Optical media at this point is long cold storage backup for me. No sense wearing out your drives playing an old game. No sense using it like a floppy drive to transfer files. But these disks are very useful if you understand the methods for archival and recovery the dvdisaster people advertise. Good media should be able to hold up for a very, very long time. So I'll really mainly use DVD+R and BD-R for backups, perhaps fully transitioning to BD, but DVD support (and CD!) is found in Blu ray drives and many used DVD drives floating around, and so perhaps will be around for a long time, if you want to put in the effort to keep optical media going. I will probably keep DVDs around for a long time.

I've got a bottleg VCD of The Matrix burned to two Infiniti 'professional' quality CD-Rs circa April 2000. The discs appear completely unblemished but the audio is choppy. I'm unsure if that's an issue with VLC (SPDIF passthrough is similarly broken). I'd test it in MPC but, pertinent to this thread, my BR drive just won't spin up anything other than audio CDs.

dr_st wrote on 2024-01-16, 19:56:

However I don't understand what upgrading or not upgrading to XP has to do with how one burns and archives DVD discs.

🤷‍♂️

I assume that XP was the dominant platform at the day.
It supported NTFS, which handled files larger than 4GB (98SE had trouble here being limited to FAT32 by default).
It also had most recent UDF support and could play movie DVDs out-of-box, provided that an MPEG2 decoder board was installed or if the user had purchased a license for a software decoder.
Popular third-party tools like Cl*neCD, Alc*h*l or Ner* were also available to XP.
The older versions had less restrictions, I think.
There also were tools available that did provide a walkaround for the region check.
ASPI could also be installed on XP, still.

Well I left a very negative review on the website. They had the 8x ones pictures, but sent the 16X. Not the same thing at all.
I had found a website that claimed to have some some 8X JVC/TY ones. I find that VERY hard to believe. I sent them an email inquiry but never got a reply