Over time, I have accumulated a lot of DVDs containing magic instructional videos. So many that I have now reached the point where I only have shelf space for half of them, and most of that shelf space is out of reach. A while ago I started to keep my DVDs instead in plastic sleeves inside a large ring binder, with the case inserts kept in regular A4 sleeves alongside them. I used to have a mere 40 or so DVDs in this type of storage but after a recent concerted effort I have now got two 65mm ring binders, each with 20 pages of double sided 2 pocket dvd sleeves. For those unwilling to do the maths, that’s 160 DVDs, and it is still not my entire collection.
But this time around I did something else alongside the action of putting DVDs into binder sleeves and collecting a huge box of empty black keep cases. I also digitised the video onto a big hard drive.
And I wish I’d done it earlier
The Process
So here’s what I spent about 8 hours a day doing for the last week:
Take a DVD case down off the shelf, open it, pop the disc in my PC and run Handbrake 1.5.1 on it. I use handbrake 1.5.1 because since Handbrake V6 the software no longer supports the DeCSS encryption removal, rendering it useless for most commercially produced DVDs. This is because although the DeCSS encryption removal is a necessary library to even play a DVD, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act made it a crime to produce software with the intent to circumvent copy protection, even if its for personal backups¹.
Handbrake then rips every track on the DVD to the hard drive and I put the disc into my big ring binder. The theory is that I still have all my originals stored in a much smaller space, but also I don’t have to take down these huge ring binders and search through to find the disc in order to watch it. This means I don’t need to go to the effort of putting all the discs in alphabetical order and deciding if Craig and Dave’s Vegas Road-trip should be filed under Penn or Petty, or under the names of the actual magicians teaching the tricks on that DVD.
Where The Theory Falls Apart
The problem with this process is that magic DVDs are authored really really badly. The minor problems I’ve encountered include:
- Box sets where the discs are called Disc One and Disc 2
- Box sets where both discs are called Disc 2
- DVDs where a one hour lecture is split into 30 individual titles on the disc, instead of a single title with chapter timestamps
- DVDs where title 1 is the full thing, chapters 2-30 are snippets of that full thing, but with a few extra bits thrown in so you have to keep all of them
- DVDs where the video encoding is somehow corrupted and only the first chapter of a 2 hour title will actually encode.
- DVDs that aren’t even recognised by the computer.
and worst of all
Obviously I can just rename the files which come out with stupid naming conventions, and I wrote a special script for the “This DVD is in 48 parts” problem ².
But the others speak to a far more worrying problem
Disc Rot
This is the reason my wife suggested that I begin this process in the first place, and the reason I wish I’d done it years earlier. You may have heard that plastic is a huge problem because ever piece of plastic ever manufactured still exists and probably will continue to exist for another 10,000 years³. While this is true, that plastic won’t always be exactly the same. The surface will go cloudy, the structure will become brittle, the colours will fade, and eventually the polymers will begin to dissociate. Fine details are the first to go and, oh would you look at that? DVDs (and all ‘permanent’ physical media) store their data in fine details in the plastic.
DVD-Rs are the worst because they use special photo-sensitive polymers to encode the data, which will slowly return to their unwritten state over time. How many magic instructional videos and lectures do you think come on DVD-Rs rather than fully mastered discs? It’s more than you might think (if the back is any colour other than silver, that’s a DVD-R).
This rot comes in 3 stages:
- Minor data corruptions
- Major data corruptions
- Please insert a valid disc into drive D:
I have workarounds for the minor corruptions which would prevent direct transcoding due to mismatched timestamps or invalid frames.
I’m working on methods of recovering what I can off DVDs with major data corruptions, which will still play but you have to seek around the garbled parts.
But that last one… I mean what do you do? I know magicians with a shelf full of books that they have collected over a 60 year career, big weighty tomes of career spanning knowledge. Imagine if the pages of those books could just suddenly go blank on the shelf and you didn’t know until the next time you got it down to read. I have a copy of Dave Forrest’s Project Zero, released in 2010, and one of the discs is totally unreadable. Just gone, at 13 years old.
Frankly it seems like a crime to not back up your DVDs if that’s the expected lifespan. I used to say that I didn’t like paying for downloads, I’d rather have the DVD, physical media, something permanent… but I no longer think that way.
It’s been said that there are two ways to protect a book.
The first is to keep it safely locked in a dark climate controlled vault where no one can touch it. This protects the physical book itself, and will only work for so long.
The second is to make as many copies of that book as you can, keep them in distributed locations, give them away if you have to, and let other people copy them. This ensures the words of the book will survive long after the original has turned to dust.
Given the short release cycles of some products and the number of out of print books, magicians have apparently decided as a group that owning a very rare and valuable source of information is far more important than ensuring that source is available in our culture for the next generation.
What a sad state of affairs.
Caveat Emptor
So that was the end of this but I wanted to share one other fascinating piece of info I learned from this process. When you start to rip these titles, you see the length of the titles and you get a much better feel for how much is on each disc. I’ve got discs which contain over 2 hours of teaching material… and yet I still keep encountering multi-disc projects which have roughly 48 minutes per disc.
How many magic tricks release on double DVDs when all they need is 1 disc to hold all the video? It’s way more than I ever would have imagined, and all those discs still exist, even if they can no longer be read.
Also this post uses a new kind of footnote, I hope you found them easier to use⁴.
¹ So this is the silly part. There’s a lot of legal hoopla about whether owning a DVD constitutes ownership of the physical media itself or if it is some kind of license. If you own the physical object there should be no limit to what you can do with it, and manufacturers don’t like that idea, because you might play it at a party with an admission fee where technically you should have bought a license for public exhibition of the material. As such buying a DVD, they say, is actually a license to view the material on it. As such it shouldn’t matter if you make a backup, after all, if the original gets broken you still payed for a license, so technically you should still have access to the contents. They’re not going to provide it unless you buy another DVD with anotherlicense. So legally you were allowed to create a copy as a backup, and as far as I know that’s still allowed, except that in order to make that copy, you now have to break a different law. It’s like if it were legal to mow your lawn, but lawnmowers were only available on the black market. Corporate culture utterly disgusts me.
²Here’s a fun fact about DVDs: although the theoretical resolution of a DVD is 720×480, if the authoring software detects that the image has any kind of black border, it will cleverly trim the video file down to save space, and pad it out again later. Whilst this is super useful for storing movies with varied aspect ratios, if a DVD is based on digitised footage from a videotape (which happens more than you might realise) often you will get a DVD with the content split into 8 titles, each of which is a slightly different resolution, due to an intermittent black line or two present on the original recording. Combining these titles into one file is then a nightmare because you can’t just stitch together a pair of files which are 718×480 and 716×480. You need to first scale and re-encode the files to all be the same size, then stitch those converted files together. Fortunately I can automate complicated calls to ffmpeg and avidemux using a python script.
³ How ironic that all those toys I broke as a child will exist long after the death of the human race, when super evolved hermit crabs will wander around wearing fashionable vintage tamagotchi shells.
⁴ now clicking a footnote number in the text will take you to the footnote, and clicking the footnote number in the footnote will take you to the place in the text where you came from. Simples.