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I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies.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.



@cathoderaydude brought up in his old video about DVD camcorders the truly baffling charts detailing compatibility with different recordable discs and what features they supported, and how nonsensical it all felt. I ran into this firsthand a couple years ago when I picked up a Sony VRD-MC3 - a glorified external DVD burner with some extra ports and a screen tacked onto it. It came with its original manual, and near the back there's THIS nightmare of a page detailing the disc compatibility. I assure you, the longer you look at this thing, the less sense it makes. You feel like a character in a Lovecraft story staring into the hopeless abyss of madness, your own senses slowly unraveling.

Like, it doesn't support using its own interface to make photo or video discs with DVD-R DL. That's fine, this whole box feels pretty half-assed overall so I'm sure they couldn't program the firmware to support dual layer discs properly. Whatever, no biggie, recordable DLs are expensive and unreliable in my experience anyhow.

... But then, why does it support creating video discs on DVD+R DL? Is it because Sony spearheaded the "plus" format, so wanted to push their own discs? That would make sense, but then why doesn't it support creating photo discs on the same media?

And if it was Sony's priority to push "plus" media, then why are DVD-RWs fully supported but DVD+RWs have all these compatibility hangups, like "only able to create video discs when NOT using the USB interface" or "high speed DVD+RWs cannot create photo discs at all, while the slow speed ones can"?

I CAN FEEL MY MIND TEARING ITSELF APART!!!


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in reply to @pendell's post:

I looked up the manual for this device, because, you know, seems interesting, seems like it does a couple things I can imagine having wanted at the time, but boy howdy it feels like this is a disaster.

This is ultimately a really perfect example of the particular way Sony was doing things at the time and ultimately, I think you're right on the money with the idea that this is simply Sony half-assing things to serve some perceived (but ultimately AFAIK not real) market that wanted to do all this different stuff without a computer.

Cool idea for a product completely destroyed by the fact that Sony built it.

It does so many things, so many useful things! I actually had a genuine need for this specific product in 2006 and the cost and disastrous nature of it meant I ended up with a literal walmart-brand set-top DVD recorder. (it was Just Easier to dub to DVD and rip w/ handbrake than to get a firewire<>analog bridge)

secondarily -- this is probably one of the worse side-effects of the "exciting" era of computing. writeable DVDs (all types) is a microcosm of that but the same thing applies if you have a zip drive at home but the good camera uses LS-120 media, or whatever.

This is, for worse or worse, one of the things that's ultimately been good about the modern era - almost everything supports USB, SD cards, and the EXFAT filesystem, making everything more or less functionally universally compatible.

Yeah I was lucky enough to find this thing with all its original cords and the manual at a flea market for like $20, but after I tried to use it a couple times, it's never been more than a novelty.

If you're doing something dead simple like dumping photos onto a DVD from a memory card I imagine it does well enough (though why it can't create photo CDs is beyond me, seems like a dead simple idea). And if you had a contemporary hard drive Handycam with USB, it would be recording MPEG-2 anyways, so the burning of a DVD would have just involved reorganizing the data into a DVD-Video compatible form. My own HDD Handycam is incompatible, however, I believe because it's too new and this thing either has a whitelist or Sony's proprietary communication standard changed down the line.

The analog and DVD inputs are the most appealing, and unfortunately, the biggest letdown. The compression just... Isn't very good. Unless you're using the highest quality mode, which only gives you one hour of recording time, the compression artifacts are extremely visible, and analog capture is generally quite muddy, even with S-Video. I've made one or two capture discs with it, but it was so disappointing it pushed me to assembly my own PC capture machine.