I’m not sure if this is possible to answer- but if an advanced alien civilization were to somehow get ahold of a DVD from earth, with no knowledge of it, how hard would it likely be for them to figure out how to play it?
They could probably figure out how to read the data on it but given that it’s encrypted they might have a hard time translating it to a workable video.
I mean they’d figure out the “it’s a digital optical disc” part quickly. Under a microscope it’s a single spiral of tiny pits, so a red-ish laser and a photodiode would give them a clean bitstream.
The hard part is the stack above that. The disc uses specific modulation and error correction, a filesystem, compressed video and audio formats, and most movie DVDs add copy protection.
Guess an advanced lab could reverse engineer all that but it’s a software and math project not a “press play” moment.
For aliens with advanced tech, the DVD would look like a shiny data storage disk.
With spectroscopy + microscopy, they’d see tiny pits arranged in spirals. From there it’s “just” reverse-engineering how those pits encode binary.
But without knowing the file system, encoding, or video standard, it’d take a while. Imagine finding a vinyl record without ever seeing a record player.
They’d eventually get it — but step one would be: “oh, humans stored something shiny again”.
If it’s advanced then yeah it would be obvious. They would have advanced from analog to yes/no gates and then understood it was an abstraction. And it’s safe to assume they developed the ability to see light the same way and would understand the analogy
Let’s say you know English… written and spoken… and that’s the only language anyone on Earth knows. You then find a book with Japanese Kanji characters on it. Nothing else. Nobody speaks the language. There’s nothing but the characters. There’s no “Rosetta Stone” to bridge from one language to the other. And here you know it’s a language. You would never be able to figure it out.
In the DVD scenario, they don’t know what it is. It could be a coaster, a piece of art, a weapon, something to dig in the ground, a toy, a sports item, a war medal, jewelry, etc….
Impossible. Zero probability. I think there would be essentially no chance they’d even realize it was a “storage” device. I am one of those who is of the mind that aliens, if they exist, will be truly alien, and our thoughts, ideas, and technologies will be mutually incomprehensible. Not just more or less advanced…of a different nature entirely.
semi related – there was a show on youtubes called earthling cinema where an alien from the future analyzed an ancient earth artifact. he did extremely good summaries and analysis of themes, but with certain names and details comically flubbed as you’d expect from a large eyebrowed alien
Yea, I think they would. If they are at least mathematically equally advanced as ourselves, they could look at the disk at magnification and figure out it’s optically encoded. Once they have a bit stream, it would become fairly obvious that it’s digital. A base 2 counting system falls out of that naturally. Without a shared unit of time, which is arbitrary, and a shared unit of byte length, which is also arbitrary, they would likely have some further challenges decoding the rest.
I think a CD with just audio on it would be rather trivial. Regardless of the sample or bit rate, you can still see it’s a waveform when plotted on two axis. Applying FFT would get you a spectrum that would make that even more obvious. I don’t know enough about DVD format to speculate about how difficult it would be to reverse engineer if you don’t know anything else about us.
Aliens would probably look at it like “cute, tiny flying saucers. How do we make it spin and vomit magic lights?” then give up and start tiktok instead
If they can also get their hands on the description of MPEG-2 encoding, it would be realistic. Just figuring out the encoding from raw data – unlikely.
Probably pretty difficult without any other information about human technology.
There are plenty of artifacts from ancient human societies that have writing on them that we have no idea what they say, and there are even things written as late as the 16th century that we can’t decipher. It would effectively be akin to that.
Very doubtful. I doubt most of humanity past or future couldn’t do it without the rainbow. I was involved with early CD-ROM and CD-I authoring. It’s pretty intense.
I would say it would be impossible. There are human languages that we can’t decipher, and we share a common set of experiences.
They might determine that it’s a data device with a string of 1s and 0s. But where are those broken to make numbers. What would the numbers even mean to them. How would they convert them to colored pixels and the from pixels to line and lines to pictures.
I would expect that any true “AI” (not the goofy LLM’s we have now, they just guess statistical outcomes based on training data, over and over and over again, really really fast), would probably see the binary patterns right off. Then it would try and figure out the actual ‘base’ of the numeric system (which in most of our datasets is hexadecimal). At that point, it’s just sifting the patterns to figure out the codecs involved, which tracks are audio waveforms, which are digitized image sequences (index frames = full pictures, progressive frames = changes from the previous i-frame + successive P-frames).
There is a crypto layer in there too, which a quantum computing system could probably crack really quickly – most encryption is based on prime number factoring, primes being true no matter what numbering base you use, they don’t change just because you count on 10 fingers or on sixteen. It’s hard for us to crack existing crypto without knowing the ‘keys’ because of our current computer architecture, it can’t sift primes all that quickly past the ‘known’ list, whereas quantum systems could manage that via transforms and imaginary numbers, rather than brute force testing of integer after integer ad infinitum.
The real question would be, if an alien species communicates via other media besides sight and sound, how would they translate an audiovisual experience into their method of speaking or relating? A race of telepaths, using thoughts/brainwaves to ‘sync up,’ might not even NEED a sensory language at all. This means tech that relies on sensory organs to convey concepts and language would be useless to them – it would be like us trying to tell a story based on smell alone. Our sense of smell still -works- but it has atrophied because our eyes and our ears are our main conduits for percieving the world AND relating to it.
The movie “Arrival” (which is an amazing story about communication in general, much less “speaking with aliens”) goes down another rabbit hole. We percieve time as linear and set, we’re stuck within it like a rollercoaster on a track, all we can do is remember what came before and anticipate what we see coming. Spoiler alert: >!The heptapods see Time en entire, they’re able to step their cognition outside of it, and the means to do this is their language.!<
If the disk is encrypted, which commercial ones are, that’s going to make it much harder. Unencrypted, maybe yes even if they are at our same level of technology but one of our biggest unknowns is the alien part of the equation. What will alien intelligence be like ignoring probable physiological differences?
I asked Gemini your question (strangely didn’t mention encryption!). It did bring up multiple other issues including a non obvious one – DVDs are not perfect (which is why there is error correction at a very low level in the first place). So basically noise in the “signal”. But maybe precisely because of this figuring out solomon-reed ECC might actually be easier?
UDF might kind of be easy to figure out and you might not really need to at first – just find the right places to start.
The various compression schemes are kind tough. Certainly they would know about Huffman encoding and stuff like LZ77/78 but MPEG-2 is kind of sophisticated and lossy according to human physiology. Dolby sound – likely the same.
Maybe the right question is not so much if but how long? I think they would be kind of interested in figuring it out and it would be something they would be interested in solving – assuming they value figuring stuff out. As they progress technologically, it might get easier. A biologically inspired super computer although not really practical for an interactive system can try out lots of things and could be left running for years.
It would only take a microscope to work out how it should be read. So it would be trivially easy to get the raw bits from it.
Working out the encoding with no idea of what the end result should look like would be less easy. So, it depends just how ‘advanced’ they are. But a supercomputer and some machine learning would be able to try lots of methods. It only has to get to the point of decoding one frame and working out it’s an image before the whole thing is cracked. Depending how advanced their computers are, it could take milliseconds or years.
Assume it’s a civilization with the ability to see and hear, and a history of using advanced machinery – as opposed to, say, a planetwide intelligent fungus that communicates philosophical musings through organic chemical messaging, or armless lizards who communicate complex musical constructions by hissing to each other….
A DVD is obviously a manufactured artifact.
A scanning electron microscope image of a DVD surface obviously shows that it physically holds coded information. The circular layout is apparent.
The only real question is how long it would take them to figure out that the data is audiovisual. Some tracks on a DVD are just encoded in MPEG-2, but most are also encrypted with CSS. It would probably pose an interesting puzzle to a small group of enthusiastic aliens. I imagine if they also had the DVD cover and cover art, giving them a clue to the fact that the disc holds images, they’d be highly motivated to figure it out. MPEG-2 is complicated but it isn’t mind-bendingly complex, either.
They could probably figure out how it stores information, and extract the raw data from it.
But then, in order to play the movie, they’d still need to decrypt and decompress the video data. That’s the tough part, since movie DVDs typically don’t carry the algorithms used to play them, and well-compressed, well-encrypted data looks really random until you apply the right algorithms to it.
In my opinion with sufficiently advanced technology, yes. After a fashion.
They could pretty quickly figure out how information is stored and upload the raw info for analysis. They would then know the size of the file. From there they would, if they are somewhat like us, guess that it probably contains a video.
From there, if determined enough they could probably brute force it to get some kind of comprehensible output. Assuming their AI tools are more advanced than ours, as indicated in the question, this might even be a pretty quick and easy process.
But, without more information I don’t see how they could get it to play as originally intended: I don’t think they could calibrate colour correctly, or playback speed, and probably other details would rely on some guess work as well.
Fun fact: It would be exponentially easier for them to decode a LaserDisc, as they contain a carrier-modulated analogue video signal, rather than the encrypted digital data and file structures of DVD.
It would be even easier if it was a CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) LD, because each track on the disc contains exactly two frames of video. If they could read a single track it would quickly become obvious what the frame format was and then they should be able to at least see a monochrome image. They would be able to tell that there is color encoding, but there are an almost infinite number of ways to decode it, so without any reference material they might think we had purple skin.
So I’m of the opinion that it would be a bit easier for them than most people think. First, you have the physical disk. Assuming it’s not blank on the outside, there will be writing. And if it was a Hollywood movie, there will artwork. If it has the case, there will be even more writing and pictures, enough maybe to give them a clue that it was a moving picture of some sort. And if they were really lucky, maybe even some images of people.
The way DVD are structured, there are separate files including audio. With enough computing power and a little knowledge of human anatomy, they could probably figure out it represents pressure waves (aka sound.)
And if they know it’s a moving image, they could probably figure out there is a series of repeating frames. Now, MPEG is a compressed format, so figuring it out would take time- but an advance civiIation would have access to advance computers and deciphering techniques.
Plus, there are captions and menus and other things that could help explain how the images are structured and generally what they look like.
I think the biggest issue would be how close human and alien sense match. They might be able to decode it, but if their eyes don’t work like ours (or if they don’t have eyes) they would have to translate that it to something their senses could understand.
I think theyd figure out how to get the data off the disk pretty quickly, but knowing what to do with that data and how to interpret it would be extremely difficult. Even more so given they haven’t a clue what form the output is supposed to take. Like, if they knew it was encoded audio visual media they might have a chance, but with no idea what it is they could be trying to figure out how this stream of 1s and 0s communicates a cake recipe.
I think theyd figure out how to get the data off the disk pretty quickly, but knowing what to do with that data and how to interpret it would be extremely difficult. Even more so given they haven’t a clue what form the output is supposed to take. Like, if they knew it was encoded audio visual media they might have a chance, but with no idea what it is they could be trying to figure out how this stream of 1s and 0s communicates a cake recipe.
Right now on earth, there are massive amounts of data from decades ago that are currently inaccessible. We have the tapes and discs and whatnot, but the equipment used to read it is long gone, be it hardware that is no longer exists, or software that is incompatible. Once common fileformats that have been long since superseded a thousand times over. NASA once spent years trying to read their own data from a decade earlier, imagine an amount of data where you have no idea what it is or how to read it.
All this to say, good luck to the aliens holding a copy of Mad Max 2, I’m sure you will like it, but this is going to be a very longterm project, if that means anything in your frame of reference.
Advanced civilization? Man, take the factor of computing improvement between a guy with an abacus and ChatGPT 5, and then add 30 zeros to the end of that. They’d know what it was and be watching that copy of Air Bud 30 seconds after they found it.
Star Trek: Discovery in its fourth season discusses how with active contact, an interlingua could be developed with an alien species that is so unusual that their universal translator could not work for them.
a DVD us just a LP that uses a laser instead of a needle. so it would depend on if they shined a light on the correct side and if they measured the reflection that would get something, they would also have to do break the encoding and then separate that into video and audio tracks then and only then can they get 60 free minutes of AOL dial up internet
Depends on how “alien” the advanced civilization is. The disk might rival the size of their known universe, and the matter that constitutes it may only weakly or partially interact with their own.
Perhaps the myriad of neutrinos that flow silently throughout our cosmos are bits of information. A vast whisper so distant in scope from ourselves that our lives are incapable of grasping it.
I think it’s impossible to answer because we don’t have enough context for the alien. A DVD could be something which is incomprehensible as an artificial object or it could be a technology which is familiar to them just slightly different.
Like imagine for example that the aliens do not have eyes, the whole concept of a DVD would be lost on them.
Comments
Probably not. They might put it under a microscope and see the linear track of what can easily be seen as 1’s and 0’s. Now, how to assemble those into something meaningful is a cosmic longshot.
Reading the raw data: easy. They would easily convert it to a binary sequence.
Doing anything else with that? Highly unlikely. There’s multiple layers of abstraction there.
Even we humans probably wouldn’t be able to do it with enough information lost.
They could probably figure out how to read the data on it but given that it’s encrypted they might have a hard time translating it to a workable video.
I mean they’d figure out the “it’s a digital optical disc” part quickly. Under a microscope it’s a single spiral of tiny pits, so a red-ish laser and a photodiode would give them a clean bitstream.
The hard part is the stack above that. The disc uses specific modulation and error correction, a filesystem, compressed video and audio formats, and most movie DVDs add copy protection.
Guess an advanced lab could reverse engineer all that but it’s a software and math project not a “press play” moment.
For aliens with advanced tech, the DVD would look like a shiny data storage disk.
With spectroscopy + microscopy, they’d see tiny pits arranged in spirals. From there it’s “just” reverse-engineering how those pits encode binary.
But without knowing the file system, encoding, or video standard, it’d take a while. Imagine finding a vinyl record without ever seeing a record player.
They’d eventually get it — but step one would be: “oh, humans stored something shiny again”.
You’d probably get a kick out of reading up on voyagers golden record, especially the part with instructions for how to play the record!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Voyager_Golden_Record_Cover_Explanation.svg
If it’s advanced then yeah it would be obvious. They would have advanced from analog to yes/no gates and then understood it was an abstraction. And it’s safe to assume they developed the ability to see light the same way and would understand the analogy
Let’s say you know English… written and spoken… and that’s the only language anyone on Earth knows. You then find a book with Japanese Kanji characters on it. Nothing else. Nobody speaks the language. There’s nothing but the characters. There’s no “Rosetta Stone” to bridge from one language to the other. And here you know it’s a language. You would never be able to figure it out.
In the DVD scenario, they don’t know what it is. It could be a coaster, a piece of art, a weapon, something to dig in the ground, a toy, a sports item, a war medal, jewelry, etc….
Impossible. Zero probability. I think there would be essentially no chance they’d even realize it was a “storage” device. I am one of those who is of the mind that aliens, if they exist, will be truly alien, and our thoughts, ideas, and technologies will be mutually incomprehensible. Not just more or less advanced…of a different nature entirely.
semi related – there was a show on youtubes called earthling cinema where an alien from the future analyzed an ancient earth artifact. he did extremely good summaries and analysis of themes, but with certain names and details comically flubbed as you’d expect from a large eyebrowed alien
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLghL9V9QTN0hRWpPpyh6T7_V2Nmah6rHj
I still have a breaking bad parody shirt I won from when they did the series. good stuff. rip
Yea, I think they would. If they are at least mathematically equally advanced as ourselves, they could look at the disk at magnification and figure out it’s optically encoded. Once they have a bit stream, it would become fairly obvious that it’s digital. A base 2 counting system falls out of that naturally. Without a shared unit of time, which is arbitrary, and a shared unit of byte length, which is also arbitrary, they would likely have some further challenges decoding the rest.
I think a CD with just audio on it would be rather trivial. Regardless of the sample or bit rate, you can still see it’s a waveform when plotted on two axis. Applying FFT would get you a spectrum that would make that even more obvious. I don’t know enough about DVD format to speculate about how difficult it would be to reverse engineer if you don’t know anything else about us.
Aliens would probably look at it like “cute, tiny flying saucers. How do we make it spin and vomit magic lights?” then give up and start tiktok instead
It depends how advanced. Maybe they’re so advanced they throw it in a machine and it tells them exactly what it is and how to use it.
If they can also get their hands on the description of MPEG-2 encoding, it would be realistic. Just figuring out the encoding from raw data – unlikely.
I don’t reckon it’d be much of a challenge for a race who’ve mastered inter-planetary travel
Probably pretty difficult without any other information about human technology.
There are plenty of artifacts from ancient human societies that have writing on them that we have no idea what they say, and there are even things written as late as the 16th century that we can’t decipher. It would effectively be akin to that.
Very doubtful. I doubt most of humanity past or future couldn’t do it without the rainbow. I was involved with early CD-ROM and CD-I authoring. It’s pretty intense.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Books
Ask AI to figure it out.
They’d probably use it as a coaster before anything else
I would say it would be impossible. There are human languages that we can’t decipher, and we share a common set of experiences.
They might determine that it’s a data device with a string of 1s and 0s. But where are those broken to make numbers. What would the numbers even mean to them. How would they convert them to colored pixels and the from pixels to line and lines to pictures.
I would expect that any true “AI” (not the goofy LLM’s we have now, they just guess statistical outcomes based on training data, over and over and over again, really really fast), would probably see the binary patterns right off. Then it would try and figure out the actual ‘base’ of the numeric system (which in most of our datasets is hexadecimal). At that point, it’s just sifting the patterns to figure out the codecs involved, which tracks are audio waveforms, which are digitized image sequences (index frames = full pictures, progressive frames = changes from the previous i-frame + successive P-frames).
There is a crypto layer in there too, which a quantum computing system could probably crack really quickly – most encryption is based on prime number factoring, primes being true no matter what numbering base you use, they don’t change just because you count on 10 fingers or on sixteen. It’s hard for us to crack existing crypto without knowing the ‘keys’ because of our current computer architecture, it can’t sift primes all that quickly past the ‘known’ list, whereas quantum systems could manage that via transforms and imaginary numbers, rather than brute force testing of integer after integer ad infinitum.
The real question would be, if an alien species communicates via other media besides sight and sound, how would they translate an audiovisual experience into their method of speaking or relating? A race of telepaths, using thoughts/brainwaves to ‘sync up,’ might not even NEED a sensory language at all. This means tech that relies on sensory organs to convey concepts and language would be useless to them – it would be like us trying to tell a story based on smell alone. Our sense of smell still -works- but it has atrophied because our eyes and our ears are our main conduits for percieving the world AND relating to it.
The movie “Arrival” (which is an amazing story about communication in general, much less “speaking with aliens”) goes down another rabbit hole. We percieve time as linear and set, we’re stuck within it like a rollercoaster on a track, all we can do is remember what came before and anticipate what we see coming. Spoiler alert: >!The heptapods see Time en entire, they’re able to step their cognition outside of it, and the means to do this is their language.!<
Makes me think of the old SF story, Pictures Don’t Lie – though in that case it was Television transmissions.
If the disk is encrypted, which commercial ones are, that’s going to make it much harder. Unencrypted, maybe yes even if they are at our same level of technology but one of our biggest unknowns is the alien part of the equation. What will alien intelligence be like ignoring probable physiological differences?
I asked Gemini your question (strangely didn’t mention encryption!). It did bring up multiple other issues including a non obvious one – DVDs are not perfect (which is why there is error correction at a very low level in the first place). So basically noise in the “signal”. But maybe precisely because of this figuring out solomon-reed ECC might actually be easier?
UDF might kind of be easy to figure out and you might not really need to at first – just find the right places to start.
The various compression schemes are kind tough. Certainly they would know about Huffman encoding and stuff like LZ77/78 but MPEG-2 is kind of sophisticated and lossy according to human physiology. Dolby sound – likely the same.
Maybe the right question is not so much if but how long? I think they would be kind of interested in figuring it out and it would be something they would be interested in solving – assuming they value figuring stuff out. As they progress technologically, it might get easier. A biologically inspired super computer although not really practical for an interactive system can try out lots of things and could be left running for years.
Imagine aliens sending us their probe with a weird crystal brick. How long would it take us to figure it out?
I guess they would go shopping to get the dvd player
7
It would only take a microscope to work out how it should be read. So it would be trivially easy to get the raw bits from it.
Working out the encoding with no idea of what the end result should look like would be less easy. So, it depends just how ‘advanced’ they are. But a supercomputer and some machine learning would be able to try lots of methods. It only has to get to the point of decoding one frame and working out it’s an image before the whole thing is cracked. Depending how advanced their computers are, it could take milliseconds or years.
78 minutes
Assume it’s a civilization with the ability to see and hear, and a history of using advanced machinery – as opposed to, say, a planetwide intelligent fungus that communicates philosophical musings through organic chemical messaging, or armless lizards who communicate complex musical constructions by hissing to each other….
A DVD is obviously a manufactured artifact.
A scanning electron microscope image of a DVD surface obviously shows that it physically holds coded information. The circular layout is apparent.
The only real question is how long it would take them to figure out that the data is audiovisual. Some tracks on a DVD are just encoded in MPEG-2, but most are also encrypted with CSS. It would probably pose an interesting puzzle to a small group of enthusiastic aliens. I imagine if they also had the DVD cover and cover art, giving them a clue to the fact that the disc holds images, they’d be highly motivated to figure it out. MPEG-2 is complicated but it isn’t mind-bendingly complex, either.
They could probably figure out how it stores information, and extract the raw data from it.
But then, in order to play the movie, they’d still need to decrypt and decompress the video data. That’s the tough part, since movie DVDs typically don’t carry the algorithms used to play them, and well-compressed, well-encrypted data looks really random until you apply the right algorithms to it.
In my opinion with sufficiently advanced technology, yes. After a fashion.
They could pretty quickly figure out how information is stored and upload the raw info for analysis. They would then know the size of the file. From there they would, if they are somewhat like us, guess that it probably contains a video.
From there, if determined enough they could probably brute force it to get some kind of comprehensible output. Assuming their AI tools are more advanced than ours, as indicated in the question, this might even be a pretty quick and easy process.
But, without more information I don’t see how they could get it to play as originally intended: I don’t think they could calibrate colour correctly, or playback speed, and probably other details would rely on some guess work as well.
They could just google it🪄
They would probably have no idea what it was so they would just trash it
Fun fact: It would be exponentially easier for them to decode a LaserDisc, as they contain a carrier-modulated analogue video signal, rather than the encrypted digital data and file structures of DVD.
It would be even easier if it was a CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) LD, because each track on the disc contains exactly two frames of video. If they could read a single track it would quickly become obvious what the frame format was and then they should be able to at least see a monochrome image. They would be able to tell that there is color encoding, but there are an almost infinite number of ways to decode it, so without any reference material they might think we had purple skin.
So I’m of the opinion that it would be a bit easier for them than most people think. First, you have the physical disk. Assuming it’s not blank on the outside, there will be writing. And if it was a Hollywood movie, there will artwork. If it has the case, there will be even more writing and pictures, enough maybe to give them a clue that it was a moving picture of some sort. And if they were really lucky, maybe even some images of people.
The way DVD are structured, there are separate files including audio. With enough computing power and a little knowledge of human anatomy, they could probably figure out it represents pressure waves (aka sound.)
And if they know it’s a moving image, they could probably figure out there is a series of repeating frames. Now, MPEG is a compressed format, so figuring it out would take time- but an advance civiIation would have access to advance computers and deciphering techniques.
Plus, there are captions and menus and other things that could help explain how the images are structured and generally what they look like.
I think the biggest issue would be how close human and alien sense match. They might be able to decode it, but if their eyes don’t work like ours (or if they don’t have eyes) they would have to translate that it to something their senses could understand.
I think theyd figure out how to get the data off the disk pretty quickly, but knowing what to do with that data and how to interpret it would be extremely difficult. Even more so given they haven’t a clue what form the output is supposed to take. Like, if they knew it was encoded audio visual media they might have a chance, but with no idea what it is they could be trying to figure out how this stream of 1s and 0s communicates a cake recipe.
I think theyd figure out how to get the data off the disk pretty quickly, but knowing what to do with that data and how to interpret it would be extremely difficult. Even more so given they haven’t a clue what form the output is supposed to take. Like, if they knew it was encoded audio visual media they might have a chance, but with no idea what it is they could be trying to figure out how this stream of 1s and 0s communicates a cake recipe.
Right now on earth, there are massive amounts of data from decades ago that are currently inaccessible. We have the tapes and discs and whatnot, but the equipment used to read it is long gone, be it hardware that is no longer exists, or software that is incompatible. Once common fileformats that have been long since superseded a thousand times over. NASA once spent years trying to read their own data from a decade earlier, imagine an amount of data where you have no idea what it is or how to read it.
All this to say, good luck to the aliens holding a copy of Mad Max 2, I’m sure you will like it, but this is going to be a very longterm project, if that means anything in your frame of reference.
Advanced civilization? Man, take the factor of computing improvement between a guy with an abacus and ChatGPT 5, and then add 30 zeros to the end of that. They’d know what it was and be watching that copy of Air Bud 30 seconds after they found it.
It all depends if they have a DVD player on their spaceship or not.
Star Trek: Discovery in its fourth season discusses how with active contact, an interlingua could be developed with an alien species that is so unusual that their universal translator could not work for them.
1 dvd is not enough, but if they get a shipping container full of CDs and DVDs with multiple examples probably something could be done
a DVD us just a LP that uses a laser instead of a needle. so it would depend on if they shined a light on the correct side and if they measured the reflection that would get something, they would also have to do break the encoding and then separate that into video and audio tracks then and only then can they get 60 free minutes of AOL dial up internet
Depends on how “alien” the advanced civilization is. The disk might rival the size of their known universe, and the matter that constitutes it may only weakly or partially interact with their own.
Perhaps the myriad of neutrinos that flow silently throughout our cosmos are bits of information. A vast whisper so distant in scope from ourselves that our lives are incapable of grasping it.
I think it’s impossible to answer because we don’t have enough context for the alien. A DVD could be something which is incomprehensible as an artificial object or it could be a technology which is familiar to them just slightly different.
Like imagine for example that the aliens do not have eyes, the whole concept of a DVD would be lost on them.