The culprit is scratches, they say. The real culprit is the cheapness of CD/DVD/Blu-Ray media. It's extremely cheap to print a video game. The value comes in the creation of the data that is laser etched on it. When you buy a game you really aren't paying for the CD you are paying for the data.
Why Scratches Lead to a Need to Burn Games
Scratches aren't your fault. No disc is made to withstand our every day environment without failing. This failure rate is up to us as consumers to defeat. We have the opportunities of solid state storage media that seems as if it will inevitably replace disc media. But why do movies not come on these chips yet? An SD card now comes in 32GB and 64GB versions. Regular DVD quality will fit on a 8GB SD card without compression. A typical compressed quality for a movie to fit on a CD is 700MB. A 1GB SD card is the same, but still about 500 times more expensive.
Also, flash storage does break down. A CD or DVD actually will hold up pretty well if properly stored and not used. Honestly the moral of the story is that removable media is not the ultimate solution. It almost seems wasteful instead of reusing removable media and always storing movies and songs on a mounted hard drive. That way everything can be backed up and made immune from the disasters of scratched discs or lost memory cards. Internal media has made the most gains in capacity relative to advances such as Blu-Ray or SD.
The now is the time when everyone should be migrating data to work on a high bandwidth environment in their homes. Piping data from a central fast storage location to multiple devices in the home is the name of the game. Setting up your own media server in your house is easier than ever with products like MythTV, Ubuntu, and Windows Home Server. One last problem remains after going this route.
Is the Future to be Burning Games?
We all love our video games but the manufacturers do not have a way to deliver content to us cheaply besides discs. Publishing games online for download can be very very expensive when you consider the number of console owners. They may move to flash memory cards in the future but that still is a removable media solution. Blu-Ray as a concept is nothing more than a content delivery system, the cheapest one with the largest storage ever devised. Until bandwidth to the home is made cheaper. 32GB transfer over a 10MB pipe would saturate that connection for over 4 hours. You can see where bandwidth is king. If your movie plays for 2 hours you have 2 hours to stream that in. So really only about 20MB to the home would be necessary to deliver a full HD quality Blu-Ray movie on demand, with a short up front buffer. It is easy to stream in lower quality previews or commercials whilst this initial queuing is completed. The cost to saturate that pipe for that time is the real issue. Sustaining that transfer rate to thousands if not millions of people simultaneously is quite a feat. It's not problem for the distributed internet but not for one content provider. This is why the torrent system was created. Peer to peer can solve a lot of problems, even if the content provider does it behind the scenes. A content provider could seed copies of games at locations around the world and then use great amounts of bandwidth at first delivering the initial peer seeding. Once a critical mass is achieved in peers the bandwidth of the original seeds can be fully pulled. Managing a distributed content network will be possible as soon as bandwidth is available.
Now, when you scratch a CD or DVD what happens to the data? It is still working properly, but the media it resides on is damaged. This is equivalent of a hard drive failure. Hard drives get worn out, and scratches are the wearing out of CDs and DVDs.
No one could say you couldn't make a backup copy of your hard drive, after all you paid for all that software, didn't you?
Hard to Imagine Life Without the Ability to Burn Games
Video games are really better today than ever and there is such a huge variety of next generation titles to buy and check out. I have about 100 Xbox 360 games and 75 PlayStation 3 games and that's a lot of discs folks. What I do is just thumb through stacks of about 50 discs at a time. Forget opening and closing cases and wasting all that time. My friends and I won't wait on that. You gotta take every minute you can and it takes plenty of time to swap between titles as it is.
Burn the games you own and you can keep the originals safe for resale later when you get tired of playing them or if you didn't like it. You use software to copy the game to your computer and then you can burn a backup disc. Of course you can't sell a copy and you need to delete the backup if you sell the original, but blank DVDs are cheap. This will totally prevent scratches from ruining the value in your game. I can't say much for the value of horrible titles though. I never can sell those back for much.
Scratches Ruin Video Games - Find Out How to Back Them Up and Save Money
More information about how to burn games.
Want to burn wii games?
-Tom McFay @ Ezinearticles
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