Jumbo — Dvd

In theory, this was brilliant. You could fit an entire season of a TV show, a movie in both fullscreen and widescreen formats, or a director's cut with three commentary tracks on a single disc, without needing to flip it. In the early 2000s, physical shelf space was gold. Retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart charged studios for every inch of shelf space a DVD case occupied.

Here is why the Jumbo became the bane of video stores and collectors: Because the Jumbo had two semi-reflective layers sandwiched in the middle (a gold layer and a silver layer), oxidation was rampant. If the glue seal failed—which it often did—air seeped in. Within months, the disc would turn a telltale bronze or copper color around the edges. Once that happened, the data was gone. The disc was a coaster. 2. The Layer Change Stutter While a standard DVD-9 has one layer break (a brief pause where the laser refocuses), the DVD-18 has three layer breaks. On cheap DVD players (the ones most people owned in 2002), these breaks were not seamless. They resulted in 2-4 second freezes, audio drops, or the player giving up entirely and spitting the disc out. 3. Physical Fragility Hold a DVD-18 up to a light. If you see pinpricks of light shining through, those are manufacturing voids where the reflective layer failed to bond. Unlike a standard disc where a scratch might skip one chapter, a scratch on a Jumbo could penetrate through the top layer and destroy the data on the opposite side of the disc. The Most Infamous Example: The West Wing If you want the poster child for the Jumbo failure, look no further than Warner Bros.’ early DVD releases of The West Wing . dvd jumbo

If you own one, check it immediately. Hold the disc up to a bright light. If you see , the disc is actively degrading. Rip it to a hard drive immediately using a computer drive (which has better error correction than a standalone player) or consider it lost. In theory, this was brilliant