pendell

Current Hyperfixation: Wizard of Oz

  • He/Him

I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.

Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.



In my DVD-RAM era, in case it wasn't extremely obvious. Allow me to share some of the useless information I've absorbed and find mildly intriguing.

  1. DVD-RAM is most known in its "final" form, where it is 4.7GB (or sold as 9.4GB for double sided discs), matching regular DVDs perfectly in capacity. But, initially, there was a "version 1.0" of DVD-RAM which only stored 2.6GB (5.2GB for double sided)! Not talking about the 8cm discs for camcorders (I don't think they introduced those at all for version 1.0), no, these were full-size 12cm discs, but they had nearly half the capacity of regular DVDs! It's clear from how short-lived that version was and how quickly it was brushed under the rug that it was a case of "who cares if it's not finished, get it to shelves now!!!"

  2. There are, I hear, some PowerMacs which included an official Apple-supported DVD-RAM drive that supported this 2.6GB standard, and accepted cartridges for such. I have yet to see any pictures or videos of any of those in use.

  3. While there unfortunately was no successive "BD-RAM" as cool as that would have been, there was a precursor and effective "CD-RAM" developed almost exclusively by Matsushita called PD650. It looks almost identical to a cartridge-based DVD-RAM, even down to the disc, though it only stored 650MB. The drives for those discs could read CD-ROMs, and I may be mistaken but it may have been possible to read the PD650 discs in regular CD-ROM drives, given the data was organized in a non-illegal manner.

  4. Drives made for that initial 1.0 version of DVD-RAM were backwards compatible with PD650 discs! However, it seems the finalized 4.7GB drives ditched that support, although I have yet to test that myself. Weird. I wonder if that means those elusive PowerMacs could also use the PD650 discs... 🤔


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in reply to @pendell's post:

please consider: Sony Professional Disc, which is a BD-RAM that not only made it to market, but can be purchased in great quantity if you like

PD is literally blu-ray, it's the same thing. Sony was part of the standards group developing BD, and just before it got finalized they ran off with a copy of the spec, rebadged it "Professional Disc", and made it the backbone of their brand new HD camcorder lineup.

since they took it shortly before finalization, they kept something absolutely wonderful: the caddy, with its incredibly complicated dual protective doors, which almost ended up on BD but got pulled at the last second. you can find prototype blurays that still have it, and they are precisely identical to PD.

sony made a ton of cameras that use it, and it's a full RAM type disc, arbitrary reads and writes. their cameras treat it like an SD card, and while I haven't fully experimented with it, I believe when connected over firewire in FAM mode, I can just drop arbitrary files on it, just like DVD-RAM. it is a true delight, and I think they even made multilayer versions.

good luck getting a drive for it though. they made them but they command mid-hundreds on ebay.

additionally, re: PD650, I believe there was a single panasonic laptop that contained an integrated PD650 under the keyboard. someone on my patron discord has been searching for a specimen for a decade

Ah, I thought briefly of PD when writing that sentence, but the fact that the drives go for 700-1,400 even on the used market makes it, in my mind, essentially non-existent to most people. You can get into DVD-RAM on a whim these days (I got a drive for $45 and some discs for around $5-7 a pop, on eBay of all places, with its notorious overvaluing of old shit), while I don't imagine Professional Disc will ever come down in price. It's a totally different market segment.

I have Looked Respectfully at those fancy discs and their equally fancy drives, though. In the way one might window shop for homes you'll never be able to afford on Zillow.

Thanks for introducing it to me in one of your videos though, I never even knew it was a thing before then!

Also I don't even want that Panasonic laptop really I just want to SEE it like how the fuck would that work PLEASE

i have Youtuber Income which means i looked at this and went "oh damn that's the cheapest i've ever seen maybe i should grab it" but yeah not a single one of these things ever sold for less than four digits and the overwhelming majority were either thrown out when replaced, or were used for playing back archival footage for 10,000 years until they broke