Why not CD-ROM?

People ask us about putting our products on CD-ROM. While we can, we strongly advise against using CD-ROM for remembrances for several major reasons. The video quality in particular is vastly inferior to DVD, usually limited to a small fractional screen size of pixelized and often jerky video. CD storage capacity is also a dramatically limiting factor, and frankly they don’t cost that much less than a DVD.

One of the strongest reasons not to use CD’s is technological obsolescence. You can only play CD-ROM (not to be confused with audio CD's) on a computer. The disc you make this year plays fine this year, but, because CD’s are personal computer dependent (DVD’s are not), when the computer operating systems change over the years, the drivers or playback software used to play this year’s CD-ROM yearbook very likely will not even be around or won’t be compatible with the computer OS you’ll be using 10 or 20 years from now.

Companies that advocate CD-ROM yearbooks utilizing standard web browsers as the playback tool are overlooking or skirting the issue that browsers also become out of date. Try using Mosaic (an early web browser) or several revisions back of Netscape or Internet Explorer on today’s web sites and see how they work. It’s not just the Java, Flash and other plug-in enhanced sites that won’t work properly...a lot of sites won’t work at all using browser software that dates too far back.

DVD will change too. An HDTV version of DVD is already in the works, but it will be backward compatible with today’s discs. DVD comes with the huge advantage of having a unified file system from its inception—something CD-ROM never had. CD programmers have always resorted to different paths to achieve the same end—not a good thing when it comes to compatibility or longevity.