To show how much smaller this is than a Mini CD, a UMD, a Gamecube disc etc - here's a picture I made imgur.com/a/vWGARLX

I feel one of these days Techmoan could pull a prank on everyone, by inventing a fictional format and doing a full episode about it. And nobody would know the difference. Because some of this stuff is just too crazy.

_"This is a fascinating little gadget. It'll replace CDs soon. Guess I'll have to buy the 'White Album' again."_ -Agent K, Men In Black (1997).

The blank DataPlay discs that Mat showed off there had something that caught my eye- the album "Wall of Spears" by Thorr-Axe came out in 2011! Meaning the person that originally owned the discs actually burned the album onto one of them in 2011 at the very earliest. Just thought it was weird and kind of interesting

This reminds me of that scene from MIB where Tommy lee Jones brings up a tiny disc that would replace CD’s “ I’m going to have to buy the white album again”

There is nothing more 2001 than a crazy weird dead portable music player that plays Aviril and Outkast.

Avril Lavigne, plastic devices with bad ergonomics and the "thinkpad" coat on them, and lasers dying... this video resumed my high school life pretty well

The tiny discs are adorable. I can imagine eating this as a child in the early 2000s.

This IS a pretty hefty disc for its size. It actually looks like some nice retro future reference material for anyone wanting to make a sci-fi story.

This video is already more successful than the DataPlay format!

"We even watched a prototype die doing what it loved: playing 'Sk8er Boi'". Well, we all have our aspirations, I suppose.

So crazy seeing my band's first album on one of these at 8:43. I wonder who these belonged to.

11:52 - I felt a tinge of panic and hopelessness when you said there's really nothing you can do about that rubberized plastic material. I mean, yes I have removed this icky material from several devices (all post-2010 so I dunno why they're still using it long after this device you showed here) with isopropyl alcohol, but somehow I was kinda hoping something could actually be done to restore the rubbery surface. Thanks for dashing my hopes into a million pieces!! 😩 But yeah, I understand. It's the shi**iest material ever to be put on an electronic gadget.

You know, you could just start making these formats up and I'd believe it whole heartedly

Without doing any research whatsoever (because I'm just feeling that dangerous), I'm guessing this used a red laser diode? I must admit that getting 250 MB onto one side of a disc that small seems like a mild impossibility, and surely it must have required DVD-like pit density. In fact it almost seems like it might have needed more. And wow is that a weird looking laser pickup. It's too bad the mechanism is sealed as this is really intriguing! And the color of the disc suggests maybe it was magneto-optical like MD? The world may never know! What a delightfully obscure thing--thanks for such a great effort with this!

"He was kind enough to lend me his Avril Lavigne album" is not a sentence ever before uttered by a human.

Me at the machine: “why’d you have to go make things so complicated?”

I think I saw a scene in Men in Black with this disc. It was inside the alien room of future copied tech "... it will replace CDs..."

I remember how amazed I was when the web designer at my works brought in an MP3 player. "No moving parts!" he kept saying and I couldn't understand how it worked at the time! I think it was very expensive, a few hundred pounds back in the day. My husband was an electronic engineer and he explained the concept to me. However, we're quite used to MP3 players and flash drives, things which have no moving parts and it's all just normal to us now.

Never thought I'd ever see a disc smaller than UMDs

be carefull, they self-destruct after playing the mission briefing....

As a teacher, I have a Logitech presenter's wand that suffered with this sticky coating syndrome. I found that chalk dust from the blackboard seems to solve the problem, it restores the premium feel surprisingly. Give it a go on something cheap or worthless and see what I mean!

FYI, it wasn't very common for the actual laser on an early Playstation to die. What would happen is that the transport would wear out. There was a plastic rail that would help hold the laser up as it slid back and forth to read CDs, and unfortunately that rail would wear down over time, causing the laser to rest further from the CD, and it would eventually become unable to focus. As a consequence, a lot of owners of early Playstation units discovered that, in fact, they could still play their games, if they only turned their console upside down while attempting to do so.

"Died doing what it loved, playing skater boy" 😂😂😂

500MB!!! That's quite large for such size and time. Imagine if it kept evolving. Maybe it could hold like 25GB. Or even more although it wouldn't be worth the price I believe.

The tiny being inside me wants this so much.

My dad was an optical engineer at dataplay during the development of this device. Allegedly, they "expected" to be able to cram a potential 2gb on each side of the disc for a total of 4gb. Obviously this was an unrealistic expectation, and solid-state memory was simultaneously becoming the preferred storage format which quickly led to the demise of the company....except in Asia, where the device enjoyed (limited) commercial success.

I love how he makes me feel old while I hang on every word. Anyone else here during Quarantine?

That Thorr Axe album was released in 2011, so it means that some guy was recording on this format at least in that year.

The disk looks like a prop from any sci-fi/spy thriller movies of the 90's and 2000's that contains the data that the protagonist is trying to get/destroy. :)

00s-era tech really strikes as strange these days, it's all archaic, yet the designs just ooze futuristic, With the bold colours, sleek designs, see-through plastics. I can't help but find myself getting a little excited just looking at this tech. Maybe that's just nostalgia, idk.

1:55 Oh man, the "futuristic" tech designs from the late 90s / early 2000s :D

1:56 has a FIRE aesthetic and you can't change my mind on that

That Avril Lavigne was a promo copy. You can tell by the circle punched in the barcode. I was working at Tower Records at the time this format was supposed to be released, Tower Records carried everything. I don't ever remember see a single DataPlay disc ever. I wonder if any of the retail discs actually made it to the street?

It is funny and eerie that the moment Matt says "it was a 2000's recordable format" I picture myself in that years ripping Avril Lavinge's "complicated" on it, and the songs starts to sound in my head while watching the video. Little I knew that I was watching the future...

2:07 That smartphone design is so ugly that everyone died. The end.

Those silver curves in the promo animation!

The comparison of the DataPlay disc to a CD is like comparing a CD to a LaserDisc!

Impressed by the team effort that went into the production of this video. Thanks!

Early 2000 was so weird. In the same breath almost I used floppy discs, portable cd players, minidisc player, zip drives and now I heard about dataplay too. 4 years earlier in 1996 I was listening to Tupac on a walkman. Around 2004 I was listening to Rob Zombie on my first mp3 player. And as a kid my parents would play vinyl records for me. What a time to be alive.

I wish I was a teen or an adult on those early 2000s years just to have the opportunity to experience this type of tech even if they didn’t succeed

I too, wanna die listening to Sk8r boi.

KUDOS to iRiver for driver/software support !!

Not gonna lie, those tiny cases holding the discs ejecting out the side of that looks slick as hell. I love stuff like that. Also, I just discovered this channel on accident, and 7 videos later you more than earned a sub my man. Cheers.

The early 2000's we're just chock-full of this kind of stuff. I graduated high school back in 99, and let me tell ya that was a much much different world. Until the rise of SD cards really took over every company tried to throw it's hat in the ring of trying a new format. Of course in the end it was all about cheap plentiful CD and DVD writable media.

I'd hunt down another one. Right now, there is no documented footage of the computer portion working. It needs to be documented.

Flash from the past! I have a Dataplay disk, unrecorded. I worked at Imation and was involved with the disk development. It was exciting for a while.

The funny stuff is that there were so many optical formats out there and people still prefer standard CDs for physical music media. Even pendrives and SD cards were sold as music albums were somehow unnoticed. I think that DVD/BluRay players and drives backwards compatibility made CDs immortal. Everyone have something to play CDs at home like a gaming console for example.

"We certainly don't have all the answers yet." Has to be one of the worst pre-rollout CEO statements I've ever heard!

Now that you've done the video every Dataplay unit ever manufactured will show up on Ebay. So I suspect a follow up will be forthcoming... :)

i'm glad these existed, its very cyberpunk

it’s such a shame that the company was too small to get past their bankruptcy, as they clearly had a vision for the dataplay format and its future potential! i do hope that your searches find fruit, and thanks for making these great videos exploring old forgotten media and formats, keep it up!

tech in 2019: Artificial Intelligence will soon become smarter than humans tech in 1999: we made a tiny cd

Would love to see more stuff about iRiver. I had a 20GB hard drive mp3 player back in the mid-2000's and I really loved it. I even dropped it in a river once, and it still worked. I guess the name "iRiver" was accurate.

What the heck?! ANOTHER format that I didn't know it existed. I love this channel so much. Shout out to LGR and the 8-but guy too!

If these weren't write once and flash storage hadn't started to get cheaper I could have seen these being a big success. 10 bucks for 500mb? And on that little disc? It was a great concept

never in my life would i have expected to see Gentle Giant mentioned in a Techmoan video!

The copyright protection reminds of around 10 or so years ago when there was a bit of a panic around certain Sony CD’s that secretly installed a DRM that couldn’t be manually uninstalled from your computer. Depending on your player, I believe it could’ve locked you out of downloading music entirely, if memory serves. I remember there was a certain album by the Coral I wanted and didn’t buy just because I wasn’t tech savvy and would’ve never figured out how to fix it. Copyright protected on formats like that could be a really interesting video, especially considering those CDs are still floating around in the market at retail shops and online.

I love how spontaneous and unrehearsed your videos appear! The fact that the DataPlay unit croaked while you were still producing this video only adds to the great "real" feeling of your presentation!

I was at the consumer electronics show when dataplay was first announced. I remember that they bragged about spending over $1,000,000 on their Show Booth, had multiple celebrities signing autographs, and were showing their dataplay hardware, one-off prototypes, and giving out free coffee and food. it was like they were just throwing money around. I was lucky enough to pry a couple of data play recordable and pre-recorded discs away from one of the engineers which I will never part with. This is a true piece of consumer electronics history.

People will always reject a format that includes copy-protection/DRM whenever there is a non-protected option available.

Techmoan and Avril Lavigne. That's a combination I've never thought I'd see. :)

Seeing Napster and Bearshare takes me back to the times.

Honestly, I think that format had a big potential. I could see me using it instead of an ipod, as long as the discs were RW.

9 year old me has just had his mind blown! I remember thinking how it would be great if CDs were really tiny.

I hope this does not violate the "not going on and on about the player breaking", but as someone that has worked with at least a dozen types of optical drives, that was NOT the sound of a failed laser. To me it sounded like the sled that moves the laser across the disc was stuck. Another possibility is that the home position sensor is not making good contact and the sled motor is perpetually trying to bring the laser back to the home position. Moot points since you are not going to destroy the player trying to make it functional again, but just wanted to throw in my .02 on a more likely cause of that noise.

For a quick fix I have treated those sticky coatings in the past by dabbing on some cornstarch (baby powder).

I really enjoyed this video. Well put together

Thank you for sharing what you have its a lot more than I was expecting.

The disc reader committing seppuku after playing avril lavigne only seems like a logical conclusion.

One feature not mentioned was the DRM system of the DP environment. The original intent was to allow customers to purchase tracks online and burn to the DP media while protecting the digital format from illegal copies. Additionally, there was functionality to “unlock” additional content for a fee on prerecorded media. (Does anyone remember the US Circuit City “DIVX DVD” fiasco?) Of course cheap CD-R media and NAPSTER killed any chance for the DP format. I had friends and former coworkers (engineers) working for DataPlay. I think the best tech lingered on for a few years following bankruptcy with an attempt to make it an optical media format for laptop computers. I know DP moved from Longmont to Boulder, Colorado sometime in the mid-2000s since the company logo was on the doors of an adjacent building to my office on the bike path.

You sound a lot like James May. That’s a positive thing.

No prob, these things happen all of the time! Thanks for informing me of another format that I've never heard of! This would've been awesome for car audio!

I always thought there was something wrong with the early 2000's. I think this summarises it nicely.

I remember seeing these on the ZDTV's CES coverage when I was in high school. I was convinced DataPlay was the future, and absolutely stoked about it. Then, of course, I never found it in any stores.

Man, your videos are just so interesting and engrossing. Thanks for all that you do.

I actually really wanted one of these back in the day

I hate that awful coating. I've had remotes with that coating that broke down very quickly, likely due to humidity. Excellent video as usual. I was aware of the DataPlay format. I was a Minidisc enthusiast in the day, so I heard about the DP format before it hit stores. I remember seeing blank DP discs in a store only once. I would have purchased them for the novelty if they were not so expensive. I thought they might come down in price, but I never saw them again. I knew the format was not going to last and the players all looked several levels below the quality of the disc technology. A few times over the years I have searched online for DataPlay(cat play) discs like you showed here and found very little proof of the format's existence, and very few listings to buy anything. But I remember when the format was new and I did see that pack of discs in store that one time. Great video. Thanks for covering it. It definitely filled in some gaps in what I knew about it as it has been so long.

Hmm, I don’t think I’m going to release my albums on this format after all... 🤪 Sticking to cassettes and vinyl for now. 😎

I have never heard of DataPlay but I do remember magazine adverts for the Iomega HipZip with their 40mb Clik/PocketZip disks. Thanks for another great video. It's interesting seeing all these different formats of yesteryear

9:28 and for sure the owner was a big fan of prog rock! Great video mate, keep them coming! Cheers!

It was doomed. Timing is everything. A small device with white earbuds had just appeared on the market at about the same time.

That rubber coating is literally decomposing. There is nothing that can be done to reverse the process anymore than you can reverse an apple going rotten. You can prevent it if you have something with this coating on it that's still in good condition, but you'd have to seal it with something. A clear resin or epoxy or something similar. It should completely cover over the rubbery coating which will prevent it from falling apart and it won't have that gummy feeling to it.

Really like the outro. So many beautifull smart and refined devices the past gave us.

Wow, how much some things have changed. This reminds me of high school days recording tons of mixes on minidisc. I thought I'd be using those for years to come. Then came iPods, then iPhones, and now I can listen to almost any song I want on demand thanks to Apple Music. Makes me wonder how I ever got along without it lol. And that Avril album is great top to bottom.

The producer for the best band I ever worked with was obsessed with using the latest tech. They recorded all our songs onto these stupid things. I have no idea where they even got the gear. They even had this fancy mic that recorded live onto them. It actually worked really well for the time. Now I would have to spend tons of cash on antique gadgets if I ever hope to hear our music again.

I remember this format when it was announced. I recall it being AMAZING... and never heard from again. Now I know why. Thanks!

Your channel is one of the best!

"Ah I see you've played compactey discey before!"

I think this is the first time you've shown a oddball storage medium I don't still have or haven't had before. I don't know if I should be impressed at your knowledge of formats or disgusted at my own track record of format purchases.

I always enjoy all your videos, expecially your main outro! Much as I was a tech maven back at the time of that format's release (and still am) and followed every single exotic format -- this one never caught my attention either. Fond memories of my iRiver bullet-shaped mp3 player, which had a joystick control. All the reviewers of that model kept harping on how devilishly hard it was to learn the menu navigation. That wasn't a problem for me, but after awhile, the control wore out, necessitating wiggling it around or pressing multiple times. Even earlier, around 2000, I bought my very first mp3 player (I don't remember exact model #s for either of these, sorry) which was a camera too. With an empty camera folder, it could hold about 11 mp3 songs -- a joy, since this was right around the time the mp3 players came out and this was one of the only ones out at the time! No Spotify or the like on the 'Net back then -- there was barely even a 'Net -- so I downloaded songs off Kazaa and Napster's first incarnation -- it took forever on my 2400 baud dialup, which was no problem; I would set the download early in the morning, head off to work, and let it run. Due to a bug somewhere, the connection would always drop out mid-day, so no concerns about blocking incoming calls, and no ruined download -- ISP was America Online and their software was already robust enough even back then to know to resume download interruptions. It'd take 1-3 _days_ of this routine, but after awhile I would have _one_song downloaded, lol. I didn't care about the time taken, it was a super hobby; I am sure you can relate! :-D After two weeks, I'd have a whopping 7-9 new songs, and, since they were obscure Indie songs I didn't know, except for their genre, I really awaited with joy what the songs were going to be like. There were some real lousy songs and icky copies sounding like they were made over the telephone or a lousy cassette recorder, especially with Kazaa, sure, but most of them were great! I built up a computer data CD of about 170 obscure songs this way over about a month. I enjoyed this set more than any hits that came out for awhile, and when better players and later the MD format came out, I copied them onto those and kept listening to them on and on, for years! Ah, memories... :-D

You make the best videos techmoan.thanks for all the entertainment in them love the audio elctronics you do.

I know it wasn't headed for a rosy future with NAND revving its engines, but man, I wish this caught on anyway. There's something about the idea of a phone with an optical drive that just makes me happy.

You never cease to amaze me by finding the most obscure media formats I've never heard of.

"Thats not a knife, this is a knife" Love all your references.

A person in Italy was selling a factory box of 100 red blank discs on eBay recently. Along with a few retail display boxes containing 5x 3 disc blanks. And 10 drive engines for them.

I love that the only home recorded dataplay disc around has gentle giant on it. Great band.

I am still wanting a muppet in a liquid spinning around in a cube.

I would have LOVED this as a kid.

This is fantastic! I had no idea this media had actually been in around! I remember seeing the movie that featured the similar looking prop. I wonder if applying clear coat of sorts to the degrading surface might stop that problem. Thanks for sharing this.