A tool for burning visible pictures on a compact disc surface (2022)(github.com)
github.com
A tool for burning visible pictures on a compact disc surface (2022)
https://github.com/arduinocelentano/cdimage
63 comments
Back in the day, there was a Yamaha burner with a feature called "DiscT@2". It could burn images and text onto the unused area of a CD-ROM. I just had to get it and did so, and I had a bit of fun with it.
It seemed especially badass when the model number was the CRW-F1, released in 2002.
It was also cool because the activity would blink purple (orange + blue) during writing. This set it apart when blue LEDs were all the rage.
It was also cool because the activity would blink purple (orange + blue) during writing. This set it apart when blue LEDs were all the rage.
I still have mine (in a firewire enclosure)! Last tested the DiscT@2 feature about four years ago, at the time qpxtool had a utility for burning the imagery under Linux.
I still have that particular Yamaha burner (CRW-F1). Besides DiscT@2, which I used to burn all types of useful information, it had really good burn quality. Given I used a good brand, none of the discs had rotted or lost data even after a decade.
Disc rot/substrate oxidation would be a media issue instead of the writer.
Not all writers can write with the same quality to a given media, regardless of its quality. While lower quality media rots even if it's stored correctly, I found out that lower quality writes to higher quality media generates more read errors down the road, due to different readers' characteristics.
i.e. You can always read the disc you have burned with the original burner, but it's not guaranteed to be read by a future drive without errors or serious retrying in some sectors. Only three writers I had (HP 9100i, Yamaha CRF-F1, and a Samsung DVD writer with Lightscribe support) made high quality burns which can be read at full speed by anything which came before and after them, regardless of the media age.
i.e. You can always read the disc you have burned with the original burner, but it's not guaranteed to be read by a future drive without errors or serious retrying in some sectors. Only three writers I had (HP 9100i, Yamaha CRF-F1, and a Samsung DVD writer with Lightscribe support) made high quality burns which can be read at full speed by anything which came before and after them, regardless of the media age.
Same. I had one of these in ‘98/‘99. The disc didn’t even go into a standard tray—-you had to use a caddy that completely enveloped the disc.
any idea what the caddy did?
some sort of feedback for rotation angle maybe?
some sort of feedback for rotation angle maybe?
Caddies were fairly common in early CD-ROM drives. Tray-loading (and, even later, slot-loading) drives were a later development.
One theory I've seen is that caddies were developed in part to protect valuable data CDs from accidental damage, and faded in popularity as software became more affordable. Early multimedia software could be quite expensive, with some titles running into the hundreds of dollars.
One theory I've seen is that caddies were developed in part to protect valuable data CDs from accidental damage, and faded in popularity as software became more affordable. Early multimedia software could be quite expensive, with some titles running into the hundreds of dollars.
Discs always used to be in cases/sleeves. The caddies were a natural extension of that same metaphor.
5-1/2: "floppy" plastic outer shell with a rectangle cutout across the disc, and a circle cutout so the disc could be squeezed/grabbed and then rotated. Stored in a paper sleeve to protect from scratching, all those were usually in a plastic case that held 10-100.
3-1/2: hard outer shell, metal exposed ring/hook in the middle, spring-closing door to protect from scratching. These had gone from ~360kb to 1.44mb (4x increase) and space hadn't bloated out yet. They were durable enough not to bend, and the protective door meant it was semi-dust/sand-proof.
Then along came CD'd... jewel cases, but you're carefully handling the actual media (ie: that magnetic disc/vinyl "record" from within the 5-1/2 floppy).
Caddies gave you the feel and protection of the 3-1/2 hard case disks, and were actually pretty useful if you had like a 6-CD encyclopedia set (eg: Encarta 2003 - https://news.microsoft.com/source/2002/06/27/microsoft-encar...).
You'd generally install a 50-100MB program and have to swap CD's depending on what program you had open (or what it was asking for). Even! There were IIRC 3-disc changer drives (like car audio) where you could load up a cartridge and switch (slowly) between discs 1, 2, and 3.
In some cases they were really useful! We had one with like a 20-slot Rolodex style storage box and you could load up the caddies (and type labels!) and keep the optical media safe from grubby kid's hands.
Zork, Myst, 7th Guest, Encarta, Clip Art bundles, font bundles... at a time when Nintendo was the contemporaneous technology, switching "cartridges" to whatever you were working on was an incredibly efficient use of space and money compared to how expensive hard drives were!
5-1/2: "floppy" plastic outer shell with a rectangle cutout across the disc, and a circle cutout so the disc could be squeezed/grabbed and then rotated. Stored in a paper sleeve to protect from scratching, all those were usually in a plastic case that held 10-100.
3-1/2: hard outer shell, metal exposed ring/hook in the middle, spring-closing door to protect from scratching. These had gone from ~360kb to 1.44mb (4x increase) and space hadn't bloated out yet. They were durable enough not to bend, and the protective door meant it was semi-dust/sand-proof.
Then along came CD'd... jewel cases, but you're carefully handling the actual media (ie: that magnetic disc/vinyl "record" from within the 5-1/2 floppy).
Caddies gave you the feel and protection of the 3-1/2 hard case disks, and were actually pretty useful if you had like a 6-CD encyclopedia set (eg: Encarta 2003 - https://news.microsoft.com/source/2002/06/27/microsoft-encar...).
You'd generally install a 50-100MB program and have to swap CD's depending on what program you had open (or what it was asking for). Even! There were IIRC 3-disc changer drives (like car audio) where you could load up a cartridge and switch (slowly) between discs 1, 2, and 3.
In some cases they were really useful! We had one with like a 20-slot Rolodex style storage box and you could load up the caddies (and type labels!) and keep the optical media safe from grubby kid's hands.
Zork, Myst, 7th Guest, Encarta, Clip Art bundles, font bundles... at a time when Nintendo was the contemporaneous technology, switching "cartridges" to whatever you were working on was an incredibly efficient use of space and money compared to how expensive hard drives were!
The caddies were just a simple loading mechanism, with a spring door like a floppy disc. I suspect they had the life they did because someone was hoping that we would all buy ultra-expensive caddies for our collections instead of moving discs in and out of cases.
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I fondly remember LightScribe, that was a pretty awesome technology.
I was going to say, I still have a 5 pack of Lightscribe DVDs unopened in a box specifically to save something "special" but obviously nothing has ever been special enough to warrant using them. And now that they aren't made anymore it would feel downright sacrilegious to use them, not to mention 4.7GB of capacity is just not enough for anything nowadays really.
4.7GB is quite enough for a standalone Linux DVD (for devices that still have DVD drives). Plus some cool art.
Might be a good idea to preserve a known-working distro for some old PC, especially for discontinued or less-used architectures. Just saw a discussion the other day about finding 32-bit Debian for an old laptop.
Might be a good idea to preserve a known-working distro for some old PC, especially for discontinued or less-used architectures. Just saw a discussion the other day about finding 32-bit Debian for an old laptop.
> preserve
I don't know how it ended up with later generations, but all the CD-R and DVD-R discs that I thought I had archived everything on became entirely unreadable after something around 7 to 8 years.
I don't know how it ended up with later generations, but all the CD-R and DVD-R discs that I thought I had archived everything on became entirely unreadable after something around 7 to 8 years.
Yeah! I have had that exact same feeling! The one I remember burning the most was a collection of photos and movies of my family. I printed across the disc a photo of everyone. It was just so cool, even in black and white, but I always held back because they were a little expensive, and I wanted to save them for something really special! Had they been the same price as other discs.. I think I would have used them more.
Someone would probably buy them on eBay for a good price.
There are definitely people that collect older media for use in the retro setups.
I constantly buy New Old Stock when I find Floppies, Mini Disc, Cassettes, Zip Disks, hell just about anything. We're a weird bunch of collectors but we're out there.
Somebody here is going to be very rich one day, just safeguard them against elements
Looks like you can still buy 10-packs on eBay for £15, not really collectible yet it seems :-)
Still have a few of those knocking around. USB is just not the same
I gave this a go about 3 years ago when the hackday project[1] first got published, it turns out choosing the parameters is _very_ disc dependent, since every disc is a little bit different (possibly even between lots of the same type, not published anywhere, and quite sensitive. I got it working for the CD-R's I got, but it took ~50 experiments to get ok parameters (the image was pretty good, but still wobbly in some areas of the disc).
That said, the end result is pretty cool, if hard to photograph.
[1] https://hackaday.io/project/186303-burning-pictures-on-a-com...
That said, the end result is pretty cool, if hard to photograph.
[1] https://hackaday.io/project/186303-burning-pictures-on-a-com...
It’s a slightly more involved project, but tmbinc managed to write arbitrary pictures to a DVD surface:
https://debugmo.de/2022/05/fjita-the-project-that-wasnt-mean...
https://debugmo.de/2022/05/fjita-the-project-that-wasnt-mean...
Cool idea. Like a more accessible version of lightscribe. (if you use a dual-sided disc)
I assume this isn't possible with a DVD/bluray due to the much much smaller pits.
I assume this isn't possible with a DVD/bluray due to the much much smaller pits.
> I assume this isn't possible with a DVD/bluray due to the much much smaller pits.
Or, you know, higher resolution images.
Or, you know, higher resolution images.
I suppose these shapes could be made incredibly detailed. There must be some kind of application for that.
Its basically a bespoke diffraction grating printer, indeed. So, you could probably print holographic images?
This github issue mentions a paper about holographic images on a DVD: https://github.com/arduinocelentano/cdimage/issues/14
But I can't actually imagine what it would look like. Sounds amazing though!
But I can't actually imagine what it would look like. Sounds amazing though!
30+ years of computer and I had no idea you could do this.
These are the kind of things I get excited about!
Congrats to the author - a few decades ago I attempted the same, with very little success (using data tracks, not audio, which might have been my mistake).
The challenge (as I saw it) was that the drive has the option to toggle the state of the laser every sector, effectively letting it invert all your data if it wants to. To have control of the laser state, you need to be able to do perfect predictions if the drive will toggle or not.
Any unpredicted bit leads to the laser state toggling and the image being ruined.
The challenge (as I saw it) was that the drive has the option to toggle the state of the laser every sector, effectively letting it invert all your data if it wants to. To have control of the laser state, you need to be able to do perfect predictions if the drive will toggle or not.
Any unpredicted bit leads to the laser state toggling and the image being ruined.
Assuming control of the decision to toggle, could that be used to draw something even while burning useful data? Of course you would have very low precision, but still. Maybe an outline or something.
Yes. You get the option to toggle the laser every 33 bytes, which is a lot of controllable toggles to make cool patterns.
I love the Github username!
I gather it's a reference to the pop singer Adriano Celentano?
Ol rait!
Parent is referring to an entertaining music video where the Italian singer made a song of nonsense words that sounds like English to non-English speakers:
Starts at 1:40
https://youtube.com/watch?v=v5VpczwrSCc
Starts at 1:40
https://youtube.com/watch?v=v5VpczwrSCc
Can you encode holograms, similar to scratch holograms?
Oh wow, the readme to one of the mentioned projects is in KOI8. It's been decades since I last saw that encoding used.
If only this existed 15 years ago when I got rid of my burners.
It did! I remember playing with 'Disc T@2' when I was a kid. I had a lightscribe then too, so I put pictures on both sides
After many years without an optical drive in my home, I bought an external one within the last year or so. It's one of those things that occasionally comes up, and is useful to have around, and I figured the longer I waited the more difficult it would become to find a decent one.
Optical media is unmatched for archival purposes. I have photos, videos, and documents I'd be devastated to lose. I simply cannot trust magnetic or solid-state storage over the long term.
Luckily blurays are still somewhat cheap in Japan so I stock up when I visit. Stored properly they should outlive me.
Luckily blurays are still somewhat cheap in Japan so I stock up when I visit. Stored properly they should outlive me.
If you care about your data, you need to have a regular process where you check the copies and remake them from time to time.
Hopefully some of the copies live on after your death. Optical does well, but I've seen reasonably treated cd-rs degrade, and well treated pressed cds decay. Sometimes some mistake in production takes years to become apparent, but results in a fixed lifetime below the estimates.
Hopefully some of the copies live on after your death. Optical does well, but I've seen reasonably treated cd-rs degrade, and well treated pressed cds decay. Sometimes some mistake in production takes years to become apparent, but results in a fixed lifetime below the estimates.
I have so many CDs/DVDs that cannot be read anymore that I stopped using them for backups.
Regular optical media can suffer corrosion of the aluminium reflector layer, and breakdown of the dye. Sure, they do make archival grade discs (e.g. with a gold layer) but they're expensive.
I still use my bluray to rip audio CDs... Pretty oldschool but with navidrome and audiobookshelf it is a pretty solid workflow...
See https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/
See https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/
I don't even remember if the CD/DVD drive I have in my desktop is a writer or not. I distinctly remember purchasing one about a decade ago, but I think I was looking for an external one.
Hell, I'm not even sure if it's plugged in at the moment, I may have unplugged it to plug in another hard drive...
Hell, I'm not even sure if it's plugged in at the moment, I may have unplugged it to plug in another hard drive...
I had a DVD Burner in my self build PC and discovered a year ago that it wasn’t plugged in and that it must have been like this for years. That was the moment I decided it’s time to remove it.
Can it still hold data?
But a multisession disc with this technique should be possible, using a data track and then the rest as "picture audio."
Technically CDA allowed tracks in the “negative time”. So you could probably burn everything there and then have a short track on the “normal” time for an actual song. Cool CD single?
+1 for the GitHub user name :)
LightScribe reinvented?
No. It is reinventing DiscT@2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DiscT@2
Right. See [1]
It was really slow, but it did work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightScribe
It was really slow, but it did work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightScribe