DVD Vs. Video Tape
- One of the most important advantages of the Digital Versatile Disc over a standard tape is the much clearer image quality . Due to the analog recording process, you will always lose quality when copying to tape (no matter from which source). Bad brinks are a well known characteristic of analog video systems.
On DVDs the data is stored digitally , which means that basically no information gets lost during recording. A non-compressed high quality video stream would of course consume dozends of megaBytes per second. That's why the data is being compressed according to the MPEG-2 standard, which will always bate the image quality due to artefacts.- Data Safety
A tape is magnetized in order to store data. After a certain time, this magnetization will slowly degrade, thus decreasing the image quality. In addition, magnetic tapes do not last forever. Simply expose a cassette for some time to the sun; after half an hour you can usually throw the tape away. DVDs and CDs are much less delicate. Of course you will also kill a CD when placing it in the sun. Stored safely in a shelf, your data should be absolute safe for at least 20 years. Even the first CDs from the early 80s are mostly working properly today.- Data Access
The laser of a consumer DVD or CD drive can be posotioned in a few seconds, giving you the option to access every part of the medium within a very short time.- DVD consumes less space
If you store your discs without the plastic covers, you could have 100 of them consuming the same space than 6 video tapes. Even if you don't want to chuck out the DVD cases you can still store 3 DVDs for 1 tape.- Less medium sensibility
Dropping a video tape might destroy some important part and leave the cassette useless. A CD or DVD will usually survive a fall without taking any harm.- Flexibility
You can watch a DVD movie either on a computer with DVD-ROM drive and MPEG-2 decoding software or on a consumer DVD player.
