Never pay another DVD rewind fee again! Compatible with all disc formats: DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, CDR, CDRW, Audio CD, VCD. Multi-region, code-free rewinder capable of rewinding all 6 region DVD’s including RCE/REA encoded discs
I suspect a few people bought this legitimately. When the CD/DVD revolution happened, a lot of the quattrogenarians spent their entire home video experience inundated with “be kind, rewind” slogans from rental shops. Being fairly frugal and not wanting to pay the extra to have the shop rewind the video for them, they would be obsessed with rewinding a video before returning it. I imagine that some used this unironically to appease their elders into thinking that it was “rewound” before returning rentals. It’s useless, sure, but it would have completed the “rewind” step, preventing the unnecessary (and non-existent) rewind fees for mildly dementia ridden elders during the early DVD era. Just having that extra step would appease their need to do it, and prevent complaints and re-explanations that DVDs don’t need it.
Just put it on the thing, make it spin backwards for a minute, then package it up. It’s useless to explain that you don’t have to do that because they won’t remember it, and the next time they play a DVD, they’ll just be looking for a way to rewind it again.
It was more common for commercial discs and some consumer discs to have the data layer sandwiched between the bottom surface and label layer, especially later in cd/dvd’s heyday, to prevent tiny scratches on the label or sharpie marks from destroying bits in the data layer.
There was still a wear layer below the data layer which could be resurfaced. So the services worked.
Commonly it worked by removing some material from the bottom wear layer to remove the damaged bits, so it didn’t work forever. You would eventually run out of material to remove and trying to repair it would result in a catastrophic failure of the media.
There is merit to it, mainly in high speed applications. When you got up to 48x and 52x speeds, an imbalance could result in a catastrophic failure of the material and the disk could lose structural integrity… aka it can explode.
For audio… Not so much. Since audio always ran at 1x speed. Any disk imbalances would be trivial to the ability for the player to read the disk.
I remember when I converted a bunch of CDs to mp3, the “ripping” program would give errors if it was trying to read too quickly, it would result in those slips and cirps you could hear on some mp3 files. Those were literally read errors from when the data was extracted from the original media… though, it could also be imperfections in the disk, or scratches. I ran mine at… IIRC 4x to ensure there were few, if any, read errors. Sure, it took between 10 and 20 minutes to extract all the tracks from a CD, but I didn’t get any audio issues that were so common in early mp3 files.
I imagine that if I had this and used it on the disks for a minute before ripping them to mp3, I could have run it at 8-16x or more with no loss in quality.
For data applications, there’s read checking (CRC) to ensure data integrity. If there’s a read error, the drive will just retry, slowing down as required to ensure the data is consistent. This is why your CD/DVD drive spins up and down while reading data during something like a file copy off of a disk. Eliminating the need to re-read the data can significantly increase the speed of a copy operation.
The disk shaver did work, it was just marketed poorly. For 1x CD reads, it was generally useless.
They used to make ones that can do both sides at once, but they were too complicated, expensive and basically immediately outdated when dual layer DVDs came around.
I don’t know about rewind. As a child of the 90’s, you lay that sticky label on there, let your older sibling press the freshly burned disc onto it, and bam, you have a homemade mix CD before Lars can shut down Napster.
As a Metallica fan, I do repent my Napster days, though.
Doesn’t the fediverse userbase trend towards being made up of millennials? I’m on the older end of gen Z myself and grew up with CDs and DVDs, so I imagine most people here are familiar with the technology.
I’m on the younger end of gen z and still know what the are, never actually use them but we have lots. I feel most of us know what old stuff like CDs are because of the Internet tho.
I’m of the age where I can remember having a load of rewritable cds and DVDs plus those things that supposedly cleared up scratches now those were a scam too.
Usually the home versions were scams, but there were better quality ones out there that would remove just a little bit of the top layer, making a smooth finish again. Although deep scratches obviously couldn’t be repaired in this case.
Sometimes it did! I tried it on a disc that was so messed up, I figured out couldn’t make it work any less, and wouldn’t you know, it worked for the first time in a long time. Other times, not so lucky.
Most toothpaste is slightly abrasive so depending on the scratches it can definitely work as a polish. I’d always steal my dad’s special glass polish and it was basically like toothpaste
I had one that was a hand crank thing. It actually worked pretty well. Whenever I thought that was it for my Diablo II CD, I would run it though there and Presto: good as new.
My Xbox 1 also had this weird thing where it sounded like it was fucking eating the CD too. If it got too grumpy we would use the crank and boom: back to teabagging people in Halo.
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