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Yamaha CD-RW Drive Writes Images In Substrate
johnny5 writes: "Yamaha has recently demonstrated a new CD-RW drive that can write images into the unused space on a CD-R disc after the data track is written. The technology, called DiscT@2(TM), is due out in Japan in July. The images print on to the CD at approximately 250dpi, making graphics as well as text possible. More info can be found at Yamaha's CD-RW site (in English) as well as at Akiba PC Hotline (in Japanese, with better pictures. Babelfish for suitably akward translation). No word on a timeframe for U.S. availability"
Don't you know the value of PI, some specs on CD diameters, track separation distances....copy a bitmap over...
No more losing my WaReZ cd keys!
- tristan
How about burning in something like 'Fuck you RIAA' onto every CD-R. That'd make them happy.
For anyone wondering what the word 'hack' actually means, THIS IS IT.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Maybe I'm missing something, but Why is it the drive itself that is important? I would think most CDs are pretty much the same (correct me if I'm wrong), so after doing a bit of math, properly enhanced CD-burning software should be able to do this, right? Well, maybe not, I never claimed to be a genius.
So not only can we make pirated CD's, we can now put copy protected images on them as well... you probably can't see it, but I'm doing a little dance for joy over here, knowing that I can piss off the RIAA even more
Next step, incorporating this wonderful gadget into your fridge/freezer/1970's jukebox
what will they think of next
my last sig was too controversial... now, a new and improved useless sig!
For smaller companies, now that is a different matter and something likw that would be rather neat and useful.
Plus, isn't the market moving more and more towards DVD burners? I have a 4x CD burner at the moment and when I upgrade i'll be looking more and more at a hybrid CDR/RW/DVD combination job and not a 32x CDRW with the ability to burn pictures on it.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
So its
pronounced as Disctatoo trademark LLSHow do normal people know how to pronouce this or non-english speaking people like me. In German it would be "DiskTatzwei" trademark LLS. So Marketing only focuses on the english speaking clientel or what ?
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
Wanking while watching pr0n CD's just took another dimension.
is there any actual use for this? Id rather buy a drive that burns faster than one that prints images on my CDs. That thing must cost lots of money, and its not a actual new feature, I already saw some presentation CDs here in the company I work for with text printed but I believe those were done with MUCH professional (expensive) equipment.
Fabio - Sumare/Sao Paulo/Brazil/South America/Earth/Solar System/Milky Way/Universe
http://www.morroida.com.br
So it will only "draw" on unused parts of the disk, basically taking up space... crap.
Free Mac Mini
AOL stamped their logo by similar methods into a wave of CDs a while back.
I was keeping a few as extra-pretty coasters, but they were thrown out behind my back...
I was doing that 10 years ago with optical cards. You could print an image on the optical surface in a similar way as the CD-RW. Of course, you couldn't put any data on there...and the writers/readers cost $10k each...and they were SCSI only...
I like this text from the product info page:
Yea! Yippee! Those floppies sure are quick! And with the amount of data loss I've seen, those floppies are easy, too! Someone should sit down with their marketing people and show them that most of us probably wouldn't interpret that sentence as a compliment to their product.
Unless I'm misreading this, the image only appears on the data side of the disc. And the last time I looked, even on a bare no-label CD, I couldn't see where the data ended from the label side.
I don't know about you, but I'd never label the data
side of my CD-R.
Whenever they figure out how to show it on the LABEL side, call me.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Yes. But I couldn't justify the expense JUST for doing that, but that's the first /practical/ use I've read yet. CD clocks would look uber-l33t with graphics burned into them... but for added hack value, why not just put together something like a GIF2ISO... er, I mean PGN2ISO program so everyone can do it for free?
Problem solved, no need for a usable CD, it's just artwork =) No extra cost, just grab the free program.
Genuinely useful, genuinely innovative, not just some more "we're 8% faster using our own benchmarks on a good day with the wind behind us, and really almost pretty much compatible" nonsense.
Partial solution to a perfectly real problem.
The computer industry has gotten ossified... there are so many problems that have now been around for so long that nobody sees them as problems any more.
Of course, I know all of YOU are religious about labelling your media and are neat and tidy, so I'm sure none of YOU have ever been guilty of saying "You can recognize that diskette, it's the one with no label on it..."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Ahhh cool non-musical tricks for music.
It would be cooler if someone would design a disk that could display a picture in the area where data is stored (perhaps store data on a lower level, like on double-density DVDs) so you could have art on the underside of a full-length album.
Frankly I think all of this is a little bit cheesy, and while cool every once in a while, would get old fast if put into general use.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
What would go along well with this is double sided CD-R disks. I've always wondered why they aren't around. Have one side completely free to write these pretty graphics, text, warez keys, and the other side for the data or music.
I am sure I have heard of someone doing this before in software, but I can't find a link. It should be quite simple to do if you know bit widths and track diameters I guess. As long as Yamaha haven't patented it I can see this turning up as a plug in for CD writer software quite quickly.
This will probably start turning up on ISO's soon, and it would be cool to have a nice Debian mini-CD ISO hacked to say "Woody" in the unused space! Of course, now we have the possible pain of ISO adverts...
I think that marketing deps just looked into numbers and figured that 90% of all CDR made by teenagers (mainly porn, divx and warez stuff)
:)
So they named new technology according to their target group preferences.
- Hey l00k DuDe, That DiscT@2 sounds KooL
The "point" is that CD-R drives have become a commodity, and they're trying to stand out. Two years ago, I bought CD-R drives largely on brand, for the most part sticking with Yamaha and Plextor. It used to make a difference; I had cheap drives die on me after only a few hundred burns, whereas Plextor and Yamaha drives typically make it into the 10,000's.
However, for the last year or so, (at least, in my experience) a drive is a drive; they all work just fine and there's not much reason to get more than a $70 CompUSA-branded Sanyo or something. Yamaha and other higher-end manufacturers have had to cut prices drastically to remain competitive.
There are better and faster media being developed, but they're in the lab. When it comes time to develop a standard in the industry to utilize those media, I'm sure Yamaha will be at the table. In the mean time, they have to make money selling the product that's coming out the door now.
Having a drive that does something cool like this sets it apart and might make people spend an extra $20 for a Yamaha drive.
Just a patch for mkisofs should do the trick. Tux only would be nice to begin with :)
The distance from the middle should be fixed for every data entry point on the cd (distances of the pits are fixed (except for burnproof, but those margins are slim enough, within 50 nm) && distances between tracks are fixed). Mmmm. Nice summer holidays experiment for my new CDburner.
the pun is mightier than the sword
the revolutionary DiscT@2TM Laser Labeling System,
...pronounced as Disc Tattoo Laser Labeling System.
[Google doesn't show a German word for tattoo.] A tattoo is a permanent marking by stippling ink designs into living skin. Or in this case, a permanent marking by stippling burn designs into compact disc designs.
Stupid ASCII Rebus puzzles. Leet Speek trademarks.
[
Look! You can make your own front side labels on your computer!
I know becuase I did a lot of research on this. I went to Best Buy and talked to their knowledgable staff and they told me this was the thing we needed. And they said it was "Sweet" so I had to get it. They also told be I should buy the extended warranty contract, so of course I did- you never know when some "new technology" is going to break and you won't be able to fix it.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Holographic effects aren't possible with this technology - there's nowhere near enough data.
Holograms require the interference pattern and light dispersal of an actual object, as well as a "control" beam, simultaneously hitting a photographic material. Without the incoherent light caused by a physical object, holography is impossible.
However, something like 3D images might be accomplished with multi-layer discs. I'm not sure how successfully the process would convert to multi-layer - CD burning doesn't have to worry about writing/reading to a layer above/below. If it was converted, I don't know how "deep" the images would appear to be.
--
Zig.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
To read the page mentioned in the article simply cut-and-paste the URL.
So, it means that now I can have a CD full of pr0n and still squeeze one more picture in by printing it in the media. Cool! :)
"Customers can put graphics, such as signatures, logos, memorandums, and photo images onto CD-R's unused area after data writing."
Look closely: there is a very small data area (inner circle) on the picture, all other space is unused.
The reason is that you will need some software to convert the bitmap into a writable image for the burner to work with. However, this is almost certainly going to be closed-source only endeveror, doing this open-sourced early in the ball game would only make it easier for competators to understand how exactly you are doing things, and possibly make a feature as good or better. You can of course burn all you want with your non-windows operating systems, but my guess is that you can only use the picture drawing tool in side of windows. This is like the case with some of my network cards that only state that they work with windows 9x and windows NT, but still work just fine in the various *NIX operating systems out there (worked with all the ones i got my hands on: FreeBSD, various flavors of Linux, and solaris).
I mean, it's cool and all, but I don't want it to automatically put images of Rocco on my "back up" CDs. It would make them easier to find in a pinch, but...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
There's an old story circulating among my geekier friends about someone who figured out how to do this with disk packs while working as a third shift a systems operator. Disk packs used to fail at a fairly high rate and it was not possible to tell a good pack from a bad one by looking. This operator figured out how to use the read/write heads to chip sections out of the top platter so that the word DEAD could be read at a glance.
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
the only thing that could make this better is...making it external as well,
On the Yamaha site they show an internal and an external model...
http://www.yamahamultimedia.com/press_02.htm
When reading the original writeup it sounded like it was being burnt between the tracks or something - apparently this is not so. It also begs the question of whether this could be done in software with current CD burners...
If you or anyone you know has a green card, work or student visa, check the back side that has the optical data stripe.
Now you know how they do that. This is old tech, but is just now making it to the consumer market.
I just happen to know this because I did a little bit of work on the green card printer system.
For those of you who don't have access to them, they print the images of the first 32 presidents on the back. In uber-DPI, it's not much of a challenge to fit them all. I think there's other stuff too, like your picture. It's one of the many features of the new green cards that helps to discourage forgery.
Users would happily pay for copy protected CD's if enough extra features were added to the CD. The copy protection becomes less of a drawback if the number of extra features grows.
Obligatory complaint: why, this is barely news at all; a very similar story was reported in Slashdot just a few decades ago, in 1961.
The PDP-1 used eight-channel punched paper tape as the predominant storage medium, punching at a speedy 60 characters per second and reading at an ungodly-fast 200 characters per second.
On program tapes, prior to the start of the actual binary program data, the assembler would punch a human-readable label in which the title was spelled out in human-readable format in the block letters made out of patterns of holes. IIRC a 5x7 matrix, a little ugly because a horizontal line of little feed holes ran through the center of the character which meant that not only did the characters look "overstruck," but the spacing between rows 3 and 4 was a little wider than the spacing between other rows.
I wonder what the earliest use of "kludging directly human-readable data into a medium that was intended only to be machine-readable?"
I seem to recall that IBM card decks had a couple of preamble cards in which the punches spelled out a code number in block letters.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
My first reaction to this was cool.
My second reaction was cool.
My third reaction was, couldn't something like this be done through changes in existing software?
I suspect this is far more a funtion of software than the burner itself, and hope to see it added as a 'feature' by Ahead -soon-.
I can see the pr0n collectors lined up to buy it.
The DOD should love it, FOU, EYES, etc could be more useful when it's not just on a label that can be pasted over.
For me it's the geek factor.
so if i burn a picture of a felt tip marker slash on the edge can i make an un-protectable cd?;)
have you?
They have the OEM number right on the cd...
If i'm not using that capacity, I'll galdly put images on my 2nd DVD layer, or outer CD ring.
Storage will defenitly come before decoration, however.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
The next thing is obviously to put a printer in the drive and print the label side. You can get CD printers, but they cost about $2K and are bulky. There's a thermal transfer CD printer available that fits in a full-height 5.25" drive bay. But so far, there's no low-cost integrated solution.
Some of the stories on /. are about as fresh as meat sold at WalMart.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
While probably not quite as hard, it's on the same order of difficulty as writing a poem who's MD5 checksum is the first 32 characters of the declaration of independence.
First off, the CD-R writes pits whose edges are detected, so you have to translate edges into pixels.
Also, you'd be limited to pits/lands that are between 2 and 10 bits long (if memory serves), since the data you feed it are eight-to-fourteen modulated (eight bit data coming in are translated to the set of fourteen bit numbers with strings of 2 to 10 zeroes -- note that there are a few extra suitable 14-bit values, which is where the subchannels (p, q, etc.) come from).
But before you do that, the CD-R interlaces the data around the disc so that a scratch won't wipe out more than a few bits of a given byte. So you'd have to figure out in advance where a given bit will end up.
So it is probably theoretically possible to burn a certain set of images onto a CD-R. If you pull this off, you might send a copy to the NSA and maybe they will hire you.
I actualy thought of this several months ago, and even submited an ask slashdot (rejected of course...) to find out if it could be pulled off through specialy constructed ISOs. Anyone ever tried doing this?
How long after this drive becomes available in the United States will someone be on the streets of New York selling their artwork burned onto dirt cheap CD-Rs for $5.00 a pop? How long will it take for every pr0n retailer to start including pr0n piccie CD's with every sale.
Yikes, and I only thought AOL was bad about innundating the market with their wares.
I can see this technology as being very useful for double sided DVDs and CDs. It would let you use the whole disk area for a label instead of just the little ring in the center.
Now I wonder when we'll see high contrast disks...
-Mike_L
Give me the ability to burn on the top side and don't mess with the data side (of ANY disc).
Those damn labels always bubble up after a couple of years anyway.
-info
Broadcasting LIVE from a Bonus Room Over the Gara
Yeah they can, that's whta packet writing formats are for.