Why I don't like DVDs

For over a decade, the standard delivery method for delivering Wedding Films has been DVD. But that time(thankfully) is coming to an end.

Don’t get me wrong, there was a time where I had a shelf containing over 200 DVDs. But that was a time before fast internet and Netflix. Anyway, here’s…

Five reasons why I don’t like DVDs

Quality - Or Lack Therof

A wedding takes up about 200GB on my computer, when I’m finished the final films are about 15 GB. But the maximum that can fit on a DVD is 4.7GB. So how do we fit it on a DVD? The only way is to reduce the quality. There are ways to compress a video to minimise this apparent loss of quality, and if you’re releasing a big Hollywood blockbuster, you can afford the time, effort, expertise and money to do it. But if you’re little old me, making one off DVDs, that’s just not possible. So your nice shiny HD wedding film has to be downgraded to ye-olde standard definition.

Durability

DVDs wont last forever; One of the reasons people get a wedding film is because they want a record of their day that will last, something to show the kids and the grandkids.

Now, if created and stored perfectly, DVDs are rated to last a hundred years, but every-time it comes out of the box, it’s getting scratched, dusty, sun-damaged and covered with greasy, corrosive fingerprints. In those conditions, 20 or 30 years might be all you’ll get out of them. Leave it sitting on the windowsill for a few months and that disk might never play again.

Add to that; can you realistically say you’ll still own a DVD player in 20 years, or even a TV with the right connector on the back? You might still have a VHS player today, but i’d wager it’s somewhere in the attic.

Hard to share -

Ireland is a country of emigrants; I film a lot of weddings where the couple are only home for a short while before jetting off back to Canada or Australia, and I’d wager every single wedding I do has some guests that have travelled far to be there.

DVDs are physical objects and therefore hard to share; you can post them and potentially lose them. You can rip the video files from the disk to send digitally, but then you just have a lower quality version of something I could have sent you

Environmental Issues

As a lot of people are these days, I’m a lot more conscious of the amount of waste that I produce. In my personal life

The disks themselves are made of polycarbonate plastic with an aluminium coating, both these things on their own are recyclable, but since they’re bonded together there’s no easy way to separate them. As such, DVDs generally end up in landfill.

Making them

Finally my biggest reason for hating DVDs; they are such a pain to physically make. Designing and printing the cover, printing the physical disk, and you can guarantee theres no ink in the printer…

Go through all that and then when you test it, it doesn’t work for some reason and then I have to start the whole process over again

So much torture and at the end of the day I’ve created something that isn’t going to be as good as a digital download.