Remember when computers were old and lame
and you needed to put your data on some sort of removable optical disc like a lame and old person?
I sure do.
That was a fun process!
Sessions.
Burning.
What do you want to do with this disc?
Tables of contents.
[ sound of disc drive spinning up ]
Finalizing.
Disc write failed.
Oh the memories...
(and cor cor cor corrupted ones!)
orrupted ones!)
[dial-up modem sounds in background]
Thanks to the internet and cheap flash media
the use of discs in PCs is essentially over.
But there was a time when you had oh so many
options of write once read many discs you
could buy by the spindle.
You’ve got your ol’ reliable compact disc
recordable,
because really who needs more than 700 megabytes
how could you possibly
ever fill that?
And for those weirdos who might want to write
things to a disc and then erase them
so you can write more things later you’ve
got your compact disc re-writables.
But in the late ‘90s, there was this new
thing comin’ ‘round the mountain.
The DVD.
Yeah, I know, 4.7 gigabytes?
It's absurd!
Anyway, eventually your precious CD burner
you spent all that money on was obsolete
because there’s DVD burners now you absolute dweeb!
Get with it!
But for a short while, choosing a DVD burner
wasn’t that easy.
Because, thanks to the fact that format wars
are apparently irresistible,
there were two competing versions of writable DVD.
Because… that’s what this video is
about.
If you remember seeing DVD+R next to DVD-R, you might have wondered what the heck that was all about.
Was there really a difference between them?
Well, to the user,
not really much at all,
but the two were technically very different
(and thus incompatible)
because they were
created by two different companies.
That’s right, somehow, within the very format
of DVD,
there was a format war!
Ugh.
Humans.
Before we get too far I’d like to point
out that a while ago I made a video about
the objectively way cooler DVD-RAM which is
somehow older than both -R and +R
and way more capable when it comes to data
storage.
You can find it through that clicky thing
there.
But possibly thanks to wanting to make DVDs
with your computer that you could watch with
a DVD player, the much less cool write-once
read-many formats were soon to follow and
dominate the landscape.
And their re-writable versions, of course.
Oh, and also, lots of people apparently misremember
the plus vs. dash debacle as being a thing with CDs,
but that’s some Mandela effect stuff going
on as there was never a CD+R.
Just… so you know.
Alright.
Quick recap of the history of optical discs.
In the beginning, there was Laserdisc.
Then there was the Compact Disc.
Then there were also weird one-offs.
And then there was the DVD.
The end.
OK but really here’s the thing you gotta
remember.
The leap from Laserdisc to CD was significant
because it made the optical disc digital
for the first time.
Most formats after that, though, were simply revisions or improvements to the same fundamental technology.
Maybe we’ll change the color of the laser.
Maybe we’ll use dyes instead of pits.
And maybe we’ll harness the 
Power of the Third Dimension
and stick a second translucent data layer below the reflective one.
But in every single optical disc format, it’s
a shiny disc read by a laser and decoded digitally
based upon how that laser gets reflected back
all blinky blinky.
So, given that each new format was just building
on the last one, how do you create a new format?
Why, with intellectual property.
And in the land of intellectual property,
how are you gonna differentiate yourself?
Why, with meticulously documented format specifications and licensing, of course!
We’re not gonna let you stick our precious
little logo on there unless you follow these instructions
and pay us money.
And of course, with all the various electronics
companies of the world just drooling at the
chance of licensing revenue,
but especially Sony,
there was potentially gonna be a problem with this next generation of optical disc.
Without some sort of agreement between all
of the companies,
there could be a slew of proprietary nonsense going on
and we do not want that.
In fact, in the years leading up to DVD, there
was a competing standard!
The Super Density disc.
Which, as we explored in this video, lives
on as the weirdly disc-centric logo in the
not-at-all forced Secure Digital format
because if there’s one thing Toshiba is good at
it’s gettin’ their money’s worth from
graphic design!
Anyway, as we explored in that video we have
the computer industry to thank for refusing
to adopt the next generation of optical disc
unless everybody could agree on what it was gonna be.
So, in 1996, the DVD Consortium was formed
by a whole bunch of companies that agreed
to all do the same thing.
And they came up with the technical specifications
of the DVD,
and this was also where DVD-RAM came from.
And everything was good with the world all the way until
1997 when Sony did what Sony does best and
decided they’d like to do their own thing
thankyouverymuch.
Yes, in 1997 Sony
(along with Philips and Thomson, so yes it’s not fair to say this was Sony’s idea ...
but let’s be real it probably was)
created the DVD+RW Alliance.
Their mission was to be a thorn in the sides
of the world at large.
I’m kidding, of course.
Their mission was to create a better writable
and rewritable version of DVD.
And they did it by using what they at least
marketed as a more robust method of recording.
Just as a quick recap, commercially made discs
are molded or pressed with teeny tiny pits
and lands on their inside reflective surface,
which when you shine a laser at, cause the
reflected light to come back at two different
intensities thanks to destructive interference
caused by the depth of the pit.
This change in intensity can then be decoded
as digital information.
With a recordable disc, the effect of the
pits is recreated by burning tiny spots onto
a field of heat-sensitive dye.
The spots that get heated by the writing laser
darken.
And this means that when read back, the dark spots
absorb some of the reading laser’s light,
producing the same effect as a pit in a commercially
made disc.
But a blank recordable DVD (or really any
recordable optical disc) is never truly blank.
For a whole bunch of reasons you can’t simply
have a disc with a layer of heat-sensitive
dye and expect a DVD burner to produce a usable
result.
All optical media formats, regardless of whether
they’re recordable or not, rely on some
sort of tracking from the laser.
Usually the laser’s objective lens is sort
of floating, and electromagnets in the laser
assembly will move it up and down as well
as left and right in order to closely track
the stream of pits and lands flying past it.
You see the disc being read isn’t ever truly
flat.
Neither is the hole in the middle perfectly
centered.
And even if it were, the spindle holding onto the disc sure ain’t manufactured well enough for that to matter.
Therefore, to follow a stream of microscopic
pits and lands whizzing past the laser on
a flexible cheaply-made plastic disc,
ya gotta get a little wiggly.
This was the basis by which the original PlayStation’s
copy protection worked, which you can find
out more about in this older video of mine.
That’s the third plug this video, must be
a record!
And so on a blank disc, you’ll find a pre-made
guide of sorts.
The disc may be blank but the disc drive needs
to have some sort of target to aim at in order
to burn the data correctly.
This target is a microgroove molded into the
plastic of the disc which travels the entire
length from beginning to end.
And this groove is wobbly.
Some might say wiggly.
To ensure the disc is spinning at the correct
speed, this track wiggles back and forth at
a fixed rate relative to the rotation of the
disc.
And it turns out that this wiggling is the
main thing separating the dashes from the pluses.
DVD-Rs use a wobbling frequency of 140.6 kilohertz,
whereas DVD+R uses a frequency of 817.4 khz.
That’s way more hertz.
But in addition to being objectively wobblier,
DVD+R changed how the addresses on the disc are pre-recorded.
Or rather, it used a suspiciously similar
method to that which our old friend the CD-R used.
In a CD-R, that wobbling is frequency modulated
so that it not only serves as a speed reference
and target but also encodes at what point
along the groove the drive is writing.
This is called the Absolute Time in Pre-groove
or the ATIP.
On a DVD+R or RW, the same general method
is used,
although it is called Address in Pre-groove or ADIP
(to make it less obvious
that it’s the same thing)
and the address information is bi-phase modulated rather than frequency modulated.
Knowing where you are along the discs’s
length is helpful for ensuring the data is
being recorded in the right place, and not
just at the correct pace.
This is especially helpful for when you want
to burn more data to a disc at a later point.
But the original flavor DVD-R as envisioned
by Pioneer only used the wobble for maintaining pace.
Its wobble was constant with no modulation
at all.
For positional information, a series of so-called
“land pre-pits” were moulded into the
groove at various points.
So, rather than getting a constant positional
reference from the ADIP, a DVD dash R only
gives absolute references periodically, and
so a drive writing to one relies on counting
the wobbles between the land pre-pits to maintain
positional awareness.
Now, that worked!
But Sony and Philips apparently felt that
it wasn’t precise enough for their liking.
By going with the ADIP, which again is the
same basic idea as the ATIP used previously
in the CD-R which ... 
by the way who developed that?
Oh!
Sony and Philips.
Look at that...
the DVD+R and DVD+RW allowed a drive writing to it
to know more precisely where it was writing.
Which… to the end user meant…
not a lot.
There were some very small differences to
be seen, such as the fact that the -R
varieties needed more of a buffer between sessions…
and thus waste a few megabytes between each one...
but really that’s probably the only
significant difference you might notice as a user.
If you even do.
If this sounds like Sony and Philips felt
that the land pre-pit method that Pioneer
had come up with for the DVD-R wasn’t
good enough for some arbitrary reason
and decided that a much better method would be
the one they themselves had created for the
CD-R in 1988,
that’s because that’s probably
exactly what happened.
At least, to my ears.
It seems more than a little suspicious to
me that two of the founding members of the
+RW Alliance happened to be the same two
that wrote the ATIP specifications in the
Orange Book about a decade before.
But perhaps I’m being a little too conspiratorial.
Now it may not seem like it, but this created
an actual format war.
At least… briefly.
It took The Alliance a pretty long while to release
the Plus standard -
it didn’t come out until 2002.
But these discs had no compatibility with
previously existing recorders.
Because DVD+ discs didn’t have land pre-pits, a drive designed for DVD-R wouldn’t know what to do with one
and thus couldn’t burn to it.
And since a DVD-R disc had a constant wobble, a drive made for DVD+R would have the same lack of direction
and couldn’t burn to it.
A frustrating problem.
But also a very easy to solve problem because
it was really just a matter of software.
There was no reason a drive couldn’t write
to both.
It just needed to know how to handle both
the ADIP of the DVD+R and the land pre-pits of -R.
The actual burning process is the same, and so is the finished disc to any DVD player or other drive.
It’s just a slight technical difference
that separates the two formats,
but since we’re dealing with licensing,
that makes all the difference.
For a rather brief time, you might have come
across a drive which paid its dues to the
DVD Consortium (now the DVD Forum, by the way)
but not to Sony and Philips and their so-called Alliance.
You couldn’t use this amazing DVD+ media
that Sony is trying really hard to convince you is better.
And maybe you bought a drive from Sony that,
through sheer spite
(and perhaps their own financial incentives)
didn’t support DVD- media and you were stuck with the plus.
But this was stupid and everybody knew that
so thankfully DVD Multi drives quickly appeared
on the market which just went ahead and paid
both the Allaince and the Forum so they could
write to both.
As early as 2004, just two years after
Plus made it to the market,
you pretty much didn’t need to care if you were using DVD- media or DVD+ media.
Yet, both were still available
(and still are!)
Why?
Well because anything made before 2002 can’t
write to + discs.
And because the Alliance apparently did a
fairly good job convincing people that plus
had its pluses so it became fairly popular.
One plus that plus may have legitimately had
was that the discs were cheaper to make.
This could have been the entire reason Sony
and Philips broke off from the Forum
to form their Alliance.
Looking through some older articles on whether
you should choose plus or
(as was often incorrectly called) 
"minus" media,
it seems that plus discs
were cheaper.
And this kinda makes sense.
The ADIP was molded into the plastic, just
like the ATIP was,
so really a DVD+R is the same exact thing as a CD-R but with different dyes and construction.
The land pre-pits on a DVD-R were likely
more complicated to manufacture.
They are really, really tiny.
It seems they are much smaller than a pit
on a commercial disc, in fact they were intended
to be so small as to essentially be invisible
to a drive reading a disc with data on it.
They would only be the faintest of blips,
detectable only when the disc was blank.
It may have been the case that these tiny
structures required more precision, and thus
the discs were more expensive to produce than
the DVD plus format.
But, at least today, the pricing between the
formats is virtually identical.
Whether or not manufacturing cost was the reason Sony and Philips went and threw the Orange Book at Pioneer,
it’s clear that this was mainly a format war of spite.
The DVD Forum refused to accept DVD Plus as
a legitimate form of DVD for some years.
And this led the DVD+RW alliance to make their
own logo since they couldn’t use
this one.
And the geniuses over there decided to make
this their logo.
So, these DVD+R discs from Philips, which
are not rewritable,
nevertheless contain this RW badge on them.
That’s not confusing at all.
But in January of 2008, the Forum gave
in and said, fine, you can be a DVD.
So I guess at that point the format war was
officially over.
This really was the dumbest format war because
it wasn’t ever really a thing.
It was all just technicalities.
Aside from really early adopters, it didn’t
affect consumers other than being mildly confusing.
Now, DVD Plus is claimed to have a number
of advantages over DVD dash.
One of which is that you don’t have to keep
yourself from saying “minus” every time
you see this.
Really, we should just be calling them "DVD R" but
thanks to the plus we can’t.
But whether those actually mattered to anybody
is highly debatable.
For instance, one limitation of DVD- media is that it only had the space for
7,088 unique power calibration events,
meaning you could only record to a single
disc 7,088 unique times.
Is my sarcasm coming through strong enough?
DVD Plus increased that to a cool 32,768 times.
Yeah.
Real good.
Real factor-of-two.
And thanks to the more-precise ADIP (and a
few other technical technicalities),
it is possible that DVD+ might be on the whole
more reliable than DVD-.
But it’s hard to know which of Sony’s
-er the Alliance’s - various claims regarding its betterness are objectively true
and which
are just marketing.
♫ jaunty music ♫
these words aren't important right now
yes let's get back to it
Because, and here’s the thing I want to
stress again, the only differences between
the two formats can be found when the disc
is being written to.
Once the data has been laid down, the ADIP
and the land pre pits are… irrelevant.
And that means that some of plus’s claimed
advantages just don’t matter for some applications.
For instance, say you’re using your computer
to make a bunch of mastered DVD-video discs
of your home movies to watch in a DVD player.
Those discs will be burned in one fell swoop,
so the addressing advantages of the ADIP
in a DVD+ really don’t apply.
If you’re using a disc like a flash drive
and burning a bunch of small files to it,
a DVD+R might have been a better choice.
But honestly, it’s hard for me to say that
with confidence.
I mean, at this point it’s not like it
matters anyway, but the only way to determine if
DVD+ was more reliable would be to compare
failed burns or other mishaps
with those of DVD-.
If you were doing that back in the day, let us know in the comments and we’ll see if there really was a difference.
But as far as practical differences to
the consumer,
for the most part there weren't any!
There really wasn’t anything plus could
do that dash couldn’t.
It was all down to technical minutia.
But since there was a time when you could
purchase a disc drive (or DVD recorder) which
only worked with one or the other, both remained
on sale, needlessly confusing the majority
of us with multi-compatible drives.
And giving Sony yet another licensing income
stream.
Presumably.
Maybe not...
But they are Sony.
Well, thanks for watching!
Since this is a video about media types and
there are surely two camps which ardently
prefer one over the other, I’m sure the
comments will be completely harmless.
For what it’s worth, for many years I used
this trusty Panasonic DMR-ES40V for making
DVD copies of VHS tapes for my family and
others.
At least for that application, DVD-R
seemed to be less of a fuss than DVD+R.
But maybe this is some sort of outlier.
And really this is why this whole format war
was so dumb.
This is from 2004, and it supports Plus, Dash,
and RAM.
Given that there wasn’t anything unique
you could do with plus, its existence is
a little frustrating.
Perhaps it was more reliable, and articles
of the time suggest that it was, but unless
somebody did some sort of study comparing
the reliability, my experience suggests the
difference was marginal at best.
And again, the technical differences only
matter when the disc is being burned.
Once the data is on there the ADIP or the
Land Pre Pits are completely invisible.
Unless of course you’ve designed some sort
of copy protection which looks for them on
a disc to determine if it wasn’t original.
Which was a thing.
Maybe I should make a video about that…
♫ confusingly smooth jazz ♫
Hi!
[clears throat]
Before we get too ff…
before we get too
far, I’d like..
Mmhm…
bleh…
...and their rewritable formats of cou …
AHH!
Versions.
Oooh.
Then there were also weird one-offs.
Then there was the dbdb… ahhh
...we will harness the THIRD dimension and
stick a second translucent data…
de.. uehhhhh.
Just as a
[weird noise]
just.. [laughs]
It seems more than a little suspicious to
me that the two founding… blergh!
Two of the...
Tiny pits and lands on their inside reflective surface.
When you shine a la…
That wasn’t the end of the sentence.
Not gonna lie, the bloopers weren't that great this time, were they?
I mean, it's nice for MY benefit when there aren't a lot, but it sure makes the end less fun.
Note to self:
Screw up more
bwaaaaaaaa
do do do doo
