Bit-rot
"Bit-rot" is slang for data-corruption. The optical storage mediums used late last century such as CDs and DVDs would typically get slightly corrupted over time. This was specially true for burned DVD images.
Anecdotal information[edit]
Going through hundreds of burned CDs and DVDs made ca 1995 to 2010 sometime in 2017 revealed that some CDs would have read errors and a few would not work. DVDs were a lot more problematic, a majority of burned DVDs had simply become unreadable over time. The DVDs that did work had some corruption as a result of "bit-rot".
Files with lossy audio compression on ancient CDs sound horrible. This is not only due to bit-rot; a MP3 with a 128kbps bitrate made with the MP3 encoders that were common in the 1990s sounded horrible back then too. Some data corruption due to 20 years of storage on a burned CD will obviously not help MP3 files which were bad to begin with.
Playing rotten video flies[edit]
The mpv video player is by far the best alternative for playing partly corrupted video files. It handles them very gracefully. VLC will also play them but it will have a lot more visual artifacts. GStreamer based players like Parole are the worst choice for corrupted video files; players using the GStreamer framework will simply abort or crash if a video file isn't perfect.
Not "bit-rot"[edit]
Some young "developers" who couldn't write a hello world program in C if their life depended on it have suggested that unmaintained source code suffers "bit rot" because "nobody is maintaining it". That is a wrong and foolish use of the term "bit-rot". A source code repository on a RAID 1 array won't have bits flipped around because time goes by.
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