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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI A tool for burning visible pictures on a compact disc surface
danjc wrote 1 hour 38 min ago:
It would be awesome if you could encode data using this technique
bestham wrote 1 hour 27 min ago:
Just burn a QR-code.
ungawatkt wrote 1 hour 55 min ago:
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.
URI [1]: https://hackaday.io/project/186303-burning-pictures-on-a-compa...
eahm wrote 2 hours 16 min ago:
30+ years of computer and I had no idea you could do this.
These are the kind of things I get excited about!
londons_explore wrote 4 hours 59 min ago:
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.
lucianbr wrote 4 hours 49 min ago:
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.
grishka wrote 5 hours 3 min ago:
Oh wow, the readme to one of the mentioned projects is in KOI8. It's
been decades since I last saw that encoding used.
ziofill wrote 5 hours 39 min ago:
+1 for the GitHub user name :)
amelius wrote 5 hours 40 min ago:
Can it still hold data?
_def wrote 5 hours 37 min ago:
I assume no
URI [1]: https://github.com/arduinocelentano/cdimage/issues/16
meindnoch wrote 6 hours 13 min ago:
LightScribe reinvented?
Animats wrote 4 hours 19 min ago:
Right. See [1] It was really slow, but it did work.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightScribe
HPsquared wrote 7 hours 22 min ago:
I suppose these shapes could be made incredibly detailed. There must be
some kind of application for that.
isoprophlex wrote 6 hours 49 min ago:
Its basically a bespoke diffraction grating printer, indeed. So, you
could probably print holographic images?
_def wrote 5 hours 35 min ago:
This github issue mentions a paper about holographic images on a
DVD: [1] But I can't actually imagine what it would look like.
Sounds amazing though!
URI [1]: https://github.com/arduinocelentano/cdimage/issues/14
Cockbrand wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
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.
m-s-y wrote 6 hours 59 min ago:
Same. I had one of these in â98/â99. The disc didnât even go
into a standard trayâ-you had to use a caddy that completely
enveloped the disc.
4rt wrote 3 hours 20 min ago:
any idea what the caddy did?
some sort of feedback for rotation angle maybe?
duskwuff wrote 16 min ago:
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.
chaboud wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
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.
xattt wrote 7 hours 1 min ago:
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.
jonah-archive wrote 2 hours 18 min ago:
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.
axoltl wrote 8 hours 2 min ago:
Itâs a slightly more involved project, but tmbinc managed to write
arbitrary pictures to a DVD surface:
URI [1]: https://debugmo.de/2022/05/fjita-the-project-that-wasnt-meant-...
Molitor5901 wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
I fondly remember LightScribe, that was a pretty awesome technology.
gambiting wrote 6 hours 59 min ago:
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.
yaky wrote 1 hour 8 min ago:
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.
layer8 wrote 6 hours 58 min ago:
Someone would probably buy them on eBay for a good price.
gambiting wrote 6 hours 1 min ago:
Looks like you can still buy 10-packs on eBay for £15, not
really collectible yet it seems :-)
ganoushoreilly wrote 6 hours 42 min ago:
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.
zapp42 wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
I love the Github username!
thomassmith65 wrote 6 hours 13 min ago:
I gather it's a reference to the pop singer Adriano Celentano?
myself248 wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
Ol rait!
extraduder_ire wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
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.
globular-toast wrote 8 hours 47 min ago:
If only this existed 15 years ago when I got rid of my burners.
mystified5016 wrote 7 hours 39 min ago:
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
al_borland wrote 8 hours 5 min ago:
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.
valianteffort wrote 7 hours 53 min ago:
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.
HPsquared wrote 7 hours 20 min ago:
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.
Milpotel wrote 7 hours 37 min ago:
I have so many CDs/DVDs that cannot be read anymore that I
stopped using them for backups.
gambiting wrote 6 hours 57 min ago:
Blu rays are meant to be like the old M-Discs and they should
last ages. I've been burning my archives to BDXL discs for
years and never had any issues reading them back.
toast0 wrote 7 hours 44 min ago:
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.
sandreas wrote 8 hours 25 min ago:
I still use my bluray to rip audio CDs... Pretty oldschool but with
navidrome and audiobookshelf it is a pretty solid workflow...
See
URI [1]: https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/
pavel_lishin wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
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...
lhoff wrote 8 hours 38 min ago:
I had a DVD Burner in my self build PC and discovered a year ago
that it wasnât plugged in and that it must have been like this
for years. That was the moment I decided itâs time to remove it.
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