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ArVid: Russians squeezed 4 hard drives into one VHS tape in the 90s
- rightbyte 3y agoInteresting. I would have really liked having one of those. Strange that it did not spread? I wonder what the practical reliability was. For comparison breathing in the same room as my first CD-burner made it fail. "your 500MB hard drive is overflowing with software, games, and documents." Mh ye no. Zero people filled up their HDs with documents.
- orbital-decay 3y ago>Strange that it did not spread? I tried this thing as a curiosity many years later. It sounded nice in theory, but was pretty slow and unreliable compared to the specialized streamers. It required a fairly janky driver, and depended on the quality of the VHS recorder and the tape. Seeking was also a problem. Besides, HDDs out-sized VHS pretty quickly.
- ithkuil 3y agoWhen I was a kid I helped setting up the computers for my father's small business. The disks did fill up because of documents. I think he counts as people too You know, it really depends what you use a computer for.
- rightbyte 3y agoWith a 500 Mb HD? How is that even possible (at the time)? But ye, of course I am exaggerating. Surely there were maybe a handful of persons.
- jfil 3y agoI took some artistic liberties in the introduction :-) In practice, it seems that the ideal customers for this system were Sysops/BBS operators, small businesses that used their 1 computer to the max, and people who had lots of logs (possibly astronomers or academics running experiments). This also explains why it never hit mass-production: very few people needed 2GB of storage (a single tape). Let alone needing multiple tapes.
- rightbyte 3y agoI just needed something to nitpick nice write up :)
- ithkuil 3y agoI don't remember the exact sizes of the harddisk(s) but it was late 90s early 2000s and the small business I was talking about was a small publisher, so many of the documents were large DTP files, postscript files ...
- Arech 3y agoI've just covered a few points in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39142648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39142648 There were some inherent problems associated, but nonetheless, it was quite known back then, at least in ru.
- sunpazed 3y agoThis technology has been around for a while on a number of different platforms. Wizzard VHS on the C64 predates this from about 1987-88 https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=61209 https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=61209
- actionfromafar 3y agoAn image of an ad for Wizzard: http://web.tiscali.it/c64commodore/tt.htm http://web.tiscali.it/c64commodore/tt.htm There were also similar systems for the Amiga, I think one was called VBS.
- egorfine 3y agoThis brings back memories! Getting ArVid was my childhood dream at the time.
- kozak 3y agoFun fact: nowadays music is still distributed mostly in the 44.1 kHz sample rate, and this odd rate derives from how much it was comfortable to store on a PAL/NTSC video tape using devices similar to Technics SV-P100 (when video tapes were the only viable way to store full-quality digital audio). So this number is ultimately derived from line count and frame (field) rate of analog TV standards.
- fathyb 3y agoAlso see the Nyquist frequency: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist_frequency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist_frequency 44.1kHz lets you store all frequencies from 0 to 22.05kHz, which ought to be more than enough for most humans.
- Synaesthesia 3y agoAlmost nobody hears beyond 16kHz, from testing I've done, and I don't think the musical content above that freq is really useful.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoNot listening to much Sachiko M?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bryanlarsen 3y agoCorrect, but a filter that's flat to 16kHz with an abrupt cut-off above 16kHz would introduce a lot of noise and artifacts, especially with 80's tech. Filters with a gradual roll-off are much smoother, cleaner and cheaper. 44 kHz allows a filter with only 20dB roll off starting at ~16kHz to be used instead. Filters are necessary because if you digitize something at 44kHz, any noise above 22kHz becomes noise at a frequency < 22kHz, aka audible.
- hasmanean 3y ago
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoAnother system was D-VHS [0], a digital video version of VHS with a max capacity of 50GB. For a time it was the highest quality digital video solution for consumers, until BluRay and HD-DVD came along. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS
- retrac 3y agoDon't forget D-1 [1], which was a hybrid monstrosity. In the 1980s, it wasn't really yet feasible to handle digital video in a meaningful way. No true colour framebuffers at 720x480 pixels and no way to move that many bits in and out of a framebuffer fast enough, either. But digital electronics could run > 50 MHz even back then, and there were fast analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters. So why not digitize the entire analog video signal, directly? D-1 does just that, sampling the the entire video signal at like 14 MHz, writing hundreds of megabits of data per second to tape uncompressed. In other words, a perfect digital copy of the analog video waveform. Same signal the camera generated. D-1 was rather widely used in production in the late 80s and 90s, and for broadcast playback. Surviving material on D-1 is quite rare today - it was a very expensive tech and tapes got reused. Here's an example though - Depeche Mode performing Personal Jesus on German TV in 1989 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELRR7rPDvh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELRR7rPDvh0 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-1_(Sony) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-1_(Sony)
- actionfromafar 3y agoI love that format. I wish it would have survived and been extended instead of all the compressed pixel heaps we got for two decades. :) Looking at that video reminded of what it looked like to watch analog live broadcast from a high quality camera, or high quality film (Hollywood) on an analog TV set through broadcast. It wasn't bad. Todays cable MPEG-2 SD channels actually have worse quality. (Some cable and satellite HD channels have worse quality today even, when they crank the compression too hard!)
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoHard to believe this is from 1989, looks really good.
- helpfulContrib 3y ago[dead]
- jhoechtl 3y ago> That means that variations in colour and sound were not used when recording data. That sounds like a massive waste of space, no? Wouldn't at least using RGB and within that only using three luminosity levels essentially dramatically increased the capacity with little increase in error rate which could have been addressed with a level of redundancy?
- dfox 3y agoVHS stores the chrominance information heavily subsampled (even more than normal analog composite video) and the chroma signal noticeably bleeds into the luminance signal as the chroma carrier has lower frequency than in normal broadcast signal. So, using the chroma signal is not really worth the complication. Doing something multilevel PAM purely in the luminance signal is probably better approach, but one has to take into account that the overall level of the video signal tends to get "averaged-out" by various ALC circuits in the VCR. Also the cards appears to be largely software driven (it is too simple to do any real HW acceleration), so the main limitation of the bitrate probably is the performance of CPUs at that time.
- orbital-decay 3y ago>the cards appears to be largely software driven (it is too simple to do any real HW acceleration) Both redundancy encoding and DMA were hardware-accelerated by an onboard FPGA (although DMA had lots of motherboard compatibility issues)
- dfox 3y agoI meant the 1020 card with discrete TTL. Although there is that EPROM, which is apparently used in the datapath somehow (some kind of LUT for encoding/decoding?). Interesting aspect of the card is that it seems to be purely interrupt and DMA driven, as it has entire address bus left unconnected. I suspect that there is some clever abuse of i8237 DMA controller involved, which would explain the compatibility issues.
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- andyjohnson0 3y agoSpoiler: the hard drives aren't squeezed into a physical VHS cassette. Instead the tape is used to store the equivalent of four hard drives worth of data. As someone who owned VHS tapes and several 90s-era hard drives, and remembers the sizes of each, the title had me confused for a minute. Basically like an Iomega Jazz drive.
- ravenstine 3y agoThanks for clarifying, though I've got to say, your mind is interesting for considering that they might have physically squeezed 4 hard drives into (or inside?) a VHS cassette.
- andyjohnson0 3y agoI was imagining four present-day laptop drives. But then I remembered just how big HDs were back in ~1995...
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoI did the same, the title made me think of some long-lost TARDIS-esque technology exclusive to VHS tape shell that allowed for smuggling. Realistically it wasn’t what was talked about, but it was a fun idea while it lasted.
- rob74 3y agoInteresting idea, although the weight of the fake VHS cassette would have given it away. Plus, hard drives from that era with their cast aluminium frames were notoriously hard to squeeze...
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoIf you think that would be heavy, imagine what 120 Libraries of Congress would weigh! You would need a VHS tape the length of 4 football fields.
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- eps 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20240126111703/https://jacobfilipp.com/arvid-vhs/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240126111703/https://jacobfili...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- magic_hamster 3y agoThis was a good read. Thank you for sharing.
- jan_Sate 3y agoImpressive. People in old days are rather creative in getting the most out of the existing technology.
- bobdvb 3y agoThe Quantel Paintbox graphics system which was what was considered the gold standard for graphics in the 80s and 90s, also had the option to backup it's data to video tape. Although that would have been expected to be broadcast tape formats rather than VHS.
- stephen_g 3y agoAn interesting forerunner to these, from the late ‘70s to early ‘80s was the PCM audio adaptor for recording digital audio in the same way - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCM_adaptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCM_adaptor This is an interesting all-in-one unit with the VHS deck built in - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDCxTtn4OQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDCxTtn4OQ - released just a year or two before the CD came out.
- CPLX 3y agoI was an audio engineer at the time. Worth mentioning the ADAT machines which were basically the dominant way of doing multitrack audio in the late 90’s. All on VHS tapes.
- alchemist1e9 3y agoAwesome story! Plus it reminded me that I do need to finally start on my own LTO project, still today nothing can beat tape if you have huge amounts of data to backup and/or move.
- gnramires 3y agoI'm interested in using Blu rays (maybe M discs, which are far more expensive!) for personal backup, as I generally don't have more than 100gb of really critical data (which excludes everything I could just download on the internet), and they're said to last a long time. Blu ray readers are widely available too.
- alchemist1e9 3y agoI do use both Blurays and also some M discs with a burner for critical data. I have two burners actually and make sure each can read back the others and check on two hosts. Yes paranoid. It’s basically between cloud like B2 backblaze and LTO tapes for many 100s of TBs. Currently using backblaze B2 and I think it’s time to bite the bullet and get two LTO drives and tapes, at least it will scale up to as big as one can imagine and then have full control and access.
- squarefoot 3y agoStoring digital data in video tape dates back to the 80s when studios used to make digital mastering on what was available at the moment: Umatic, Betamax and VHS. Many popular productions from the 80s were in fact mastered on video tape recorders paired to studio grade converters such as the Sony PCM-F1. https://www.kenrockwell.com/audio/sony/pcm-f1.htm https://www.kenrockwell.com/audio/sony/pcm-f1.htm
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoThe PCM-1 came out in 1977.
- dghughes 3y agoFor my ATARI 600XLI I stored stuff on cassette tapes it was an official add on you had to buy. I think the command was CLOAD to load stuff from it. A lot of failed code from computer magazine programs typed in by 14 year-old me on cassettes somewhere.
- djmips 3y agoI made a utility for myself to backup Diskettes to audio cassette tapes directly and at a pretty high speed but for the Apple II+. It worked but it also suffered from lack of error correcting / recovery so any errors would ruin the entire backup... I could probably do a lot better if I rewrote it today! :)
- pronoiac 3y agoThese might be useful tools, if you don't want to maintain an Atari 410 but do have a tape player - https://a8cas.sourceforge.net/ https://a8cas.sourceforge.net/
- BizarroLand 3y agoI got to play with an ADAM computer that had games on cassette disk. It was interesting loading up Dragon's lair and then immediately dying over and over again.
- Arech 3y agoHehe, I had such a device long ago. It was ok-ish for making infrequent backups, but too burdensome to use regularly, since you had to bring in the videoplayer (it was a huge device, zoomer! :D), untangle and attach the wires. And then the reading/writing speed was slow, so it took a few hours to fully use a single videotape. Also a simple video tape wasn't very reliable medium, and, though ArVid had some inbuilt redundancy, still it was possible you won't read the data after a few months/years, so you had to backup the backup to be extra sure... But it was a solution to a problem, nonetheless. Very cheap and alternative-less for even twice or more money it cost. Real salvation even back then, so I'm happy and thankful they made it.
- jacquesm 3y agoVHS tape used for backup purposes had the annoying habit to stick and break when you needed it most: when your source had failed.
- faust93 3y agoI was a lucky owner of the ArVid 1030 back in the 90s. Compared to my PC's hdd size that time (WD 500MB) arvid was able to store about 2GB of data and that was an insane amount! Good old days.. :)
- jfil 3y agoI am dying to know: how did you learn about the ArVid? What was the process of purchasing it? I haven't been able to find any ads for it, and I figured "word of mouth among Sysops" was the way it spread. It would be great if you could share your story.
- VitalKoshalew 3y agoI guess the answer would be "Fido"[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet
- int_19h 3y agoI didn't own one, but in Russia at the time it was fairly common knowledge among techies that these things existed, so mostly word of mouth.
- faust93 3y agoI first saw arvid in action while my dad and I visited his mate to copy some software and games onto floppy disks. That guy had a BBS station that time with files sharing enabled. Some of that files were available for downloading straightaway and some were required 'a pre-order' so he had to recover it from the VHS tape first and then place online as I understood later. Downloading with 2400Bps modem was a torture and my dad said 'hey, I know that guy personally, let's go and grab all the files you need..' Regarding the purchase. At the time I lived in a large industrial city 1000km south of Moscow and there we had several resellers in town (small computer hardware retail firms mostly) not sure if it was official or not. Another purchase option was the so called 'radio market' a weekend event where people met to exchange,sell or buy computer software and hardware parts. So yep, there were no official ads or whatever and mostly it was a 'word of mouth' among techies as you mentioned it.
- chx 3y ago> using a custom file navigation program that resembled the popular “Norton Commander” application. I wonder whether it had to anything with Volkov Commander which was a COM-sized much faster alternative to Norton Commander. Fun memories: I uploaded it to SIMTEL in 1993 whose operator promptly complained to the operators of the university mainframe where I had an account for pirating Norton Commander and in turn I was booted from that VAX. Being 18, I ... didn't react the best however this incident started me on very interesting paths. One, I have social engineered my way back to another account (it didn't last long but still) and started using Unix and soon Linux because of this... way more useful knowledge it turned out than VAX/VMS.
- jacquesm 3y agoI spent all but a few seconds left on my account on the school 'Prime' machine trying to figure out how to hack the time quota system. Near the end I got pretty nervous both because nobody else was even close to maxing out their quota which would surely have led to some pointed questions and because if I failed I might not have been able to turn in my assignments. But once that problem was solved the ROI for the time spent on it was paid back with interest ;)
- thriftwy 3y agoNorton Commander-inspired interfaces were all rage back then. RAR for DOS had NC-like, single panel interface.
- getpost 3y agoStoring data on a VHS tape was a thing in the early 1980s. I worked on an AlphaMicro "minicomputer" with this feature. https://manualzz.com/doc/o/9paan/amos-system-commands-reference-manual-vcrsav https://manualzz.com/doc/o/9paan/amos-system-commands-refere...
- jakderrida 3y agoOn your set top box, you'll find a bunch of inactive ports on the back. One of them (I don't remember which) is there from an outdated law which was to bolster some digital VHS technology. I think it's called like VHS-D. I learned this being a FiOs technician and would look up any frequent question asked over and over again at the end of installs.
- pronoiac 3y agoFrom memory: it was a FireWire port, which could connect to D-VHS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS
- jakderrida 3y agoThank you so much! I was afraid to say it was the "FireWire" because it seemed anachronistic in my head.
- zblah 3y agoBoth the Commodore 64 and Amiga had this. https://members.optusnet.com.au/spacetaxi64/MAIN/VFL-Video-fast-loader-C64.htm https://members.optusnet.com.au/spacetaxi64/MAIN/VFL-Video-f...
- Keyframe 3y agoexactly. VBS was quite popular on Amiga.
- peter_d_sherman 3y ago>"The ArVid software gave users a lot of information about the number of errors on tape. This was unique at a time when backup vendors preferred to pretend that errors didn’t exist. And it was a source of pride for the creators. This decision gave users the feedback they needed to improve their use of the system..." It would be great if in the future all Flash RAM/non-volatile/persistent memory storage devices -- would give users easy access to what their hardware knows about its own internal errors... For example, in a Flash RAM device, most notably a USB thumb drive -- tell me everything you know about the blocks/regions of memory that have went bad and had to be remapped, when a remap occurred, and what new physical blocks/region was used to remap the data. Basically I as a user -- want to know anything and everything about what the hardware knows about the state of the underlying storage medium. Companies that are transparent about this in the future -- will succeed brilliantly!
- tenebrisalietum 3y agoHard drive in the pre-IDE days used to come with defect tables (a sticker on the unit) that told you the bad sectors. Of course, this is when hard drives were several hundred dollars in 80's money if I'm remembering right. Flash drive manufacturers whose devices sell at your local department store for under $15 probably don't want to give people a way to check what's really going on and make a case to return them. I would love an open-source standard storage device platform, though, with a standard firmware update process over USB or whichever interconnect. Then open-source storage device firmware could be developed which could have any other extra functions you could dream of.
- EvanAnderson 3y agoDid anybody else notice the Borland Turbo Vision text UI in the first screenshot? Seeing it really brings back memories
- int_19h 3y agoBorland products were extremely popular in Eastern Europe at the time, and most DOS software was written using those. Turbo Vision was then a natural TUI framework.
- VitalKoshalew 3y ago> These BBSs were part of the FidoNet7 network, a Russian network of BBSs that used software compatible with FidoNet but independent of its political structure. ... In 1997, a “newsgroup” was established at “fido7.su.hardw.support.arvid” This is technically incorrect. The BBSes were part of the "official" FidoNet [1] network, Zone 2. Fido7 was mostly post-Soviet (and not just "Russian") project to allow migration from PSTN to InterNet as a carrier. Also many "official" FidoNet nodes had additional InterNet channels which could even prevail traffic-wise over PSTN lines, one couldn't have a purely InterNet-connected FidoNet node without any PSTN presence, as that would violate FidoNet Policy (specifically, adherence to Zone Mail Hour (ZMH) [1]). ZMH was considered a core requirement for a FidoNet node (pretty much everything else was optional) and there was no consensus on dropping this "tradition". Fido7 project was created with a goal of resolving the issue of ZMH by establishing an additional Zone 7 as an overlay to the existing 6 Zones of FidoNet, that would allow for existence of InterNet-only nodes without modifying Policy for the existing Zones. The project was never accepted as part of the "official" FidoNet structure, but for technological reasons it outlived the "official" FidoNet. The author is referring to Google mirror of "fido7.su.hardw.support.arvid" "newsgroup". In reality, this was a Fido7-provided mirror of the original "SU.HARDW.SUPPORT.ARVID" ("echomail conference-group" names were traditionally capitalized) where "SU" stands for "Soviet Union". In reality, it was a post-soviet conference-group hosted by backbones of FidoNet Regions that belonged to post-soviet countries. Such mirrors were created by Fido7 project in an effort to promote FidoNet beyond "old school" PSTN-bound community. These newsgroups (with double prefix, such as "fido7.su.") did not belong to Fido7 itself but were forwarded from the "official" FidoNet to Fido7 and then presented as UseNet newsgroups and archived by Google which resulted in confusion that led author to think this was Fido7 content. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet
- wdfx 3y agoReminds me back in the early 2000s I had a miniDV camcorder. There was a linux package which allowed you to write archives to the miniDV tapes over firewire, I think each small tape could hold about 12-13Gb which was quite impressive. The only downside is that it takes ~1hr to record and restore. In the end I never stored any critical archives on that thing, as I suspected (correctly) that a number of years later I'd have no way to read them back.
- wdfx 3y agoha, here's the software I used over 20 years ago: https://dvbackup.sourceforge.net/ https://dvbackup.sourceforge.net/
- pronoiac 3y agodvbackup! https://dvbackup.sourceforge.net/ https://dvbackup.sourceforge.net/ I didn't use this either, as I worried about wearing down the camera heads, and DVD-R's were cheaper and more plentiful.
- wdfx 3y agoOff the back of this I've just dug the very same camcorder out of a box in the loft and indeed it now has a number of electrical and mechanical issues. Looks like I left a blank tape it it which is now shredded. The built in screen works one time out of three power ups. I have no computer available with any FireWire port.
- rasz 3y agoDV camcorder vintage gear pretty universally suffers leaking smd capacitors and melting belts.
- dmix 3y ago> How long would data last on tape? > The Canadian Conservation Institute says that VHS tapes have a 10-30 year lifespan, on average. https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/conservation-preservation-publications/technical-bulletins/digitization-vhs-video-tapes.html#a2b https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con... That sucks, I just got in VHS for various reasons and bought a 1987 copy of Ghostbusters. It still works despite being 36yrs old. I'm curious what it means for tape to degrade and how to detect it in films.
- Waterluvian 3y agoIn my experience the magnetism weakens and the video just becomes more and more staticy. But I think there’s also physical degradation of the tape.
- vsviridov 3y agoThere's magnetic cross-talk in effect between layers of tape in the spool, so it is recommended to rewind archive tapes every once in a while to shift the overlapping regions slightly.
- ijhuygft776 3y agoThe question is, was it still able to play a movie... otherwise, what kind of spies are they? /s
- 1letterunixname 3y agoMore precisely, it was made with Borland TurboVision (TUI framework) using a Borland IDE for Pascal or C++.
- StillBored 3y agoNotably missing in the article was the mention of the floppy/IDE interface QIC tape drives, which were usually somewhere between $100-200 for the drive, with tapes usually just a few dollars each. By '97, I think I had been using a QIC 3080 drive for a couple of years, which was 1.6GB. This was a natural progression from the QIC-80s I had been using in ~1991 to swap warez because it was a lot easier to give people a tape than the dozen+ floppy most applications were being distributed on at that time. So, I do vaguely remember seeing VHS-based backup systems, but the price/capacity wasn't something that, at least in the US, was competitive against existing consumer tape systems. I do remember though having a couple big DAT drives at work, which were the data grade versions of VHS, but the drives were a lot more expensive.
- cubefox 3y agoMagnetic tapes really had an awesome capacity. A few years after ArVid, in 1998, there would be the VHS successor D-VHS. Wikipedia claims that the tapes had a capacity of 50 GB! Which was far ahead floppies, CD-Rs, and even read-only DVDs. The format wasn't successful though. The DVD dominated the market. HD televisions, which could take advantage of HD movies on D-VHS, weren't really available at the time, and content producers didn't like the recording ability of (D-)VHS anyway. Interestingly, the German Wikipedia claims (without source) that some devices could even record D-VHS on standard VHS tapes, though with a higher error rate. Which would suggest they squeezed out much more than the roughly 2 GB ArVid did a few years before, albeit with specialized hardware.
- aembleton 3y agoPerhaps they had a shorter playback time when recording in d-vhs mode. They could run the tape faster past the recording heads to get more data onto the tape.
- cubefox 3y agoApparently faster than a D-VHS tape but slower than the standard VHS speed. They claim a 240 minute VHS tape enabled a 330 minute D-VHS recording in "SD", which was 14.1 Mbit/s. This implies an effective VHS tape capacity of (14.1 / 8 * 60 * 330)/1000 ≈ 35 GB. Far ahead of ArVid, and pretty close to the 50 GB the English Wikipedia lists for D-VHS tapes. Unfortunately this relies on unverified Wikipedia information. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Video_Home_System https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Video_Home_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS
- SergeAx 3y agoYeah, that was a technological marvel, especially the part when the card was "learning" VCR's IR signals. However, most popular models were pre-programmed. I never owned ArVid, but couple of my friends did and I used it from time to time to cold-store some unnecessary, but seems to be important data. ArVid was deprecated by affordable DVD-RW's only about 10 years later.