't think it could have ever been swapped. Mis-using Megabytes to mean Mebibytes though, has been a thing ever since MS-DOS.
1:00 The binary SI prefixes (like Mebi-) are a fairly recent development. The IEC first defined them in 1998, long after CDs were brought to market. Before that people had been using the standard SI prefixes but with binary quantities to measure bytes and bits for about as long as bytes and bits have been measured, and as you've said such usage is still ubiquitous.
also, powers of 10 are seriously NOT useful for measuring digital data, so the IEC really should have not done that and just kept the SI prefixes but with powers of two, it's just way better even if it *technically* doesn't match
@@technoturnovers7072 I sometimes think it would be better to measure computer storage with a log scale. For example, 700 MB would be about 29.45 units
When he said CD-R was a pirates favorite kind of CD I thought of all the bootleg movies sold by street vendors and paddled on public transportation. Then it hit me... CD-ARRRGH!
Degradation of data on a disc is a very good point and very well placed as a final reminder in the video. Many years ago, my parents got a CD with satellite images of our hometown, pretty much like Google Maps' satellite view. I tried to load that disc some month ago for a bit of nostalgia, but the drive behaved like there was not even a disc inserted. And finally I know the difference on why one disc is re-writable and another is not. Thanks a lot!
I think I remember that older CD players played data tracks like audio (which was pretty loud noise), while newer devices muted them. The fact that more than 74 minutes can be stored on a CD, and this also was used on music albums, was almost a kind of copy protection for a while (at least a motivation to buy the original), because at the beginning of MiniDisc it had only 60 and 74 minutes recording capacity.
i remember that the computer cd roms with two buttons (eject and play) could play audio cd's even without a computer (just power) and i hooked them to our car with good old linear regulators to get 5v out of cars 12v battery, since car CD players were very expensive, a time when youtube didint exist for my awesome diy hack to be uploaded
Wow...when you said Magic Schoolbus games my memory immediately played me some long-forgotten but vivid and very happy cutscenes. Thanks for helping me remember some of my first PC gaming experiences. I just found your channel today via Tom Scott and I've been binging with glee!
Oh god, do you remember the buffer underrun? 😂 If the system couldn’t feed the cd burner with enough data you had to throw the cd in the trash bin. And they used to cost a lot. I remember staring at the buffer percentage as if I was reading a Stephen King novel! Sooooo cringy! 😄
I went out and bought a sweet new yamaha 16x burner for my computer and my processor was too slow to real time decode an mp3 directly to CD at that speed and it would slowly eat through the buffer and fail unless I dropped down to 10x or something. I was so disappointed that I spent the extra $150 on speed I could not use unless I was making a data CD.
It was worse on some machines. With Philips early burning software and windows 98, you couldn't even use the computer while burning, as alt+tab into other programs just froze it in a way to underflow the burner. I don't exactly remember, if that happened on the 233 MHz or 1 GHz PC, back in the day. Both ran on Win98. However, I kept doing that until the PCs became more powerful and Windows XP was brand new.
And? We need a word for 2^20 bytes, and using the SI prefixes is naughty as they represent powers of 10 for all the other units. Imagine you have bags full of different currency notes (say, euros, dollars and pounds). You group them in 1000 units groups, except for one, which you group in 1024 units groups, but marking them with the same label. How is someone supposed to know how you counted them? It's the same problem, except with units instead of currencies.
And don't get me started on words like "Mega tsunami." Seriously though, if you're looking at data and don't realize it works in powers of two, you're probably an anthropology student.
@@GRBtutorials I used to think that metric (decimal) numbers were used for transfer unformatted while 1024 kilobyte format was used for formatted. It was a pretty accurate simplification I figured. It's still the same number of bytes even if the formatted number is smaller when you get into orders of magnitude.
More on SACD, please! Including the Red Book (RB) dual layer format that allowed SACDs to be played in RB CD players. More bands and singers should have went that extra mile (or extra kilometer in metric countries), and recorded their albums in SACD format, and had them pressed and released in dual layer format (with no RB only releases). Then, as more and more people ended up with more and more SACDs in their collections, more and more people probably would have thought, "Since a fair amount of CDs in my collection are also SACDs, I'll upgrade to a SACD player so I can enjoy the higher quality sound.".
When I got my first CD burner it could only go up to 4X speed, and I found out too late that the CDs go bad quickly. I lost a ton of media files that I thought were safely backed up on CDs.
@@stayupthetree it depends on how you store them. i burned a disk with a few important files i need to transfer to computers and since i might need to use those files on older machines i chose the disk instead of the pendrive. anyways, after a few years (5 maybe?) i noticed it has stains on the shiny side but it still works because the stains didn't reach the burned part. i also still have my decade old ps2 games. they've been stored on a drawer for most of their life and they're in perfectly good shape. a few have scratches or so it looks like but they still work just fine.
@@white_mage Ironically, it's light and moist/dry cycles (humidititty) that tend to kill CDs, keep them in a case, in a dark dry place and they'll last a good long time. Some of the ultra-cheap brands did use chemicals that would deteriorate over time, basically oxidize and degrade. But the vast majority will last 20+ years. For storage that you need to last even longer, your options are tape drives or classic spinning-disc hard-drives, but even these won't last forever. Unfortunately there's not yet any good *permanent* storage solution for data that needs to be kept for decades, aside from copying it from one drive to a newer drive every couple years and just ensuring you maintain a good working backup of it. Some researchers were working with "burning" the data into glass/crystal, but I don't know if this went anywhere.. Last I heard of it was a magazine like 15-20 years ago.
@@mashrien I’ve heated something called M-disc could survive for about 1000 years.Technically not permanent but if your using it to save data might as well be cause you will probably die before the M-disc if it is stored right.
@@starstudio8402 I've heard of them too, but from wikipedia: According to an accelerated aging test of the French National Laboratory of Metrology and Testing at 90 °C and 85% humidity, the DVD+Rs with inorganic recording layer like M-DISCs were still readable after 250 hours, however with an error rate above threshold, and were rated "less than 250 hours" equivalent to competing offers. They mentioned it having to be stored in a specific manner to achieve that kind of longevity.. a typical dvd will probably last 1000 years if stored in a complete vacuum, absent of all light lol I don't think "discs" of any description will be viable for long-term (read: multi-century) archival storage. We really need to physically alter some stable isotope, but that means modifying the molecular structure of a mass of some ultra-stable material, which according to wiki would be *tin,* of all things, as it apparently *DOESN'T* decay.. like at all.. ever lol Anything that's plastic will eventually break down, and anything that's easily deformable would also be a bad choice.. I would've thought vanadium or silicone to be more stable.. but I'm just a nerd that spends too much time reading random crap on the interwebs and absorbing all the astro and particle physics info I can get my peepers hooked on.
When you said "you'll almost always certainly not notice it" around 3:02, the video playing glitched slightly and I thought it was proposital, just to prove the point. Turns out it was just a incredible coincidence.
"CD ROMs or would that be CDs ROM" My Brain: The plural of surgeon general is surgeons general the past tense of surgeons general is surgeonsed general ~portal 2 fact sphere I know that's not a useful comment but oh well
I watch your videos when I feel overwhelmed by work or when I feel like I wont make ends meet this month. don't know why but your videos calms me down a lot. just wanted to thank you for that.
You just unlocked some memories when you showed the Jumpstart 3rd Grade game. I remember being surprisingly into it, even though I was fully aware it was meant to be Educational™.
I know you touched on it in passing, but I'd be really interested in seeing a more detailed look at Video CD, and potentially how it compared to future video discs (DVD et al). Really enjoyed this video!
Video CD was utter rubbish. Image quality was VHS grade at best, but often far worse. And good luck finding someone with a VCD player that's not a computer. If it's a computer, just play the original video files off a data disc.
So I had to pause the video and go look up Mebibyte just to make sure you weren't pulling my leg. Dadgum. And here I thought my nerd training was complete. This is the sort of distinction that makes no difference to most people and yet now I somehow feel more complete knowing it. Thank you, Technology Connections.
I remember my old friend had one of the first CD-burners and the process was quite a magic trick: he told the mom not to switch on the oven or the vacuum cleaner otherwise the burning process will fail! And often the audio CD's (first compilations from Napster) will had some noises in track (like a saw sound).
something to do with the CD drive and HDD being on the same IDE ribbon on an older computer and having to share a lane - if other comments are to be believed too bad I don't have an older computer to test that idea with. Sounds like a fun project
the MB/MiB, etc. distinction is important but maybe people would be more willing to make it if "mebibyte", "gibibyte", etc. didn't just sound like "megabyte", "gigabyte", etc. in baby talk
And at this point it's really kind of impossible to do anything about it. Since it's already an established controversy, most people aren't going to switch sides just because the names are changed.
I don't recall hearing the "mebibyte" etc. usage until the pseudo-SI prefixes had already been used to mean 1024, 1024^2, etc. for many years (and also fudged commercially by other people using them to literally mean powers of 10). Wikipedia says it was 1998. It was a futile attempt to clean up the confusion after it was firmly entrenched, and the terms are phonetically horrible so nobody uses them.
Making a dark music piracy joke under the guise of CD-Arrrr sounding piratey was bloody priceless xD Don't ever change, my friend. You are one of a kind.
I canNOT get enough of your channel, I've been subscribed for about half a year and I've been on a binge the last few days! You're so great at delivering content with clever writing and a very soothing vocal performance.
Unless you already did this and I missed it, it might be worthwhile covering CD-R specifications that most people miss. The most stable dyes are available from relatively few brands, plus there are things such as edge sealing and different metalizations. Add things like protecting the top side of the disk to avoid damaging the dye/metalizations layers, and you'd have yourself another video.
That's an interesting point about the dyes wearing out. I have a few CD's from around 2005 or thereabouts and while several have lost data from atmospheric moisture impingement around the edges, most of them are still completely readable. What's even more unexpected is that the super el-cheapo discs are the ones that are holding out the best, almost universally.
I like how the background color on the computer screen changes to match the book color of the CD standard he's discussing starting at 8:19 with the orange book. Very subtle how he fades the colors in so you won't notice.
I had to pull up the "kibibytes vs kilobytes " section to explain the difference between a few engineers and users today. In my experience being a software engineer, this distinction rarely ever matters and I'm so happy I could use this video as an easy explanation!
Had this playing as background/interesting listening while I do paperwork and the mega-meba-back and forth had me feeling like I was having a mental episode 😂
CD-TEXT really is one of the greatest additions to the CD-Digital Audio format and i basically always use it when ever i create an Audio CD and making the most out of it. The VLC Player can read the CD Text and even the added extra text per track (not just the artist, track and Album name). It's nice when you create a mix for someone and hide some personal messages in there for every single track :)
ok, 3 years late... but I noticed tonight that you changed the background color on the screen, according to the color of the "book" you were talking about. Nice.
I think this is by far the best channel on TH-cam! I thoroughly enjoyed this video; it answered a lot of questions I've had for a long time. In Taiwan in the very late '90s to maybe 2001, VideoCD (VCD) was the norm as "buying or watching movies at home" wasn't the thing much yet (too many movies on cable TV.) Finally the price of DVDs and players came down and any newly-purchased computers were DVD compatible. There was a time when I often burned 3-inch discs to distribute various things to friends. That lasted until everyone slowly no longer had disc trays and had notebook computers (I guess North Americans still say "laptop", which kind-of annoys me) that had slot-load disc drives. I'd love to hear what you might have to say about 3-inch discs. That is "if" it's worth making a video.....of course. Take care, and thank you so much for this video!
I have never seen a laptop, notebook, or net book with a slot type CD/DVD drive. In the US a notebook is a small underpowered laptop, and a laptop is equal to the power of a desktop computer. Any computers here with an optical disc drive can still read 3" CD/DVD or Blu-Ray if that's a thing, and any variants like the short-lived CD-R business card.
I remember when i wanted to make a music album on a cd. The copy company denied my self burned "orange book" CD-R as it has to be in red book format. Years later, i slowly began to realize how important the red book format is for distributing audio cds.
Thanks for this video. I think the Video CD also deserves a deeper technical look as it was the first time for MPEG video compression (the grandpa of all modern video compression techniques) on a consumer media. As it was not very popular in the west, they were hugely popular in some asian countries. So please make a video about MPEG, Video CD and CDi as there are no good videos in YT and I would highly appreciate your knowledge about that topic. Thank you.
Man I hate CD-RWs. Great idea in theory, but in practice, every time I tried to use one, it worked fine the first time around, but if I ever tried to erase or re-write any data on the disk, the entire thing became unreadable in any drive I tried. Functionally they were just a more expensive, less useful version of a CD-R.
Exactly.... Sounds like a great idea because "write once" seemed so wasteful, but if you handled your CD after making it, it is usually time for a fresh disc anyways (plus the rw compatibility issues) so it was pretty useless.
@@drn9814 It could also be some difference between brands of the CD. Some CDs are crap! And will bust after not long in the sun, or if it's warm. And some will last like forever.
My favorite CD-R blanks were the Verbatim ones with the blue dye layer. It was just a nice, soothing color, particularly once the disc was burned. I still have a bunch of old mix discs made with those blanks someplace, probably in the box of stuff that came out of my last car that had a CD player when I sold it.
My gosh man you're historical knowledge of technology never ceases to amaze me. I always used to get confused between DVD-R/DVD-RW and DVD+R/DVD+RW. All I knew from experience was that the plus types didn't always work in every DVD player.
Flac can have multichannel audio, so a site like hdtracks.com could offer that. However, most casual music listeners aren't interested in it. Maybe because setting up a 5.1 system is more difficult than a 2.0 one.
I remember going "huh?" when i first heard multichannel from a cd in the car i was driven in, where the radio normally played fm-stereo Also interesting: car audio is, in my experience, often Quadrophonic installations
MrHack4nerver, true quadrophonic car audio is very rare. The vast majority of car audio is two sets of stereo output, as where quadrophnic is four totally independent channels. Quadrophic was a neat thing in the mid to late 70's, but it just never took off.
I think it would've been neat to see SACD get greater adoption; even though the improved sound quality isn't detectable by most people, it still would've been worth investing in for the 5.1 surround sound and longer runtime. Alas, it had the misfortune of coming out just as MP3s were making significant headway, and as we all know, the consumer only cares about what's most convenient.
Aww you didn't cover "over burn" feature of some CD burning software. I remember using that with Nero 7 back in the Win9x days. Always wondered how it managed to squeeze 20 to 40 extra MB out of a CD-R. Supposedly it's possible to do this on a DVD-R too, but never met a DVD drive/DVD-R disc that would let me. :P
--- Mode 2 --- The main way to get extra capacity is to use Mode 2 (12:10). Audio discs use 75 sectors per second, for the 80 minutes of the "700MB" disc, you get 360000 sectors. Each sector is 2352 bytes, but only 2048 bytes are data in Mode 1, or 2336 bytes in Mode 2. Multiply and you get 737280000 bytes (737.28 MB or 703.1 MiB aka "700MB") in Mode 1, and 840960000 bytes (840.96 MB or 802 MiB) on Mode 2. --- Overburning --- However, the CD-R standard (Orange Book) requires a Lead-in and a Lead-out. The term overburning refers specifically to writing without a lead-out, using the lead-out space for extra data. The burner can write the disc in a single session without lead-out and most readers won't have problems with it, however doing this is against the standard. The size of the (first) Lead-out is 6750 sectors, which are equivalent to 13.82 MB (13824000 bytes) in Mode 1 or 15.77 MB (15768000 bytes) in Mode 2. That is how much you get from overburning. Note: The Lead-in takes up to 4500 sectors, which would be equivalent to 9.216 MB in Mode 1 or 9.216 MB in Mode 2. However the Lead-in cannot be used for extra data because it has the TOC (Table Of Contents). --- Myths --- Overburning It is not making tracks closer (14:38) that requires to change the pregroove (6:35), It is also not burning in the plastic, that is just bs.
7:35 - I have a CD player that is so old that it will only play commercially pressed CDs. It will not play burned CD-R discs. Doesn't matter what burning software, write speed, or the quality of blank I use. I'm considering trying to get my hands on a fairly rare 650MB blank, which I've heard sometimes will work in very old players.
Thanks for clearing up some of the mystery of the CD, which is as transformative as it is puzzling for the layman. The presentations conciseness and humor makes this an enjoyable nerdout.
you are the perfect teacher lol, keeping things entertaining while actually being very technical is a crazy good talent! Also i loved this rainbow book saga i want a book series about it
You call yourself pedantic, then I wonder why I like this channel so much and that brings me back to a time when my now ex-girlfriend insulted me as pedantic. Pedantry is fun.
On the topic of VCDs, the really important thing to know is that they were INCREDIBLY cheap to produce. Both the players and the discs themselves. They became dominant in a number of countries where the local population just couldn't afford other formats like VHS or DVD. VCDs could be bought for the equivalent of just a few dollars, often more like one dollar. They were minmaxed for price, and it worked. (Also, clever western anime fans of the 90s and 00s who were brave enough to import from dodgy foreign websites were able to get otherwise pricey collections for super-cheap. Sure, they came as stacks of discs in thin flimsy sleeves, they were full of compression artifacts, and the subtitles were hard-burned onto the image, but you could get an entire TV series for less than what a single four-episode DVD would cost.)
Thank you for this video! I have been incorrectly referring to a game on a Blue Book CD as "using the Red Book format" for years now, it's nice to clear that up. Several games were on Blue Books, and that's great, because it means you can rip the music, but you don't have to because you can place the game directly into a CD player and the soundtrack plays.
For those who are confused about metric prefixes vs the _ebi standard here is a history of why that happened. This is a tale of a special group of hipsters called 'engineers' and a specific group of normies called 'marketers' 1: Engineers make computers 2: Computers use bits 3: Uh-oh, you can't represent 10 perfectly via powers of 2 4: Engineers say "no matter, use 2^10 because it's 1024 and is close enough and better for description because we use hex anyway and two hex digits are a byte. 5: Everyone agrees and is happy 6: Computers grow in power and become more mainstream. 7: Our psychopathic overlords eventually realize they can make money from the machines. 8: Suddenly engineers are being taken and placed into these special teams to make computers for the masses and have to explain over night how these things work to marketers 9: The marketers nod their head not listening to anything the engineer says. 10: They see that engineers use metric prefixes and after cleaning them selves up from the fear of the realization that something they didn't bother to pay attention to in school might actually be something they needed, they skip through their old textbook for hours one night while drunk and find the section of metric prefixes. 11: In a morning, the confidentially stroll into work and write down the amount of 'bytes' the product has. 12: The engineers see this and say "What the hell" and tell them they are wrong because the number is too high. 13: The overlords side with the marketers because it makes their product look more impressive than their competitors. 14: The engineer points out to them that it would be false advertisment 15: They make up some bullshit term and replace metric bytes with _ebi bytes 16: Nobody is happy, but that overlord made a few million more dollars for a short time. And so ends our tale.
+Cyansius: Yes, the idea is to make more money. Why are prices 1 cent short: example 5.99$ instead of 6$ Apparently, the "idiot" will think that it is radically cheaper and will be more encouraged to buy it. Why are bags of chips the same size yet they are getting lighter? What used to be 250 g came down to 230 g, then 200 g, then 180 g. The idea is that the "idiot" will think the product has become cheaper. I'm sure you can think of many more examples from your supermarket. People aren't stupid. We live in a world of coupons, groupons, sales and rebates. Hard drive manufacturers were taken to court over their "cleverness". Did it help a certain manufacturer sell more? So now, all HDD manufacturers are doing the same thing and the playing field between them is leveled again. None of them have an advantage over the other. So what's next? Cheap printers and overpriced ink? HP, Lexmark, Epson aren't doing themselves any favors with their cleverness. It is obvious that they each copy each other's business model. You also have Apple who design products that aren't easy to repair. They have lobbied the government to make opening their products illegal. The reason they give is that you might injure yourself by opening it. Louis Rossmann has a channel about the tricks Apple uses.
@@louistournas120 I sometimes watch Rossmann, but he's a bit of an asshole so I can only take him in small quantities. I can't tell if your comment it supposed to be criticism or in agreement with me? Mostly because Rossmann is in support of Capitalism (He calls himself libertarian) and I would be classified as a socialist.
I hate the prefix ebi... like with a passion ever since I was like 10 on my little compaq. I love the fact that its a factor of 2, 1024 is nice to my eyes, ears, and brain. even back then when I was 10 I understood what it was, but for some reason ebi just irks me.
Saying "mebibyte" is like nails scraping on the chalkboard to the ears of anyone who grew up referring to 1024 KB as a megabyte. Same thing with the kids these days who refer to records as "vinyls"...
A Megabyte will always be 1024KB to me, however it makes sense as far as standardising formats. In SI units Kilo means 1000, Mega 1000000, having it being different for computer sciences makes no real sense other than, thats the way it is. Kibibytes and mebibytes, helps eliminate confusion.
But binary units were the norm for computers for the first 40+ years of their existence, until drive manufacturers started cheating to make their drives seem larger than what you were actually getting. Therefore if new prefixes had to be invented, they should have been applied to the nonconforming decimal units, not the standard binary units. After all, computers were using 1 K = 1024 bytes long before SI even existed, so the whole "it doesn't match SI definitions" argument is bunk. Now go complain about how "4K" video is actually only 3.84K, therefore they shouldn't call it 4K...
0:55 Wow, I'm impressed... I've seen a lot of videos of people talking about digital file storage etc. and I believe you are the first one to get it completely right. Even addressing the fact that computers actually show incorrect units. Well Linux actually shows it correctly, so not computers in general. But you know what I mean...
I loved the Jump Start games! My favorite was whichever one was the Ancient Egypt themed one. 4th grade, I wanna say? Also it took me until the scarlet wallpaper to notice that it was changing with each book discussed.
Years later, I wish you had an episode on SACD and delta-sigma modulation. I can't wrap my head around how it manages to encode the necessary data density. Also, CD text is probably the most underused standard in existence.
Thank you for that jump start clip. In k-2 my school had jump start 2nd grade and marble blast loaded on imacs. I had forgotten about these games until a few years ago when I was hit with a nostalgia trip. I was able to locate marble blast, but was completely unable to find jumpstart 2nd grade. Thanks for jogging my memory.
"A CD-R is a pirate's favorite CD" is something that only gets more brilliant the more you think about it.
Well yes but actualy yes
It would be more like “cd-arrghhh”
Yeah, T.C. *almost* went over my head on that one.
To be honest though, that is NOT so difficult a thing to do...😊
I’m noticing that the jokes come quickly. Don’t blink.
My favorite thing is how straight-faced he said it. Love it
This channel is so absurdly technically specific but somehow manages to be completely entertaining and understandable. I still have no idea how you're able to do it!
storyteller VOICE
That plus the fact that he doesn't talk down to the viewer as if we were turnips or something.
@@morphobots Bad luck for all the Swedes out there though :'(
@@RogerBarraud I would laugh but I don't want to be seen as stereotyping any one.
This dude checks all the boxes for what I consider to be a channel not worth regularly watching and yet here I am
"CD-R, a pirate's favorite kind of CD" ... First thought: Because of the pirated software etc.
10 seconds later it drops: "AARRRRR" XD
This really is my favorite channel on TH-cam! :D
Great work!
Straight deadpan. Well done.
I caught I right away and got milk up my nose. Well done. Adding to my Dad jokes collection.
Yes, I simultaneously loved and hated that joke.
+ "I think there's more to this hobbit then meets the eye" - Gandalf
Iykury Definitely ;)
The little details in your videos, such as the ever changing desktop background color in this one to match the "book color" being discussed, makes them all the more awesome. Thank you, sir!
what even are the books. when i try to google the names of them they show me everything except what he's talking about.
He showed the Wikipedia page in an earlier video: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Books
Wow. Mentioning the dye on a CD-R dug up some long-forgotten memories of burning discs as a kid in the mid 90s. I'd totally forgotten being interested in how part of the discs would turn darker from the center outwards the more data was burned. I thought that was such an oddly analogue detail on a digital system.
This dude is criminaly undersubscribed...
DM Diamond maybe he has people like
me that just watch from time to time. I have no need to “subscribe” to every channel I watch.
@@codycast Sure, I also have several channels that I happen to watch constantly, but never subscribed to them. I also understand that his content is kind of niche... If you're a content creator and want a million subs, you have to speak about mindless youtube drama, or steal content from other people. That's just how things are.
You're right. I'm going to do my part to correct this error by subscribing immediately.
Because people like stupid content creators like PewDiePie
100% agreement
Only when he got to "scarlet" near the end of the friggin' video did I notice the background color on the monitor changes according to what "book" he talks about :))))
He should have squeezed in "don't give a damn" somewhere in the scarlet book discussion.
And he ended it with the black book.
Me too haha
*Las Quejas, CA.*
_“A nice place to complain.”_
this
AMAZING
it's amazing what knowledge of another language can bring about in comedy...
Note: see Robin Williams in Mork & Mindy
Las Quejas lol
I don't get it?
"Can't help but feel sorry for [Kodak]"
Kodak didn't miss the digital photography trend, they were hoping it would die. Film was a huge source of revenue for them, selling for dollars but costing pennies to manufacture. Digital photography removed that revenue stream, so they avoided it
Kodak was at one point the largest manufacturer of digital cameras. They failed for financial reasons.
A few quick things:
Somehow I never managed to say that ROM stands for Read Only Memory. You probably knew that, but for the sake of completion...
As pointed out a few times now, which admittedly I hadn't realized, the -ebibyte suffix is relatively new so saying that a CD is "mislabeling" its capacity as MB when it should be MiB is not strictly true. The definitions have changed since their introduction--but for good reason. The confusion between base 10 and base 2 data classification is annoying and real. Each successive prefix will increase the error between base 2 and base 10 calculation, and since all we really care about is the number of files of X size that we can keep in a given data store, switching to easier-to-understand base-10 prefixes makes sense to me. As you can see in the video, Windows acknowledges that the drive is 2,000,000,000,000 bytes, and yet that becomes 1.81 TB. The problem comes when, if you buy a drive of 1,000 times the capacity, Windows will make it seem like it's not 1,000 times as large. But it is.
Other thing: 80min/700MB discs weren't around as early as I had thought. Sure, "not long into the development of the CD" is a flexible statement, but still.
Also, Apple also dropped binary prefixes and quotes all data sizes in decimal units. If you plug a 2TB drive into a newer Mac it will say it has 2TB of space. Yes, it also quotes the files on that drive as larger than a Windows machine would quote them.
Wait a minute this post is 23 hours ago?!
we could have had trinary, you really want to deal with factors of 3 instead of factors of 2!
just be happy that whole numbers are alot easier to deal with XD...
just going to throw this out there, Computerphile has some pretty good videos that give you a glimpse as to WHY base 2 is the thing and why every thing is square.
from what I understand alot of it has to do with rounding and overflow errors and the way you count on a bit level as well the logistical nightmare that comes along with doing it another way... but I am not going to say too much more than that because I can already feel myself oosing with technicalities.
See here for why Explorer calculates storage in TiB but uses TB in the UI: blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090611-00/?p=17933
The thing is, 80 minute audio-CDs had been out for a while in the early days of CD-R while CD-Rs were still available at only 74 minutes capacity. So sometimes when you were copying an audio-CD you had to sacrifice a track, which sucked.
The -ebibytes suffix is relatively new. Normal kilobytes, megabytes, etc used to be powers of two, but the general public did not understand why 1000 wasn't kilo, but 1024 was.
For me, 1 kilobyte is still 1024 bytes.
I realize this is kind of the whole problem, but it's getting increasingly frustrating as time goes on because the error is getting larger with each prefix. Shortly I'm going to pin a comment with better thoughts (because labeling it as "misrepresenting" as I did in the video really isn't fair) but I do think it would be wise to stop equating GiB and TiB with their base-10 equivalencies. If I were to buy a 1 terabyte drive, it holds 1000 times as much data as a 1 gigabyte flash drive (how quaint). But my computer won't say that because it's still using base 2 math, which is rather archaic in this day and age when files are routinely gigabytes large.
And of course there's the horrible mixing that has occasionally occurred as in the 1.44 MB floppy. We're dealing with large files now and why Windows is still using base 2 math for data stores is beyond me. You can even see in the screenshot that Windows is like "Yeah this drive is 2,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 1.81 TB". That alone is maddening!
But kilo- mega- and giga-prefixes are much older than computers and bytes, and are used all over engineering and science. Having those prefixes be subtly incompatible for just one unit just leads to all sorts of problems.
Totally agree, using 'ebibytes' just legitimises the storage manufacturers' trick of switching to powers of 10 for storage so it looked like you were getting value for money.
Maxtor was sued over this but they won.
Using the SI prefixes is naughty as they represent powers of 10 for all the other units. Imagine you have bags full of different currency notes (say, euros, dollars and pounds). You group them in 1000 units groups, except for one, which you group in 1024 units groups, but marking them with the same label. How is someone supposed to know how you counted them? It's the same problem, except with units instead of currencies.
Had a customer that legit believed that cdrom tray was a cup holder.
wowwww
On that old-internet site, FunnyJunk.com, there was a link that offered "Free Cup Holder!"
When you clicked the link, it would open your CD tray. 😅
Hey, ANY naval ship can be a minesweeper ONCE...😊
@@jbird4478 Well, without planting spyware on your PC anyway
Me too. Kept asking me to fix her cup holder which of course I didn't understand, at first.
I've got to say, it was really amazing how you managed to say Megabyte and Mebibyte that many times right after one another. There is a bit of historical context I would like to add, though.
In the days that the CD-ROM and CD-R standards were created, MiB didn't exist as a unit. So, for the most part, it wasn't a case of mislabeling. At the time, everyone was happily using MB to refer to (2^10)^2 bytes. Sure, it was a little weird that the "kilo" in kilobyte was different from the "kilo" in kilogram, but they were still pretty similar and it wasn't like you would ever have to convert from the one unit to the other. However, then came the harddisk manufacturers which realized that they could produce (10^3)^3 byte hard drives and market them to people who will think they're buying (2^10)^3 byte drives, thus getting more apparent value than they actually spent the resources on producing. They were allowed to do this because they were the ones that pointed to the SI and said "look, we're using the correct definition of a gigabyte"). That's why only in the late 90s, the kiB, MiB, GiB, and their companions were added to the SI so the two systems could be distinguished. So, yeah, technically, someone labeling a MiB as an MB is mislabeling it. On the other hand, it's the people who insisted on using MB for (10^3)^3 bytes who were originally *intentionally* deviating from the commonly accepted meaning of the word...
And that's why I never bother to use the "proper" terminology of gibibyte. It's dumb.
On the other hand, networking stuff has always used SI prefixes for transfer speed. But given the right context, it was not an issue that a megabyte was more than eight times a megabit.
I'm glad someone pointed this out. And I hate that about myself.
@@TheGldnSldr it's okay man, I was glad to see it as well 💜
Ok
I absolutely loved the Minidisc. I worked in sound design for theatre at the time, and the ability to rearrange tracks and re-record individual tracks without re-recording the entire disc was invaluable. I had two MD record decks and two portable players, one of which also acted as a portable digital recorder. It was fantastic hardware with only a limited appeal, but appeal to me it did.
"Las quejas" hahahaha
Man I love this channel.
That's Spanish for "The Complaints" xD
Gordon freemen in the flesh
@@MrPikachuTheMadman ...Or rather, in the hazard suit.
Nothing A. All I took the liberty of reliving you of your enhancements, most of them were government property after all.
I was wondering what that was from. I Googled it, and found a few other uses:
Reddit Department of Pedantry 69 Relentless Drive 42069 Los Quejas, CA
Anyone know the source of this?
@@coteyera1814 yo argentino
I had no idea what "cerc error correction" was until I realized you were actually referring to CRC. This is the first time I've heard anyone try to pronounce that as a word rather than just the letters.
No, he was talking about CIRC. Similar but not CRC.
Ah, Cross-Interleaved Reed-Solomon coding -- or what he usually just called "Reed-Solomon". Taking a few seconds to spell out the acronym would've been helpful.
Yes that was an oversight--I often foolishly assume that everyone will watch these in order and will sometimes fail to reiterate.
That said, I do put captions on nearly all of my main channel videos. If there's ever confusion, you can check there.
I thought William Shatner was involved somehow.
Thanks by the way, while your english is easy enough to understand even to us foreigners, subtitles still help!
The background of the desktop changes with each color you mention 😍😍😍
So does the light on the Mac!
You can tell it's done in post, cos the icons and windows have shadowy edges.
ﾠKawa Of course.
It took me all the way till the Blue Book to notice.
I didn’t notice until the scarlet book
YES! Someone else recognizes the absolute greatness of Jump Start 3rd grade. I'm 27 and I STILL find enjoyment in this game! Rock on dude!
Their typing game is how I learned to touch-type. I only played it for one session (during which I learned where to put my hands and how to move my fingers from there) and then just got faster over the years by typing whatever I had to type.
I grew up with the Jump Start games, and 3rd Grade was the absolute best of the lot. I didn't think anybody else remembered them!
Incidentally, they were all pirated copies I got from my uncle, the only one in our family who had a CD burner.
blu jump jump jump start first grade jump jump jump
One-of -Them I have 2nd grade. That’s the only Jumpstart I had, but I too still find some nostalgic enjoyment out of it.
That was my jammmmmmm
I remember when Mebibytes and Megabytes swapped.
Thanks, hard drive manufacturers.
@Morgan Goossen nah. Because it made the HD manufacturers more money. They could say their drives were bigger.
@@Kajifox all the articles i saw said the standards body that made the switch blamed salesmen for not being able to do the maths. Quite believable based on the computer sales staff I've met.
@@kinetkraygunn9432 My rules are follow the money, follow the money and follow the money, so pardon my cynicism.
I remember the articles being top down rather than bottom up. Marketing people like big numbers.
Taking into consideration that SI (International System Of Units) has been standarised in 1960, did they ever swap? Or were the units just misused as in case of kilobytes and megabytes it didn't do much of a difference. When we came to thinking in gigabytes and terabytes, the problem was already there striking us more and more with every year of development.
I don't have solid proof, but I assume that the "bi" in "Mebibyte" signifies "binary". So I don't think it could have ever been swapped. Mis-using Megabytes to mean Mebibytes though, has been a thing ever since MS-DOS.
1:00
The binary SI prefixes (like Mebi-) are a fairly recent development. The IEC first defined them in 1998, long after CDs were brought to market. Before that people had been using the standard SI prefixes but with binary quantities to measure bytes and bits for about as long as bytes and bits have been measured, and as you've said such usage is still ubiquitous.
also, powers of 10 are seriously NOT useful for measuring digital data, so the IEC really should have not done that and just kept the SI prefixes but with powers of two, it's just way better even if it *technically* doesn't match
@@technoturnovers7072 And it's the fault of hard drive manufacturers marketing departments.
@@technoturnovers7072 I sometimes think it would be better to measure computer storage with a log scale. For example, 700 MB would be about 29.45 units
You had me at "CD-ARRR, a pirates favorite kind of CD"
Some say that R is a pirate's favorite letter. But alas, no. It be the C.
@@buddyclem7328 I read that with a pirate voice
@@4nd3rzzon Aye... am glad ye enjoyed it!
It's funny because it's true
@@markusTegelane pirates use it for copying games,video,and audio all the time
When he said CD-R was a pirates favorite kind of CD I thought of all the bootleg movies sold by street vendors and paddled on public transportation. Then it hit me... CD-ARRRGH!
"i" but a pirate's first love B the C.
Degradation of data on a disc is a very good point and very well placed as a final reminder in the video. Many years ago, my parents got a CD with satellite images of our hometown, pretty much like Google Maps' satellite view. I tried to load that disc some month ago for a bit of nostalgia, but the drive behaved like there was not even a disc inserted.
And finally I know the difference on why one disc is re-writable and another is not. Thanks a lot!
I was totally surprised when I found out I could play MP3 CDs in my 1992 Denon® multi-disc player!
This series is missing something essential...leather elbow pads.
I think I remember that older CD players played data tracks like audio (which was pretty loud noise), while newer devices muted them.
The fact that more than 74 minutes can be stored on a CD, and this also was used on music albums, was almost a kind of copy protection for a while (at least a motivation to buy the original), because at the beginning of MiniDisc it had only 60 and 74 minutes recording capacity.
i remember that the computer cd roms with two buttons (eject and play) could play audio cd's even without a computer (just power) and i hooked them to our car with good old linear regulators to get 5v out of cars 12v battery, since car CD players were very expensive, a time when youtube didint exist for my awesome diy hack to be uploaded
@@OctyabrAprelya i think so
"[...] and it did neither, BUT ALSO YES"
Matt this guy does jokes with a straight face and I always end up laughing simply from how sudden they are
Flawless execution 😂
I just noticed... the background color on the Mac changes in respect to which Book is being discussed.
Mind. Blown.
Wow...when you said Magic Schoolbus games my memory immediately played me some long-forgotten but vivid and very happy cutscenes. Thanks for helping me remember some of my first PC gaming experiences. I just found your channel today via Tom Scott and I've been binging with glee!
Oh god, do you remember the buffer underrun? 😂
If the system couldn’t feed the cd burner with enough data you had to throw the cd in the trash bin.
And they used to cost a lot.
I remember staring at the buffer percentage as if I was reading a Stephen King novel!
Sooooo cringy! 😄
I went out and bought a sweet new yamaha 16x burner for my computer and my processor was too slow to real time decode an mp3 directly to CD at that speed and it would slowly eat through the buffer and fail unless I dropped down to 10x or something. I was so disappointed that I spent the extra $150 on speed I could not use unless I was making a data CD.
volvo09 😂😂😂 same here except mine was a plextor.
A friend of mine used to sing me a song with made up lyrics to rub it into my face 😂
That bas*ard 😂
IlRompiscatole TOTALLY remember - made LOTS of “coasters” that way on an early era burner at work.
I remember the first time I got a burner that wouldn’t underrun. It was wonderful!
It was worse on some machines. With Philips early burning software and windows 98, you couldn't even use the computer while burning, as alt+tab into other programs just froze it in a way to underflow the burner.
I don't exactly remember, if that happened on the 233 MHz or 1 GHz PC, back in the day. Both ran on Win98. However, I kept doing that until the PCs became more powerful and Windows XP was brand new.
Mebibyte IS a silly word. Thank you TC!
and measuring binary data in decimal units is a silly practice. :P
And? We need a word for 2^20 bytes, and using the SI prefixes is naughty as they represent powers of 10 for all the other units. Imagine you have bags full of different currency notes (say, euros, dollars and pounds). You group them in 1000 units groups, except for one, which you group in 1024 units groups, but marking them with the same label. How is someone supposed to know how you counted them? It's the same problem, except with units instead of currencies.
And don't get me started on words like "Mega tsunami." Seriously though, if you're looking at data and don't realize it works in powers of two, you're probably an anthropology student.
@@GRBtutorials I used to think that metric (decimal) numbers were used for transfer unformatted while 1024 kilobyte format was used for formatted. It was a pretty accurate simplification I figured. It's still the same number of bytes even if the formatted number is smaller when you get into orders of magnitude.
What about a Yotabyte? (Idk how it's spelled, but it's something like it)
8:13 A friend of mine actually did that when he couldn't find his usb stick. Makes me chuckle even to this day, everytime I think back to it
More on SACD, please! Including the Red Book (RB) dual layer format that allowed SACDs to be played in RB CD players.
More bands and singers should have went that extra mile (or extra kilometer in metric countries), and recorded their albums in SACD format, and had them pressed and released in dual layer format (with no RB only releases). Then, as more and more people ended up with more and more SACDs in their collections, more and more people probably would have thought, "Since a fair amount of CDs in my collection are also SACDs, I'll upgrade to a SACD player so I can enjoy the higher quality sound.".
When I got my first CD burner it could only go up to 4X speed, and I found out too late that the CDs go bad quickly. I lost a ton of media files that I thought were safely backed up on CDs.
I got my first CD burner in 1999. My discs still work 22 years later
@@stayupthetree it depends on how you store them.
i burned a disk with a few important files i need to transfer to computers and since i might need to use those files on older machines i chose the disk instead of the pendrive. anyways, after a few years (5 maybe?) i noticed it has stains on the shiny side but it still works because the stains didn't reach the burned part.
i also still have my decade old ps2 games. they've been stored on a drawer for most of their life and they're in perfectly good shape. a few have scratches or so it looks like but they still work just fine.
@@white_mage Ironically, it's light and moist/dry cycles (humidititty) that tend to kill CDs, keep them in a case, in a dark dry place and they'll last a good long time.
Some of the ultra-cheap brands did use chemicals that would deteriorate over time, basically oxidize and degrade. But the vast majority will last 20+ years. For storage that you need to last even longer, your options are tape drives or classic spinning-disc hard-drives, but even these won't last forever.
Unfortunately there's not yet any good *permanent* storage solution for data that needs to be kept for decades, aside from copying it from one drive to a newer drive every couple years and just ensuring you maintain a good working backup of it.
Some researchers were working with "burning" the data into glass/crystal, but I don't know if this went anywhere.. Last I heard of it was a magazine like 15-20 years ago.
@@mashrien I’ve heated something called M-disc could survive for about 1000 years.Technically not permanent but if your using it to save data might as well be cause you will probably die before the M-disc if it is stored right.
@@starstudio8402 I've heard of them too, but from wikipedia:
According to an accelerated aging test of the French National Laboratory of Metrology and Testing at 90 °C and 85% humidity, the DVD+Rs with inorganic recording layer like M-DISCs were still readable after 250 hours, however with an error rate above threshold, and were rated "less than 250 hours" equivalent to competing offers.
They mentioned it having to be stored in a specific manner to achieve that kind of longevity.. a typical dvd will probably last 1000 years if stored in a complete vacuum, absent of all light lol
I don't think "discs" of any description will be viable for long-term (read: multi-century) archival storage.
We really need to physically alter some stable isotope, but that means modifying the molecular structure of a mass of some ultra-stable material, which according to wiki would be *tin,* of all things, as it apparently *DOESN'T* decay.. like at all.. ever lol
Anything that's plastic will eventually break down, and anything that's easily deformable would also be a bad choice.. I would've thought vanadium or silicone to be more stable.. but I'm just a nerd that spends too much time reading random crap on the interwebs and absorbing all the astro and particle physics info I can get my peepers hooked on.
Your channel just brings back so much 90s and early 2000s nostalgia.... Thank you for that!
When you said "you'll almost always certainly not notice it" around 3:02, the video playing glitched slightly and I thought it was proposital, just to prove the point. Turns out it was just a incredible coincidence.
It would have been absolutely brilliant if he really put a glitch right after the sentence to prove the point.
"CD ROMs or would that be CDs ROM"
My Brain: The plural of surgeon general is surgeons general the past tense of surgeons general is surgeonsed general ~portal 2 fact sphere
I know that's not a useful comment but oh well
Come to think of it, CDs-ROM makes more sense, since you probably don't have a bunch of Compact Disc Read Only "Memories" lying around...
I watch your videos when I feel overwhelmed by work or when I feel like I wont make ends meet this month. don't know why but your videos calms me down a lot. just wanted to thank you for that.
You just unlocked some memories when you showed the Jumpstart 3rd Grade game. I remember being surprisingly into it, even though I was fully aware it was meant to be Educational™.
I know you touched on it in passing, but I'd be really interested in seeing a more detailed look at Video CD, and potentially how it compared to future video discs (DVD et al). Really enjoyed this video!
Techmoan made a great video about VCD.
Video CD was utter rubbish. Image quality was VHS grade at best, but often far worse. And good luck finding someone with a VCD player that's not a computer. If it's a computer, just play the original video files off a data disc.
"Light cannon of fire laser!" Love it.
The "Las Quejas" bit was genius
Indeed, I was going to comment on that too.
To the attention to Mr. Al Caraho.
That part genuinely made me LOL ;-)
Las Quejas, CA.
“A nice place to complain.”
So I had to pause the video and go look up Mebibyte just to make sure you weren't pulling my leg. Dadgum. And here I thought my nerd training was complete. This is the sort of distinction that makes no difference to most people and yet now I somehow feel more complete knowing it. Thank you, Technology Connections.
I remember my old friend had one of the first CD-burners and the process was quite a magic trick: he told the mom not to switch on the oven or the vacuum cleaner otherwise the burning process will fail! And often the audio CD's (first compilations from Napster) will had some noises in track (like a saw sound).
Wait what? Would an oven/vacuum cleaner cause the drive to lose power or something?
@@BlazingDiancie Yes, something like that (it was an old house)
something to do with the CD drive and HDD being on the same IDE ribbon on an older computer and having to share a lane - if other comments are to be believed
too bad I don't have an older computer to test that idea with. Sounds like a fun project
the MB/MiB, etc. distinction is important but maybe people would be more willing to make it if "mebibyte", "gibibyte", etc. didn't just sound like "megabyte", "gigabyte", etc. in baby talk
No kidding. I really wish they didn't half-ass the issue by mangling the SI prefixes.
And at this point it's really kind of impossible to do anything about it. Since it's already an established controversy, most people aren't going to switch sides just because the names are changed.
@John Doe nope it's absolutely real!
I don't recall hearing the "mebibyte" etc. usage until the pseudo-SI prefixes had already been used to mean 1024, 1024^2, etc. for many years (and also fudged commercially by other people using them to literally mean powers of 10). Wikipedia says it was 1998. It was a futile attempt to clean up the confusion after it was firmly entrenched, and the terms are phonetically horrible so nobody uses them.
Making a dark music piracy joke under the guise of CD-Arrrr sounding piratey was bloody priceless xD
Don't ever change, my friend. You are one of a kind.
Love the new format with the bloopers. I always loved that from the 90s shows. Gives it a super retro feel. And that music. My freaking god.
I live for your subtle video editing jokes! "beige"
I like the detail of the Macintosh's background changing color to match the the CD "Book" you're currently talking about
I canNOT get enough of your channel, I've been subscribed for about half a year and I've been on a binge the last few days! You're so great at delivering content with clever writing and a very soothing vocal performance.
Unless you already did this and I missed it, it might be worthwhile covering CD-R specifications that most people miss. The most stable dyes are available from relatively few brands, plus there are things such as edge sealing and different metalizations. Add things like protecting the top side of the disk to avoid damaging the dye/metalizations layers, and you'd have yourself another video.
That's an interesting point about the dyes wearing out. I have a few CD's from around 2005 or thereabouts and while several have lost data from atmospheric moisture impingement around the edges, most of them are still completely readable. What's even more unexpected is that the super el-cheapo discs are the ones that are holding out the best, almost universally.
Love how the PowerPC background changes color according to the book referenced.
I like how the background color on the computer screen changes to match the book color of the CD standard he's discussing starting at 8:19 with the orange book. Very subtle how he fades the colors in so you won't notice.
I had to pull up the "kibibytes vs kilobytes " section to explain the difference between a few engineers and users today. In my experience being a software engineer, this distinction rarely ever matters and I'm so happy I could use this video as an easy explanation!
I'm always impressed by your extensive research, and excellent production value. Great work!
Had this playing as background/interesting listening while I do paperwork and the mega-meba-back and forth had me feeling like I was having a mental episode 😂
Las Quejas, CA. [laughs in Spanish]
Hey, there is a Los Banos, CA. I used to live there. :D
TheRealColBosch And it is a shithole.
Jajajajaja.
It just reminded me of Monty Python's Flying Circus.
JA JA JA
CD-TEXT really is one of the greatest additions to the CD-Digital Audio format and i basically always use it when ever i create an Audio CD and making the most out of it. The VLC Player can read the CD Text and even the added extra text per track (not just the artist, track and Album name). It's nice when you create a mix for someone and hide some personal messages in there for every single track :)
I always saw cd-text as a gimmick as almost nothing ever supported it
ok, 3 years late... but I noticed tonight that you changed the background color on the screen, according to the color of the "book" you were talking about.
Nice.
I think this is by far the best channel on TH-cam! I thoroughly enjoyed this video; it answered a lot of questions I've had for a long time. In Taiwan in the very late '90s to maybe 2001, VideoCD (VCD) was the norm as "buying or watching movies at home" wasn't the thing much yet (too many movies on cable TV.) Finally the price of DVDs and players came down and any newly-purchased computers were DVD compatible. There was a time when I often burned 3-inch discs to distribute various things to friends. That lasted until everyone slowly no longer had disc trays and had notebook computers (I guess North Americans still say "laptop", which kind-of annoys me) that had slot-load disc drives. I'd love to hear what you might have to say about 3-inch discs. That is "if" it's worth making a video.....of course. Take care, and thank you so much for this video!
I have never seen a laptop, notebook, or net book with a slot type CD/DVD drive. In the US a notebook is a small underpowered laptop, and a laptop is equal to the power of a desktop computer. Any computers here with an optical disc drive can still read 3" CD/DVD or Blu-Ray if that's a thing, and any variants like the short-lived CD-R business card.
ACTUALLY, the department of pedantry is located in...
...My ex-girlfriend's bedroom?
/dev/null
...the Office of Redundancy Office.
@@dylansmith3660 take the like, damn it
C:\con\con\
A deep dive into SACD would be cool
After he talked about Video CD. ;-)
Its encoding, for sure.
Yeah I want to know what caused SACD to flop.
@@kylereese5869
Nobody bought it.
I remember when i wanted to make a music album on a cd. The copy company denied my self burned "orange book" CD-R as it has to be in red book format. Years later, i slowly began to realize how important the red book format is for distributing audio cds.
“And it did neither...
But also yes.”
>pirate's favorite kind of CD
Multiple layer jokes, I see.
Multiple layers to the multiple layers statement--how hard can we play the meta today?
Mmm multi-layer DVD 9, PS2 & 360 here we come :D
I'm honestly excited.
They say R is a pirate's favorite letter. But no, it be the C.
@@buddyclem7328
A pirate's 10 favourite letters are I I, R, and the seven Cs.
@@blunderbus2695 ℹ, I mean aye!
Thanks for this video. I think the Video CD also deserves a deeper technical look as it was the first time for MPEG video compression (the grandpa of all modern video compression techniques) on a consumer media. As it was not very popular in the west, they were hugely popular in some asian countries. So please make a video about MPEG, Video CD and CDi as there are no good videos in YT and I would highly appreciate your knowledge about that topic. Thank you.
Agreed. MPEG-1 should deserve some love, after the countless "VCD is garbage" comments here.
Cinepak!
Techmoan did a great video about VCD.
Man I hate CD-RWs. Great idea in theory, but in practice, every time I tried to use one, it worked fine the first time around, but if I ever tried to erase or re-write any data on the disk, the entire thing became unreadable in any drive I tried. Functionally they were just a more expensive, less useful version of a CD-R.
Exactly.... Sounds like a great idea because "write once" seemed so wasteful, but if you handled your CD after making it, it is usually time for a fresh disc anyways (plus the rw compatibility issues) so it was pretty useless.
For some reason I never had a successful write on a CD-RW. Not once. For me they were basically expensive coasters...
I never had any problem and often used it for audio books in the car.
@@Xanthopteryx Still using them for my portale CD player, not facing problems. Perhaps it was different when it just was introduced.
@@drn9814 It could also be some difference between brands of the CD. Some CDs are crap! And will bust after not long in the sun, or if it's warm. And some will last like forever.
My favorite CD-R blanks were the Verbatim ones with the blue dye layer. It was just a nice, soothing color, particularly once the disc was burned. I still have a bunch of old mix discs made with those blanks someplace, probably in the box of stuff that came out of my last car that had a CD player when I sold it.
My gosh man you're historical knowledge of technology never ceases to amaze me. I always used to get confused between DVD-R/DVD-RW and DVD+R/DVD+RW. All I knew from experience was that the plus types didn't always work in every DVD player.
"And it did neither. But also, yes!" - Alec, 2018
"[...]CD-WOs. Whoa!"
I laughed só hard on this.
Thanks.
I really wish SACD took off. I have both SACD and DVDA discs. Multichannel music is really cool.
Tatsh2DX DVDA is still a pretty cool band. \m/\m/
Flac can have multichannel audio, so a site like hdtracks.com could offer that.
However, most casual music listeners aren't interested in it. Maybe because setting up a 5.1 system is more difficult than a 2.0 one.
I remember going "huh?" when i first heard multichannel from a cd in the car i was driven in, where the radio normally played fm-stereo
Also interesting: car audio is, in my experience, often Quadrophonic installations
MrHack4nerver, true quadrophonic car audio is very rare. The vast majority of car audio is two sets of stereo output, as where quadrophnic is four totally independent channels. Quadrophic was a neat thing in the mid to late 70's, but it just never took off.
I think it would've been neat to see SACD get greater adoption; even though the improved sound quality isn't detectable by most people, it still would've been worth investing in for the 5.1 surround sound and longer runtime. Alas, it had the misfortune of coming out just as MP3s were making significant headway, and as we all know, the consumer only cares about what's most convenient.
13:13 I absolutely LOVE the font on that Photo CD logo.
Your timing at 5:05 is wonderful.
Aww you didn't cover "over burn" feature of some CD burning software.
I remember using that with Nero 7 back in the Win9x days. Always wondered how it managed to squeeze 20 to 40 extra MB out of a CD-R. Supposedly it's possible to do this on a DVD-R too, but never met a DVD drive/DVD-R disc that would let me. :P
---
Mode 2
---
The main way to get extra capacity is to use Mode 2 (12:10).
Audio discs use 75 sectors per second, for the 80 minutes of the "700MB" disc, you get 360000 sectors.
Each sector is 2352 bytes, but only 2048 bytes are data in Mode 1, or 2336 bytes in Mode 2.
Multiply and you get 737280000 bytes (737.28 MB or 703.1 MiB aka "700MB") in Mode 1, and 840960000 bytes (840.96 MB or 802 MiB) on Mode 2.
---
Overburning
---
However, the CD-R standard (Orange Book) requires a Lead-in and a Lead-out.
The term overburning refers specifically to writing without a lead-out, using the lead-out space for extra data. The burner can write the disc in a single session without lead-out and most readers won't have problems with it, however doing this is against the standard.
The size of the (first) Lead-out is 6750 sectors, which are equivalent to 13.82 MB (13824000 bytes) in Mode 1 or 15.77 MB (15768000 bytes) in Mode 2. That is how much you get from overburning.
Note: The Lead-in takes up to 4500 sectors, which would be equivalent to 9.216 MB in Mode 1 or 9.216 MB in Mode 2. However the Lead-in cannot be used for extra data because it has the TOC (Table Of Contents).
---
Myths
---
Overburning It is not making tracks closer (14:38) that requires to change the pregroove (6:35), It is also not burning in the plastic, that is just bs.
The dreamcast format GD-ROM had two books in one disk!
7:35 - I have a CD player that is so old that it will only play commercially pressed CDs. It will not play burned CD-R discs. Doesn't matter what burning software, write speed, or the quality of blank I use. I'm considering trying to get my hands on a fairly rare 650MB blank, which I've heard sometimes will work in very old players.
Thanks for clearing up some of the mystery of the CD, which is as transformative as it is puzzling for the layman. The presentations conciseness and humor makes this an enjoyable nerdout.
you are the perfect teacher lol, keeping things entertaining while actually being very technical is a crazy good talent!
Also i loved this rainbow book saga i want a book series about it
Who noticed the computer desktop colour change with the different book colours
I did
Pretty neat it was.
I was looking for a comment that mentioned that.
You call yourself pedantic, then I wonder why I like this channel so much and that brings me back to a time when my now ex-girlfriend insulted me as pedantic.
Pedantry is fun.
700 != 80? Surprising! I love your sense of humor.
On the topic of VCDs, the really important thing to know is that they were INCREDIBLY cheap to produce. Both the players and the discs themselves. They became dominant in a number of countries where the local population just couldn't afford other formats like VHS or DVD. VCDs could be bought for the equivalent of just a few dollars, often more like one dollar. They were minmaxed for price, and it worked.
(Also, clever western anime fans of the 90s and 00s who were brave enough to import from dodgy foreign websites were able to get otherwise pricey collections for super-cheap. Sure, they came as stacks of discs in thin flimsy sleeves, they were full of compression artifacts, and the subtitles were hard-burned onto the image, but you could get an entire TV series for less than what a single four-episode DVD would cost.)
Thank you for this video!
I have been incorrectly referring to a game on a Blue Book CD as "using the Red Book format" for years now, it's nice to clear that up.
Several games were on Blue Books, and that's great, because it means you can rip the music, but you don't have to because you can place the game directly into a CD player and the soundtrack plays.
For those who are confused about metric prefixes vs the _ebi standard here is a history of why that happened.
This is a tale of a special group of hipsters called 'engineers' and a specific group of normies called 'marketers'
1: Engineers make computers
2: Computers use bits
3: Uh-oh, you can't represent 10 perfectly via powers of 2
4: Engineers say "no matter, use 2^10 because it's 1024 and is close enough and better for description because we use hex anyway and two hex digits are a byte.
5: Everyone agrees and is happy
6: Computers grow in power and become more mainstream.
7: Our psychopathic overlords eventually realize they can make money from the machines.
8: Suddenly engineers are being taken and placed into these special teams to make computers for the masses and have to explain over night how these things work to marketers
9: The marketers nod their head not listening to anything the engineer says.
10: They see that engineers use metric prefixes and after cleaning them selves up from the fear of the realization that something they didn't bother to pay attention to in school might actually be something they needed, they skip through their old textbook for hours one night while drunk and find the section of metric prefixes.
11: In a morning, the confidentially stroll into work and write down the amount of 'bytes' the product has.
12: The engineers see this and say "What the hell" and tell them they are wrong because the number is too high.
13: The overlords side with the marketers because it makes their product look more impressive than their competitors.
14: The engineer points out to them that it would be false advertisment
15: They make up some bullshit term and replace metric bytes with _ebi bytes
16: Nobody is happy, but that overlord made a few million more dollars for a short time.
And so ends our tale.
+Cyansius:
Yes, the idea is to make more money.
Why are prices 1 cent short:
example 5.99$ instead of 6$
Apparently, the "idiot" will think that it is radically cheaper and will be more encouraged to buy it.
Why are bags of chips the same size yet they are getting lighter? What used to be 250 g came down to 230 g, then 200 g, then 180 g. The idea is that the "idiot" will think the product has become cheaper.
I'm sure you can think of many more examples from your supermarket.
People aren't stupid. We live in a world of coupons, groupons, sales and rebates.
Hard drive manufacturers were taken to court over their "cleverness". Did it help a certain manufacturer sell more?
So now, all HDD manufacturers are doing the same thing and the playing field between them is leveled again. None of them have an advantage over the other.
So what's next? Cheap printers and overpriced ink? HP, Lexmark, Epson aren't doing themselves any favors with their cleverness. It is obvious that they each copy each other's business model.
You also have Apple who design products that aren't easy to repair. They have lobbied the government to make opening their products illegal. The reason they give is that you might injure yourself by opening it. Louis Rossmann has a channel about the tricks Apple uses.
@@louistournas120 I sometimes watch Rossmann, but he's a bit of an asshole so I can only take him in small quantities.
I can't tell if your comment it supposed to be criticism or in agreement with me? Mostly because Rossmann is in support of Capitalism (He calls himself libertarian) and I would be classified as a socialist.
I hate the prefix ebi... like with a passion ever since I was like 10 on my little compaq.
I love the fact that its a factor of 2, 1024 is nice to my eyes, ears, and brain. even back then when I was 10 I understood what it was, but for some reason ebi just irks me.
It was made to accommodate the kind of people who refer to their computer as "the CPU..." The dumbing down for the lowest common denominator.
ebi means shrimp in japanese, and shimps are delicious. this always make me see the ebi suffix in a better way.
Saying "mebibyte" is like nails scraping on the chalkboard to the ears of anyone who grew up referring to 1024 KB as a megabyte. Same thing with the kids these days who refer to records as "vinyls"...
A Megabyte will always be 1024KB to me, however it makes sense as far as standardising formats. In SI units Kilo means 1000, Mega 1000000, having it being different for computer sciences makes no real sense other than, thats the way it is. Kibibytes and mebibytes, helps eliminate confusion.
But binary units were the norm for computers for the first 40+ years of their existence, until drive manufacturers started cheating to make their drives seem larger than what you were actually getting. Therefore if new prefixes had to be invented, they should have been applied to the nonconforming decimal units, not the standard binary units. After all, computers were using 1 K = 1024 bytes long before SI even existed, so the whole "it doesn't match SI definitions" argument is bunk. Now go complain about how "4K" video is actually only 3.84K, therefore they shouldn't call it 4K...
Instant sub as soon as you mentioned Jumpstart and Magic School Bus
0:55 Wow, I'm impressed... I've seen a lot of videos of people talking about digital file storage etc. and I believe you are the first one to get it completely right. Even addressing the fact that computers actually show incorrect units. Well Linux actually shows it correctly, so not computers in general. But you know what I mean...
I loved the Jump Start games! My favorite was whichever one was the Ancient Egypt themed one. 4th grade, I wanna say? Also it took me until the scarlet wallpaper to notice that it was changing with each book discussed.
9:03 We could have called them CD-WORMs! Worms!
"And it did _neither._
*But also yes"*
Probably the best explanation of the MiB/MB thing.
Wow! “CDs-ROM” … I never thought about that, like “States’ Attorneys General”
Years later, I wish you had an episode on SACD and delta-sigma modulation. I can't wrap my head around how it manages to encode the necessary data density.
Also, CD text is probably the most underused standard in existence.
If you ever have time, please spend a few minutes on that great invention known as CD-I. There must be something to say about it :-)
9:35 I'm gonna start calling it that now 😂😂 Aginsbpete
"A CD-R, which happens to be a Pirate's favorite type of CD." Wow, the levels of awesome in that quote astound me to no end!
It's great how you cover each subject so thoroughly. Thanks!
Thank you for that jump start clip. In k-2 my school had jump start 2nd grade and marble blast loaded on imacs. I had forgotten about these games until a few years ago when I was hit with a nostalgia trip. I was able to locate marble blast, but was completely unable to find jumpstart 2nd grade. Thanks for jogging my memory.