Slashdot Mirror

You want something like a Medical CD-R, although they are a bit expensive, they are designed to last 100 years. $30 for 10...

If you don't want "medical grade" but just want "pretty good CD-Rs" you need to know who made the discs, not just who the box says (like Fuji). I have heard good things about Taiyo Yuden (TY) discs and have had good success with them in the past. That link is to the "high speed" comaprisons (48x & higher) - lower speed comparisons here and here is a FAQ from CDFreaks. Check out the FAQ for links to tools to test your discs for errors, or check who made your discs.

In the end you just have to test with your own drive to see what burns best for you, and if archiving is your goal you might want something like those medical CD-Rs.

Could you provide links to substantiate your claims of increased music sales linked to P2P piracy? Thanks.

Here's a start

More on the Ipso-Reid study covered here. The original study isn't available through their website, unless you look a lot harder than I did.

Here's more on the Jupiter study

Still more

Liebowitz writes about it, but his only purpose was to conclude that filesharing doesn't hurt the music business.

ZDNet reports on what is probably the same Jupiter study

This article sits right in the middle of the issue, but certainly hints at an Odyssey study supporting my point.

Here's a study about studies

This came out during the height of the Metallica fight against Napster

You can google for more if you're not satisfied with these. :)

Theres issues of offset values (as with CD audio it is difficult to hit an *exact* location on the disk), plus the way the reader deals with C1 and C2 error correction, as well as how different extracting software interfaces with the hardware.

It would almost be safe to say two mp3s with the the same MD5 are one file copied twice (as opposed to two individually created mp3s), but that doesn't mean they are illegal...

I've always wondered if this [burning at 1x speed results in better CD's] is actually true or not.. I have yet to see any actual evidence to back up this claim...

Well, head on over to cdfreaks.com website and take a look at the results of some tests. For the lazy among us, burning at 4x resulted in more C1 errors in every test posted (on page 1, page 2 timed out) than burning at a higher speed (usually 40x, but one test was at 52x). A comment on page 2 indicated on person did 4 tests, and half said burn at high speeds and half said burn at lower speeds. Overall, the small sample of results indicated that burning at low speed usually makes things worse, not better. Surprising huh?

RCTFA (Read Carefully The Fine Article)
I didn't find in the article any evidence supporting your statement. It doesn't mention and brands. Actually, if you read the Media Forum on the english site, someone is posting the following, where some popular brands are in the worst list:

TOP 10(the best first):
Kodak
Mitsui toatsu
Richo made by richo(not those made by ritek).
MPO
Fujifilm (their new phthalocyanine media is REALLY good) Tayo yuden
Prodisc
Acer gold
ritek(and richo made by ritek), only phthalocyanine
Moser baer india/multimedia masters & machinery, only phthalocyanine type.

BOTTOM 10(the worst first):
Fornet international (only cyanine type)
CMC Magnetics
AMS Technology
Lead data
Xcitek
XEO Corporation
Multimedia masters & machinery (only cyanine type)
TDK
Ritek (only cyanine type)
Mitsubishi chemicals/verbatim

Sony didn't cripple the particular drive you're referencing. It in fact burned -R at 4x but +R at 2x. However, a firmware update has been released to record everything at 4x. 510?

Perhaps you're confusing it with the +RW/-RW which is +2.4x and -2.0x ? this is simply because -RW doesn't work any faster yet.

Also Sony didn't invent +, they did less than half the work on it and they're in both camps and don't care which is the success. Philips on the other hand has much more to lose.

and actually it's not really incompatible and any more proprietary than -R/-RW. it's actually technically superior and can actually be just as if not more compatible. It depends upon how you have the compatibility bits set.

For something that's going to die a slow death it's done a pretty amazing job at capturing more than 30% of the market in the last 2 years.

you also don't know how far from the truth you are.

There are royalties on DVD-R media and DVD+R isn't owned by Sony. It's got patents from many companies combined, (like -R/-RW) but is mostly owned by Sony and Philips with Philips having the larger half. (Just like the CD).

+R is hardly a cheap knockoff, it's designed to be superior to -R for multiple reasons, like listed in the link, including hardware defect management and being less prone to error.

by the way, minidisk is still amazingly popular. just not in the US. japan and asia, for example, you can find almost as many minidisk products as cd products (including media). just the cd media is larger.

Some other helpful sites:
Unofficial DVD+RW site
linux dvd+rw info and tools

Some choice quotes from linux info page:

The key feature of DVD+RW/+R media is high [spatial] frequency wobbled [pre-]groove with addressing information modulated into it. This makes it possible to resume interrupted [or deliberately suspended] burning process with accuracy high enough for DVD[-ROM] player not to "notice" anything at playback time. Recovery from buffer underrun condition in DVD-RW/-R case in turn is way less accurate procedure...

As already mentioned, DVD+ groove has "addressing information modulated into it," ADIP (ADress In Pre-groove). This gives you an advantage of writing DVD+RW in truly arbitrary order, even to virgin surface and practically instantly (after ~40 seconds long initial format procedure). In addition, DVD+RW can be conveniently written to with 2KB granularity(***). DVD-RW in turn can only be overwritten in arbitrary order. Meaning that it either has to be completely formatted first (it takes an hour to format 1x media), or initially written to in a sequential manner...

The DVD+R/RW standard is technologically superior to DVD-R/RW. So your reasoning for not supporting Sony is purely political.

Not exactly. The 4 dollars per CD is a little off. It's actually 0.007 SEK/MB for rewritable media, and .0025 SK/MB for write once media.

So figure 1.625 SK (US$ 0.20) for a standard 650 MB CDR, 4.55 (US$ 0.59) for a CDRW of them same size. The 31 SKR ($US 4) is really only appropriate for a 4.7 GB DVD-RW.
And your 4TB database would cost $USD 3816 in added levies, assuming you were using 870 DVD-RWs per backup.

According to CD Freaks the levy can actually be significantly more than $4 since it is based on the size of the media.

DVDShrink is the best at making backups of dvd9's (to dvd5 aka dvd+/-r) of what I've used. I haven't used DVD2One but if you don't feel like paying for it (or downloading a crack), dvdshrink is the way to go. It usually takes less than an hour to convert an entire dvd-9 (say 7gb or so) to a 4.3gb dvd-r. Then just burn with nero (as a UDF 1.02 DVD-R) and voila, there's your copy. The 1.02 part of UDF is important, as it provides the most backward compatibility with older players.

HD-Burn will just *halve* the pit length on the CD, so double the data (and effectively half the error correction).

However, plextor will only reduce the pit length by 40%, and assuming the drive produces no jitter, then this means the resulting CD will still be readable by normal CD drives, as the red book standard allows for 40% jitter in either direction, so think of it as like Yamaha's Audio Master, but in reverse

Plextor is showing off a new 52x32x52x cd burner, a new DVD burner, and a new version of PlexTools, which apparnetly is due out in the US pretty soon, too! the new version of PlexTools has some pretty cool features, too, including the ability to password protect CD's, to burn 980mb on a 700mb cd (i don't really understand how this works, but oh well), and the ability to make plextor drivers more quiet? i dunno, but you can read about all this here

also, LiteOn is planning on releasing some new CD / DVD burners, as well as entering the standalone DVD player business. Nero is also showing off Nero 6, and an MPEG4 / AAC codec they have in development called Nero Digital. you can read about all this here

-- for new, visit slashdot.org...
-- for community, visit us!

Plextor is showing off a new 52x32x52x cd burner, a new DVD burner, and a new version of PlexTools, which apparnetly is due out in the US pretty soon, too! the new version of PlexTools has some pretty cool features, too, including the ability to password protect CD's, to burn 980mb on a 700mb cd (i don't really understand how this works, but oh well), and the ability to make plextor drivers more quiet? i dunno, but you can read about all this here

also, LiteOn is planning on releasing some new CD / DVD burners, as well as entering the standalone DVD player business. Nero is also showing off Nero 6, and an MPEG4 / AAC codec they have in development called Nero Digital. you can read about all this here

-- for new, visit slashdot.org...
-- for community, visit us!

Plextor is showing off a new 52x32x52x cd burner, a new DVD burner, and a new version of PlexTools, which apparnetly is due out in the US pretty soon, too! the new version of PlexTools has some pretty cool features, too, including the ability to password protect CD's, to burn 980mb on a 700mb cd (i don't really understand how this works, but oh well), and the ability to make plextor drivers more quiet? i dunno, but you can read about all this here

also, LiteOn is planning on releasing some new CD / DVD burners, as well as entering the standalone DVD player business. Nero is also showing off Nero 6, and an MPEG4 / AAC codec they have in development called Nero Digital. you can read about all this here

-- for new, visit slashdot.org...
-- for community, visit us!

If you use Ogg and use Nero, now you can use them together! Yay!

The first vorbis plugin for Nero is out.

One less thing for the mp3-lUsers to complain abou

Unfortunately, most of the material available is in danish. However, I found something about it on wired, cdfreaks and infoanarchy. The most important link in danish is here. Siffan, the guy I mentioned in the parent, is working on an english translation of the bust, which happened in september. Currently, AntiPiratGruppen's methods of obtaining evidence are under investigation by the government.

Here is another interview of the CEO of 321 studioos and how they would like you to participate in their companies cause.

http://www.cdfreaks.com/news2.php3?ID=5389

Not only have Lite-On had a 52X drive out for a while, you can also flash the firmware from an "old" 48X drive up to 52X speed. An "overclocked" Lite-On drive is no different, hardware-wise, than the real thing.

That said, my 48X Lite-On is fast enough for me - and no, I've not burned any coasters writing at that speed. Those of you who believe it's impossible are living in the stone age - high speed writing is here and it works great. And it's cheap! Paid $53 for my drive, and 48X media is no more expensive than slower media - just as with the hardware, as the media improves it replaces the older, slower media at the same price.

There are physical characteristics of CD's that worry me about 52X writing (or reading), however, and that's why I won't go that high - it's not a question of getting a bad write, but a serious issue of exploding discs at such a high rotational speed.

If you have a modchip you are banned permanently and it seems so called "legitimate" users are being banned as well in the midst of microsoft's "anti-cheating" efforts.

This is just a Blu-Ray spinoff. If you want to know more about Blu-Ray you could check this explanation.

Frankly I don't understand why this should be a problem. I think Microsoft has to be seen that they're doing something to encourage game companies to develop for it. At the same time, suppose i buy this Xbox and being a hacker I try a hand at loading linux on it. Fine, now I've got an Xbox game console + Linux computer. If I can hack it's DVD region checks I'll be happier and if I'm happier I'll tell my friends who'll also buy other X-Boxes.

At a certain point, you get out of the geek circle who want to do stuff like run linux and these people start buying games. This will make game companies sit up and take notice and pretty soon...bang.... the fierce war between sony and MS becomes more cutthroat!

Read here

I think this review is really not worth a cent, at least it doesn't give you a good view on the drives, because the tests are to short and too less. If you want extensive, quality CD-RW reviews, that clearly explain what is important and that tests all features, there is only one site CD Freaks.com ! Check out their reviews here: Lite-On 40x Plextor 40x Teac 40x Intresting note to add that most of the times when discussing high speed CD-RW drives people are going to talk about the speeds and exploding CDs etc. You should know that there is a difference between reading and writing discs. Writing at high speeds is not really a problem because you are mainly using new CD-Rs you get out of plastic or whatever, there is no label on it, or an other print, in other words the CDs is stable and not likely to be damaged. If you are reading a CD you read CDs with label, damaged plastic, dust, and other stuff that make the CD unstable, and if you have the slighest scratch in the plastic the CD might even break in pieces at high speed ! So to conclude: 40x, 48x, 52x, 56x writing is not a problem, above 40x reading is unsafe !

I think this review is really not worth a cent, at least it doesn't give you a good view on the drives, because the tests are to short and too less. If you want extensive, quality CD-RW reviews, that clearly explain what is important and that tests all features, there is only one site CD Freaks.com ! Check out their reviews here: Lite-On 40x Plextor 40x Teac 40x Intresting note to add that most of the times when discussing high speed CD-RW drives people are going to talk about the speeds and exploding CDs etc. You should know that there is a difference between reading and writing discs. Writing at high speeds is not really a problem because you are mainly using new CD-Rs you get out of plastic or whatever, there is no label on it, or an other print, in other words the CDs is stable and not likely to be damaged. If you are reading a CD you read CDs with label, damaged plastic, dust, and other stuff that make the CD unstable, and if you have the slighest scratch in the plastic the CD might even break in pieces at high speed ! So to conclude: 40x, 48x, 52x, 56x writing is not a problem, above 40x reading is unsafe !

I think this review is really not worth a cent, at least it doesn't give you a good view on the drives, because the tests are to short and too less. If you want extensive, quality CD-RW reviews, that clearly explain what is important and that tests all features, there is only one site CD Freaks.com ! Check out their reviews here: Lite-On 40x Plextor 40x Teac 40x Intresting note to add that most of the times when discussing high speed CD-RW drives people are going to talk about the speeds and exploding CDs etc. You should know that there is a difference between reading and writing discs. Writing at high speeds is not really a problem because you are mainly using new CD-Rs you get out of plastic or whatever, there is no label on it, or an other print, in other words the CDs is stable and not likely to be damaged. If you are reading a CD you read CDs with label, damaged plastic, dust, and other stuff that make the CD unstable, and if you have the slighest scratch in the plastic the CD might even break in pieces at high speed ! So to conclude: 40x, 48x, 52x, 56x writing is not a problem, above 40x reading is unsafe !

Whatever about saving that precious extra 30 seconds or so during burning, I prefer to know that my burner can handle some of the more neferious copy protection schemes now coming to market.

Many of these are based on sending abnormally regular EFM subchannel data to the CDRW and relying on it to crap out. You can get details about the capabilities of current burners here, but this CloneCD list describes exactly which burners have the firmware "Correct EFM-Encoding" cojones to defeat the latest copy protection.

I'm glad to see that the "wallet-friendly Lite-On" drives seem to feature some of the the most consistent support for defeating EFM trickery.

I wonder how Apple will handle the same situation. Somehow, I can't picture Steve announcing iPLMS at an upcoming MacWorld ;)

Each new iPod, in fact, is emblazoned with a sticker that warns, "Don't Steal Music."

Apple's approach is slightly different from Microsoft's.

And once you have a market that exists, that will probably very rapidly have cheap blank discs, recorders, PC recorders, etc does anyone seriously consider that "HD-DVD" (blurry MPEG-4 on DVD-9...) has any chance of surviving? I can stick 12 full DVD-9 movies to one Blu-Ray flipper without re-encoding, so its kinda no-brainer.

And if you read specs, people, you already know that both formats (Blu-Ray is already "ready", HD-DVD still under negotiations) will include support to older formats (VCD, SVCD, DVD).

Good article:

http://www.cdfreaks.com/document.php3?Doc=83

...and some extra info:

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/2641.cfm
http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/blu-ray.cf m
http://www.sony.co.jp/en/SonyInfo/News/Press/20020 2/02-0219E/
http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/hd-dvd.cfm
http://www.dvdforum.org/forum.shtml

CD-RW drives are starting to conform to a new standard that will ease the transition to a floppy-less environment. The standard is called Mt. Rainer. It enables native OS support for file writing and deleting, and lets you write to a CDRW within a minute of inserting it using on-the-fly formatting. It also writes in 2K or 4K blocks instead of 64K that drives today use.

Here's a great article if you want to read more.

At least MiniDisc's are rewritable and if their MD-Data drives didn't cost so much it may have taken over from the humble floppy back when it was released (well before CDRW, or Zip), however in today's market something that is even more limited than MD simply doesn't stand a chance.

DataPlay is essentially a small CDR then, but you can already buy small 8cm CDR's for under $1, burn your own MP3's onto them (i.e. pick your own bitrate and selection) and play them on things like the eXpanium, all less money, more control and higher quality than DataPlay.

Record companies should concentrate on delivering good music (that's why record sales are 5% up in the UK) on CD and then leave it upto the consumer whether they want to transfer it to a handheld player, car etc, on whatever format they desire.

What ever happened to all the engineers in terms of quality, everything released is "near CD Quality" why not go further? It's ridiculous today's technology has to claim to be "near" a technology that was released 20 years ago, if only SACD takes of, even then your fair-use rights have been taken away from your, DVD-Audio offers multichannel capability but they use AC3 compression :/

• Still, the original poster mentioned a link to a site which is publishing said information. You'll probably prove me wrong again, but I dont know of any precedent in the UK which equates publishing a link to publishing the information contained on the linked page

British (by which I mean both Scottish and English/Welsh) case law on linking is still very vague. The few cases that have reached court have dealt with deep linking as a copyright violation (i.e. passing off another site's content as your own by framing it) and they have gone against the linker, but there's been nothing comparable with the US ban on links to DeCSS. Yet.

In fact, the DCPA hasn't seen too many tests, until it hit the news recently when Sony used it to prevent the sale of a PS2 mod chip in the UK. What was particularly interesting about the ruling was that the judge ruled that despite the non-infringing use of making a backup copy (explicitely allowed by the DCPA, unlike the DMCA), simply because people could give backups to each other, that invalidated that defence (consider the implications of that - it seems to say that just because the DCPA says you can make legal backups, it doesn't really mean it, because you can use a legal backup illegally!). Also, on the matter of removing the region code to allow people to play imported games and DVD's, he expressed the opinion that regional licensing was binding, so there was no expressed or implied right to import discs, or even to purchase discs in one region, then to take them with you to another region. We can only hope that these sweeping and over broad judgements fail the laugh test in a higher court.

• Bypassing it: CDFreaks article, although I don'tthink they're the original posters of this method.
• Hardware solution: AOpen CD 56X AKH/A80 (unconfirmed)
• Windows software solution #1: EAC. This is truly excellent software in its own regard, and apparently it bypasses Key2Audio nicely. You're better off Googling for EAC, as the site isn't updated often. Also check out the EAC mailing list, and this message in particular.
• Windows software solution #2: CloneCD. Many swear by it, but I haven't used it myself.

cdfreaks reported this hours ago!

Real good reviews can be found @ http://www.cdfreaks.com, they don't review much drives, but when they do ;))) 17 pages !! But this is for the burning pro's I guess

Plextor 24/10/40: http://www.cdfreaks.com/document.php3?Doc=53

Liteon 24/10/40: http://www.cdfreaks.com/document.php3?Doc=59

Gimme that Lite-On ;)

Real good reviews can be found @ http://www.cdfreaks.com, they don't review much drives, but when they do ;))) 17 pages !! But this is for the burning pro's I guess

Plextor 24/10/40: http://www.cdfreaks.com/document.php3?Doc=53

Liteon 24/10/40: http://www.cdfreaks.com/document.php3?Doc=59

Gimme that Lite-On ;)

On page 2 there, there is a link to "Download".

That page has a Description and a tab labeled "Download" but no link to download.

The page for the author's home page is out of business.

Looks like the RIAA beat us to it.