Slashdot Mirror

http://www.cdfreaks.com/
http://www.cdrinfo.com/
http://www.cdrlabs.com/

Reviews from people that actually understand the tech and know how to test it. Beware though, you wont get simple answers like "This one is best, buy it".

Okay but how does this help me when I go to buy a CD or DVD-r. The stores don't list those.

You must not have visited the media forum in a long time. Ritek, especially the G05, is considered junk by most.

Here is a poll currently on Cdfreaks, regading manufacturers (DVD) quality. You will see that Ritek is highly favored (third place) . And here is another comprehensive test site that ranks Ritek among the best possible, and Ridata (also made by ritek) among the poorest for DVD media.

this is not to say that I don't doubt you when you say ritek has a bad reptuation. But I do doubt that you could learn that from reading CDfreaks. In fact I cant' even find a bad review of Ritek on the web except possibly on places like Epionions and in regard to their cheapest ten cent disks. Cdfreaks It's a confused jumble of on weighted uncurated information with almost no value since it focuses on positive experience and annecdote not on negative experiences and metrics.

I'd also like to see a site reviewing the quality of media for CD-R and DVD-R. The thing I care about is not speed, but reliability. And the Media may affect that more than the burner itself. There's a wide variety of prices on media but nothing to really guide you on quality and longevity.

Well, go to http://www.cdfreaks.com/ or forums at http://club.cdfreaks.com/ You'll find more than you want to know about drives and media.

Well, go to http://www.cdfreaks.com/ or forums at http://club.cdfreaks.com/ You'll find more than you want to know about drives and media.

I found an article about tages which explains how it works quite nicely (infact its the discussion where the protection is essentially given an autopsy).
Theres enough info there to understand the way it works.

Have a read of it

Its all about how the disk is corrupted by having 2 index links on the disk both point at a a sector with the same identifier, but that when the disc head is travelling in one direction (as the disc rippers do) it misses completely the data hidden in the duplicated sector.
The only way to find the duplicated sector is to read the disc backwards.
Doing a diff on the 2 images will identify the hidden data.

(at least it sounds reasonable...)

Then again, ALL of them have been defeated so is there any point in being the one that took the most time?

Is TAGES however friendlier to the paying customer? Since none of the copy protections systems work the only thing that can be hoped for is that they inconvenience the paying customer as little as possible.

Offcourse no copy protection at all would be the easiest way not to upset paying customers but lets not get silly shall we? The paying customers must be hurt to pay for the pirates!

I say we whip all airline passengers to punish them for drug smugglers, you know it makes sense.

The XBox and PS2 lacked any way to run pirated games without hardware modifications.

Oh, really?

Rob

Anyway, I don't have a big problem with them finding legitimate counterfeit disks, indications of mass piracy for profit. There's an easier solution, a few nations specialise in that trade, the authorities know who they are. Stop trade with them, cut it off.

Great idea. You would only have to cut off trade with two countries to eliminate 30% of world movie piracy.

From the link:
"The U.S. currently leads with about $1.311 billion lost to piracy. Despite all the hype about piracy in China, Russia and several other of the world's most notorious pirate markets, Mexico actually turns out the 2nd worst with $483 million lost to piracy."

I agree with the rest of your post however and I think that the quote above shows some of the consequences of trying to force people to trade scotch for dirt.

Good point.

Ahhh... except for the fact that someone else has already pointed out that they have already formed a separate label for themselves... and except for the fact every single Canadian company has already QUIT the Canadian Recording Industry Association. Yes, the Canadian-CRIA membership consists of nothing except wholly owned subsidiarys of the US Big Four RIAA companies. The Canadian-CRIA is an effec a wholly owned subsidiary of the US-RIAA.

-

Hell, are they giving back the money they received from the CRIA for the CDR-levies? Or removed themselves from the CRIA altogether? That's not clear either.

There ARE NO Canadian companies in the so-called Canadian Recording Industry Association!

ALL of the Canadian companies have pulled out completely. The only current members of the so-called Canadian Recording Industry Association are wholly owned subsidiaries ofthe Big Four US RIAA. The CRIA is in reality wholled owned subsidiary of the RIAA.

-

Well here in Moscow, Russia where we have a well established pirate market that rivals the kremlin in popularity among expats. Vast majority of the DVD are region free. This people are pros, so they almost always author the DVD and add regional extras. I sometimes borrow legal DVD from my friends, they seem so horibble compared to the pirated once which are easy to use and contain no additional blocks/locks. But it's pretty easy to rip a DVD and rebuild, just usedoom9.org forums. And I think patched firmwares isn't as hard as some of the people in this thread make it seem. For instance, I have a NEC drive and I found a perfect page for patched NEC firmware. http://liggydee.cdfreaks.com/page/ I am sure that similar collections exist for other producers/brands. They might even be on cdfreaks.com itself.

A good summary of the CNet study is at http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/13193.

The Slashdot headline/summary is a little misleading. The test showed that Apple's FairPlay DRM caused about an 8% battery life penalty. It was the Zen Micro with the WMA DRM that caused a 25% drop in battery life. In this case, (if you HAVE to have DRM'd music), it seems Apple's scheme is the way to go.

Some people have raised the issue that they compared 192kbps WMA files with 128kbps AAC (i.e. iTMS) files. AAC, in general, sounds pretty good at 128kbps. (Geek Disclosure Time): I've run a few double-blind, multi-listener tests, and most people put 128 AAC about equal with 192 MP3 (constant bitrate). I have no idea whether 192 WMA is overkill - if that's what Napster provides, well, I'm assuming that's comparable sound quality.

I'm not an engineer, so I can't say whether or not the bitrate difference could reasonably account for that great a difference in battery drain. I will, however, note that if you choose to use a less-efficient codec, that's your fault.

... And here's how !

http://www.cdfreaks.com/news2.php?ID=12115

The ones that the dye wore out on were in cases and not kept in a car. They had several transparent spots on them and were unplayable. If you doubt CD rot to be a real phenomena, check out this article from cd freaks. The small image in the article looks like what became of several of my CDs, mainly those from 1985-1990.

Hopefully we can trust the newer dyes like Azo, but when the CDs of the 1980s came out, they said they'd last one hundred years.

Sony currently uses Lite-On as the OEM for most of their DVD drives (some older ones are Ricohs; and a few are even Sonys). I suppose this means that they won't be doing so for much longer.

Looks like CDFreaks will have to rename their Lite-On/Sony Drive Forum soon.

Why? The DRM difference between HD-DVD and Blu-ray is down to almost nothing. Except for that little difference, Blu-ray wins hands down on everything.

As far as I've been able to deduce, the DRM difference is this: When you publish content on HD-DVD you _must_ include managed copying. However (and this is the catch!) you're free to charge whatever you want for it.

With Blu-ray you (the content publisher) deside for yourself whether you want to include managed copy or not.

In reality I'm quite sure the end customer won't see a difference. If the publisher doesn't want managed copying they'll opt out of it on Blu-ray and make it extremely expensive on HD-DVD.

more info

Already been done.

http://www.cdfreaks.com/news2.php?ID=12115

http://www.google.com/search?q=dvi+hdcp+spatz&sour ceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=ut f-8&client=firefox&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:unofficia l

Here are a few. Searched on "Windows Vista and Monitor and DRM" http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/12201 http://crn.com/sections/breakingnews/breakingnews. jhtml?articleId=167101066 http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/hd cp-vista.ars

I can't remember all of the details, but I am sure there was a Dutch group who took a sample of all of the available CDs at the time, burnt data onto them, put them in storage for 2 years and then re-tested the disks quality. Their results showed that all of the disks had significant degredation.

OK .. here is a link to a news report of that study

http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/7751 This link includes a link to the original Dutch article

To quote:

"The tests showed that a number of CD-Rs had become completely unreadable while others could only be read back partially. Data that was recorded 20 months ago had become unreadable. These included discs of well known and lesser known manufacturers."

On top of that, consumers should expect punishment for tinkering with their Blu-ray players, as many have done with current DVD players by, in some instances, removing regional coding. The new, Internet-connected and secure players will report any "hack" and the device can be disabled remotely.

I completely agree it's not mine to copy, but it will become mine pretty damned quickly if I scratch it. And I bet I would be charged the full game price as a replacement. Maybe the rental company should have backups. Kind of makes me nervous about renting games now.

This kind of blows a big hole in the *AA's argument that all this copy protection BS is really about preventing piracy. It seems to me that more and more, it's about getting the customer to buy multiple copies of the same content.

This point is even more obvious when you look at the way the Blue-ray copy protection works. If you get even the tiniest scratch on the ROM MARK on the disc, the disc is UNUSABLE. Doesn't matter if the rest of the surface of the disc is pristine, your $30 movie is now worthless. (yes, $30, you know they're going to charge 2x or 3x what a normal DVD costs).

That spells it out pretty clearly. The future is downloaded movies. And music. and games. And no, I'm not talking about DRM'ed ones that you pay for.

...I definitely recommend it, especially if you are a *nix user, as I have encountered no problems at all with it in that respect.

Being able to flash it from Linux was the deciding factor when I bought the NEC ND-3540A. See http://binflash.cdfreaks.com/

Never had the the chance to try it since the drive went dead after less than 4 months, having burned less than 10 discs in total. Perhaps it died from underuse? Well...

--
Regards

If you have a device driver named Sbcphid.sys (which shows up as a hidden non-plug-and-play device named Sbcphid when active), you've got MediaMax and should remove it.

Only the EFF has mentioned MediaMax in the various legal claims against Sony, and Sony has remained silent about it in public as well. Obviously they're not sorry about using DRM at all -- they're just sorry they got caught.

To the best of my knowledge there is still no crack for the Xbox that doesn't involve hardware modification.

Done and done.

It involves getting in through a savegame. I had this done to my XBox; it has something to do with FTPing in and replacing boot files.

Hopefully the new system gets cracked quickly; an XBox with XBox Media Center is very useful!

for the lawyers.

The consumers ( you remember, the people these laws are supposed to protect ), on the otherhand, will likely see loose change for their troubles.

Loose change? They should be so lucky. They'll probably just get lots of unwanted CDs again. Only these will be more unwanted than ever before.

I have quite a lot of data (>800GB and growing) I want to keep for at least twenty years, on a budget. Currently, I am using DVD-R.

I only use Taiyo Yuden DVD-Rs, with a Pioneer 108 DVD-RW drive. Taiyo Yuden invented the original CD-R, and are the only company that still makes discs in Japan. Their discs have excellent quality dye, and provide good quality burns.

When determining how to burn discs, some experimentation is needed. Try different speeds. I have found that a 12x burn gives better quality (i.e. fewer errors, no burn is perfect) than 8x on Taiyo Yuden 8x discs with my burner, but other drives may be different. Try using tools like Nero CD-DVD Speed and DVDInfo to check the number of errors, and that your drive can read the discs at maximum speed all the way to the end. Take a look at the CD Freaks forums, particularly the media tests sub-forum for more info: http://club.cdfreaks.com/

I always create parity data. Parity data, in the form of .PAR2 files, is created by QuickPAR and other tools. Basically, with parity data, if some of your actual data becomes corrupt, you can recover it. I usually create 5% parity data, which means that if 5% of my data becomes corrupt I can still recover it. If 6% becomes corrupt, I'm stuffed. So, for very important stuff, I use 10% or even 25% parity data. Remember to burn the parity data to a different disc, preferably stored in a different place to the disc with the actual data on it.

A note about PAR2 files and DVDs. If your DVD becomes unreadable, i.e. you can't see the filesystem, rip it as an ISO image file. Use a tool that can skip errors, like ISOBuster. Then, use the PAR2 files to try and recover data from it. PAR2 is clever enough to find useful data blocks inside the ISO.

Don't use anything silly like multi-session discs, and make sure your PC can keep up with your burner so that you don't need to rely on "just-link" or whatever they call it. Make sure you verify data after burning (Nero can do this automatically).

Store the discs in a cool, dry place. If you are on a budget, metal "flight case" boxes with CD wallet style holders are a good bet if you keep them in a cupboard out of the light. Don't use flexible wallets. If you have the money, there are commercial storage systems designed for very old books which would probably work well.

Also, be sure to check discs every few years. I generally test a sample of my discs once a year. If any of them show signs of degrading, such as no longer being able to read at maximum speed or high error rates, I re-copy them. My oldest Taiyo Yuden discs are now four and a half years old, and only one (which I may have mishandled) has started to fail so far.

If you are really paranoid, you could keep the parity data on magnetic tape or hard disc. The advantage of only keeping parity data on these more expensive mediums is that it's usually only 5-10% the size of the actual data, which keeps costs down.

It may not always start simple, but invariably they will come. I'm not sure what technical had to come to unify the + and - formats for DVD, but it became more and more common. Will HD-DVD/BR play be more complicated? Undoubtedly. But if all you have to do is come out with a more complex laser head and control chips...?

Like as not, unless the two sides are willing to meet formally--or one is so snowballed by the other that it caves by default--manufacturers will get us to the same situation we have now anyway. People don't really know much about their DVD players, but they get the job done well. (We may get someone sidelined to a small niche like DVD-RAM, but any major format is all wrapped together at this point.)

I doubt this would happen. In the mean time, you can make a safedisc mini-image. I'm currently using it with battlefield 2 and dungeon siege 2.

Riight. Face it, at this point you're pulling shit out of your ass and are arguing that a feature is a negative point when at worst it is a neutral point and at best a positive point.

Common sense defeats your argument so you now you go the route of invective and hand-waving. Excellent defense, Old Boy. How's Mido?

What are the odds that a major media company will go bankrupt but not sell off their assets as part of liquidation? If it got any closer to zero it would be negative ..

You must have a weird definition of asset - the ability to be sued in that class action lawsuit you postulated, that doesn't fit the definition of "asset" used by regular people. It is unlikely to fetch much at an liquidation either.

The whole point of a media center pc is the Tivo-like functionality. Why would you waste your time buying a glorified DVD player? It is pointless for you to deny that the "substantial number" (meaning a number greater than ten) represents a significant percentage.

The fact that you are unaware of other uses for a media pc (note, not a ms-windows branded "media center pc" which is a crippled thing in comparison) pretty much indicates that your level of understanding of the topic is entirely juvenile. Here's a hint - read the htpc forum at avsforum, it gets about 10x more traffic than any other forum there, generally 100+ new threads per day. That's far and away more than your personal anecdote of "absolutely zero." Your ignorance does not support your arguments. Especially since the context is playback from disc, not personal recording.

No, get your troll ass off the seat and prove me wrong. (hint: search for "aacs" and "managed copy", then note about how "support" for this feature is always referenced as something the player does)

1) A disc can't do anything by itself, thus your inference that such wording means the player has some hard-coded phone-home routine is specious
2) AACS is not even finalized yet, so clearly you are just making stuff up, which is why you tried to turn a call to back up your own claims into more shouting and hand-waving.

Get a clue; this isn't a DVD with "pc content" we're talking about. Managed copy is part of the AACS specification (used in HD-DVD & Bluray).

You want to be an ostrich and ignore the risks, go right ahead, but just keep quiet about it because trying to shout down those who can actually think these things through does not help anyone, not even yourself.

Durability

If TDK's hard coat can live up to it's marketing claims, discs provided with the 0.1 mm coating will be even more resistant against damage then current DVDs. The coating is highly scratch resistant and fingerprints can be wiped off to a point where the disc can be read perfectly. This feature will help Blu-ray take an advantage. The negative point is that the coating makes the BD more expensive.

Some consolation, but I feel your pain as well!

Storage capacity

This is a definite plus for Blu-ray. The single and dual layer discs will offer much more capacity than HD-DVDs. Some developments regarding multi-layer BD discs show us that a Blu-ray disc can hold 8 layers. This offers a potential to store up to 200 GB of data, considerably greater than the theoretical 60GB of a possible double-sided, dual layer, HD-DVD. Of course, who knows if the end user will see such medias in the near future, but we know that it is technically possible.

With technology I've found it's often useful not be so short-sighted, thinking only of today. Hope this helps someone!

Hate to break it to you, but HD-DVD has a similar system in place so that isn't "safe" either. Read this.
http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/186/3/

The music industry would like you to pay every time you listen to your CD.

They would also like for pay every time you end up with defective cds .

I would have to say that the saving grace of speech is p2p networks and with that in conjuction with OSS will prevent censorship - don't think it can happen then look what happened to DVD Decrypter.

Everyone who has tried to "sue McDonald's for making them fat" did so just for the "free" publicity. They've all been laughed out of court. You'd have better luck suing Apple for bundling iTunes with their iPod.

Here's another CDFreaks thread that goes into a little more depth. The format is almost certainly CD-BGM, but all the authoring software is years old.

Anyone who makes progress getting this stuff to run, let me know, it'd be great to carry a few "muzak that doesn't suck" CDs in the car at all times, and offer them to repressed workers in such environments. :)

Another discussion on this very topic- includes the potential dip switch settings to get MUZAK equipment to play Red Book CDs.

The previous link led me to suspect Green Book as the format for Muzak. CD-Interactive Spec

CD-I Bridge: A program that reads Green Book Formats

So it looks to me like you have two options- fiddle with the dip switches to find a setting that will allow you to play Red Book CDs, or find a program that allows you to write CD-Interactive Green Book Format discs.

First, you should know that the other companies, such as Cowon (never heard of?) or Iriver (maybe?) doesn't buy something like 10k flashes, they buy MILLIONS of them. Although that's still a lot less than Apple's product, that's still an awful lot of chips. You should know that iPod's market share in Korea is completely disappointing, http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/12253
and companies like iRiver still sells millions of players every year.

The Korean manufacturers claim that Samsung never sell flash memory chips directly to them, no matter how many chips they buy. (unlike Apple, which gets flashes directly from Samsung) Adding an additional layer on sales means more cost. Additionally, they claim that Samsung never ever sells 2Gig chips to any Korean mp3 company, no matter how much they pay. Though I don't know much about Korean law, but they claim that it's against the Korean law (Looks like some antitrust/fair trade bill).

The second problem is that there is a serious flash shortage (probably due to Apple's nano), and many companies (especially smaller ones) claim that they are treated unfairly, compared to the larger corporates.

What the Korean mp3 companies, plus many other people claims is that Samsung's strategey to sell flash chips with near zero margin, or even with loss, is:

1) Kill hard disk companies, such as Toshiba or Hitachi, that sold disks to Apple. Note that Samsung also sells hard disks, and pressurizing competitors HARD will definitely be good for Samsung's hard disk business.

2) Suggest an appealing price to Apple, and lock them to flash-only players,

3) Kill the local mp3 business, and kill competition in Korea. That will help Samsung's mp3 business (plus, the cellphones with mp3 player capability). After all competition is gone, they can deal with Apple by stop providing flash with huge discounts.

Although none of these claims are proven to be true yet, it's clear that the Samsung-Apple deal pressurizes both hard disk manufacturers and mp3 player manufactures.

Personally, I'm glad Apple hasn't shared their FairPlay DRM scheme with the rest of the industry. It shows the RIAA what's like to be on the wrong side of a closed system. Now they know how we feel when we can't rip our songs to MP3s.

Sure. That's why back in late August the first pics and in-Windows screen caps of Nero working with a Pioneer BluRay drive (BDR-101A) were leaked. FWIW, I've never seen pictures of an HD-DVD burner nor any screen caps of it in Windows... [Google for BDR-101A for more articles]

"Proven capacity" is somewhat of a vague term being that HD-DVD hasn't shipped yet, and Blu-ray has only shipped in Japan. Being that now the HD-DVD is delayed till 2006, from the consumers standpoint, nothing has really been proven yet, and for either format it's too early to tell.

As far as costs are concerned, they only talk of manufactering costs which tend to stabilize over time. Certainly, initially, Blu-ray should cost a lot more than HD-DVD if it needs retooling, however once econmies of scale are established manufactering cost tend to plateau, hence while this is short term concern, but perhaps not a long-term one. What isn't talked about however is liceencing cost, the main issue in contention that caused the split was that currently you have to pay the 6C ~4%-10% of the sale price of DVD hardware(depending on the cost of the machine), something that HD-DVD retains, I'm not sure how either format fares but ultimely this will be a massive cost when initial players are expected to cost $500-$1,000(maybe much more than manufactering differences).

Engadget has a great article on this:
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000623059130/

Also, the argument "Support for hybrid discs" is ridiculous. HD-DVD use "flippers" as hybrid disks. i.e. DVD on one-side and HD-DVD on the other (kinda like the old DVDs that had "widescreen" & "fullscreen"). JVC, has developed a Blu-ray disk that is a true hybrid, having a DL-DVD9 and a Blu-ray on one side.

http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/186/4

However, while MS/Intel are big names it seems irrelevant being that they don't actually have any products to market (and XB360 won't have HD-DVD standard; not even an option at this point, maybe a $500 system to fit above their "core" and "Premium" bundles). Only other impact that the deal seems to have is Media Center PCs, but 71% of MediaCenter PCs don't even come with a TV-tuners (which kinda makes the most important feature useless). Windows support can easily be cured w/drivers, and Dell and HP are Blu-ray supporters hence windows PCs from them will likely come with Blu-Ray. Seems to be more a PR-deal. Ultimetely it will be the Studios that decide the winner, and they will at the end choose the format that the consumers are buying.

http://www.mediacenterpcworld.com/news/502

To protect high definition contents from unauthorised duplication, HD-DVD chose the successor of CSS called AACS (Advanced Access Control System), while Blu-ray invented a proprietary algorithm called BD-CPS (although Blu-ray might decide in the end to use AACS too). Quite interestingly, both technologies are very similar, proprietary ciphers and algorithms from CSS have been abandoned for state-of-the-art key exchange, symmetric/asymmetric encryption and hashing algorithms (AES, T-DES, ...).

As someone else has said, that's just a reader. :P

On the other hand, BluRay (BDR) readers/writers will be out pretty damn soon. Here's an article discussing Pioneer's BDR-101A drive:

First look: Pioneer Blu-ray BDR-101A

Be sure to check out the Nero InfoTool screenshots showing the formats it can read and write. :D

Note: the original article link in that forum thread is dead, but there are images/discussion by people who read it. You might also be able to find a cache of the article on Google or Archive.org.

For me, this is a wait and see. It was only this last year I bought a DVD player and DVD-RW. Why? Cheap and they now work. When the CDRW first came out more coasters were made than working images. I know, I made a few coasters but don't have that problem today.

For most of us, we will wait and see. But part of the reason I bought my first DVD-RW was that I could get programs like DVD Decrypter. The only program I know that can burn DVD_ISOs of Linux and Solaris reliably.

That was short lived as the article at http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/11914 will show how this industry is doing.

So this person will opt out until less restrictive and functional tools are available. I will be quite content to let someone else break this in.

Read this fine article. It has six sections, I enjoyed it a lot. Well written, unbiased, and to the point.

Sorry, I did mix up HDMI and HDCP, but my original point stands: you should have no trouble finding a converter that removes HDCP. They're more expensive than the ones that do simple HDMI - DVI, but still cheaper than a new Cinema Display. See: http://www.cdfreaks.com/news2.php?ID=12115

That is why I buy only 'data' grade cd's (oh, and avoid philips of course) you just have to do a little research before you get a burner. Might I suggest a trip over to ---> http://www.cdfreaks.com/ or maybe a little preresearch first ---> http://www.cdrfaq.org/ FragHARD or don't frag at all

The HD-DVD peoples published the specs on their DRM scheme months and months ago.

Meanwhile to counterpart Blu-Ray's "interesting" copy control features, at least as the standard stands, HD-DVD discs MUST CONTAIN DRM in order to be played in an HD-DVD player AT ALL. This is not like DVD, where CSS was an option which disc creators could choose to follow or not follow and you could just freely stick into a DVD player a DVD-R you burned. An HD-DVD drive is not allowed, by the current compliance rules, to play ANY HD-DVD disc which doesn't have a digital watermark granted directly by the central HD-DVD authority. Interestingly these watermarks include a "banned" list-- HD-DVDs keep an internal list of watermarks that have been "revoked", and every new HD-DVD printed will contain an up-to-date copy of that "revoked" list which the HD-DVD player must update every time you put in an HD-DVD. If the HD-DVD player sees a disc whose watermark has been placed on the "banned" list, it refuses to play it.