At last weekend's 9/11 Truth Movement event, Episteme & I burned & gave away almost 300 DVDs / CDs for free, mainly to people on the streets, who were not already aware of / involved with the Truth Movement (many thanks for all of your help Episteme!). As a result, we now have some very effective activists in the South London area. However, some of them do not have a PC / resources to burn their own DVDs, but are very convincing talkers, & extremely effective in speaking to people. I'm currently investigating some possibilities that will hopefully help them to help the movement.

For myself, I work all over the UK, in a different place each week, and I have a personal target: to give away at least 50 DVDs each week, wherever I go to. Presently, time is my main problem, since I work a minumum of 8 hours per day (usually 10-14), and also travel 4-9 hours at each end of my working week - hence why I am not online as much as I would like to be - although this will change very soon, when I start my new job.

Having spoken to a number of people who also burn DVDs to give away, the main problems seem to be:

1. the number of "coasters" (duds) burned - some people reported up to 25% failures
2. burn speed hampers production (to achieve readable disks, burn speed needs to be 2x in many cases)
3. the time / money factor seems to be a major deterrant to people

Hence my poll - I believe that I may be able to mass - produce professionally-finished discs equal in cost to home-made ones (this, of course, does not account for my time, but simply the cost of materials) - I give my time for free.

Therefore, I am interested in finding out whether people might be interested in e.g. shipping a load of printable DVDs to be professionally finished at this end (thus ensuring a greater "hit" rate - people are more likely to dispose of a "cheap" handwritten DVD than they are of a disc that looks good). Shiny discs work best - conduct your own trials & see.

Please help by responding to the poll.
Thank you

~Mairi

I seldom have problems when recording writable media. Usually on a spindle of 100 dvds can you find upto 25% of them being bad; however it depends on what you buy and it sometimes can be just bad luck.

I find people watch hand written discs. Having a label on the disc can create problems.

Some people --especially where I live-- seem to think anything with terrorism content is taboo and having a label that may show anything that looks or discuss terror may create problems.

There are also many brainwashed people in this area as well - being very close to American Airbases; people usually get very angry, fearful and tend to deny any evidence that goes against the official conspiracy theory; these people are very pro-government.

In the local town, the normal folk aren't interested in this sort of material and a professional looking label will tend to make them look at you as some sort of 'terrorist'. Many of the younger poorly educated folk are angry at immigration and speaking of voting for the BNP or National Front at the next election. These people are more interested in appearance, drugs, music, sex and about themselves instead of making this country better.

The older people are scared and doesn't want to know anything that goes against the official conspiracy theory.

We do however have the local College. This is where the information seems to be welcomed. A professional label might not be good if students wish to not draw attention to what interests they may share at this time.

A professional finish would be useful to send to local Members of Parliament whom many hopefully have an openmind. A professional looking disc with a professional looking video will be very good at getting the message across.

These were my observations and experiences in my area; some areas may be more or less conservative and a professional looking finish on a dvd may be more or less effective in those areas.

Daniel

I just voted.

Shiny ones are good - they just take loads more time and expense.

For me, it's about 5-10 coasters per hundred, and shiny discs are a must

Just to clarify - I am not talking about labelling discs - I am well aware of the problems that can sometimes occur as a result of labels. Original discs are not labelled, but printed directly onto the disc itself.

Having given out DVDs all over the UK from as far north as Inverness to as far south as Brighton, as far west as Belfast to as far East as Ipswich, my own experience has been pretty much consistent throughout all areas. However, I will say that I tend to give away discs in larger towns and cities, & I would imagine that would be a much harder sell in small places.

I have found that older people are far less likely to accept a hand-written disc; in general, they immediately perceive it as of little or no value. Similarly, although the younger generations will more readily accept a disc with the title scribbled on with a CD-pen, they are often more likely to lose the disc before they watch it - sometimes they will walk a little further down the street, examine the disc & see nothing interesting about it, and jettison it in the nearest rubbish bin. I have watched this happen, hence my belief that shiny, properly printed DVDs are more likely to be accepted, retained, and watched by people.

I don't always tell people what the disc is - often I will simply smile at a passer-by, ask if they'd like a free DVD, and hand it to them. This is to try to get as wide a range of people as possible to watch the documentaries - not simply people who are already interested in this sort of material.

In any case, I have bought a CD / DVD printer, which was expensive to buy, but cheap to run. I rarely have any coasters at all (it's been more than 350 DVDs since I last had one) so for anyone who does have a percentage of coasters in their burn runs, I can pretty much match the cost price of producing DVDs, with the added bonus of having a very shiny, crisp finish. I hope that these discs would have more bang for the buck, & be more likely to be watched.

Volunteers willing to test this hypothesis with some of these new DVDs against some of their own would be most welcome.

Think I voted that - that'll be the average. Except when like happened recently

- you get a duff batch of dodgy DVDs from Chav-land shop and half don't write/burn

- your DVD burner says 'enough you bastard... stop driving me like a slave' [pun there!] and you spend ages chucking out discs with just "lead in lead out" or some drivel on them only.

I rarely ever get a coaster when burning DVD's... unless it is due to something I did to fubar the operation (impatience). On the other hand, with the same burner I loose about 10% of the CD's I try to make.

I don't think people care about the homemade look overall. Vast numbers of people are exchanging home burnt stuff on a daily basis, so IMO people are used to it.

Errr... you are the poster formerly known as no and tsoldrin.

You travel by image alone

Heh... Indeed. It had simply been 'no' for a while, but IPB has a minimum of 3 characters for the name... when signing on here I couldn't think of what to put, I have an ancient little knick-knack on my desk that says "I'm number 3, I don't try at all" so I just tossed that on. When "Con"spiracycentral switched to IPB I pondered trying to to make it my actual user number, but there were ton's of people signing on at the moment I was and I figured I'd end up at least 1 number off and feel sheepish. I'll consolidate to tsoldrin eventually.