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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"
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.
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.
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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
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.
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!
Assuming it is as you say it is not so easy. You need to insure that the writer will not barf. After all you feeding it with some data which according to the red book is garbage or pretty close to garbage. So the writer should allow turning off all error and sanity checks.
Alternatively it is very good software that merges an image on top of data that is acceptable to a normal CD writer.
In either case it is not just PI, elementary calculations and a bitmap.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Actually no. When real data is written to disk there are 3 layers (iirc) of error correcting/detecting that would disrupt the pattern. In fact if I understand the format correctly data is written in such a way that it can be recovered from multiple physical locations on the disc (to prevent a single scratch from ruining things). So writting long strings of 1's and 0's wouldn't quite do it. You need to be able to tell the laser when to turn on and off. This is something that normal drives don't allow. For the conspiracy theorists out there this is in compliance with the wishes of companies like Macrovision ;). Hmmm could this be used to create perfect 'backups' ;) of games?
Thoughts on tech, Software Engineering, and stuff
The visibility of the burned track depends on the kind of substrate used on the particular CD blank. Green ones show up best. Pale yellow ones are often almost invisible.
Does this mean that the Yamaha drive will only be effective on green CDs, or does the laser use a different strength to burn the piccies?
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
double sided cdr disk would have to be twice the thickness (and consequently twice the mass...) of a regular disk, because the data is actually recorded on the 'upper' side of the disk; the plastic actually helps focus the laser onto the grooves. This is why it's far easier to destroy a CD-R (and a regular cd too) by scratching the label side than scratching the 'data' side.
A double sided CDR would have to be exactly like two CD's stuck on top of each other, or they'd have to do some extremely fancy tricks to get the laser to focus properly through a data layer.
ìì!
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.
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).
Cd drives have a very mild notion of their absolute position along the disk. I bet this drive has an extra sensor for angular position on the spindle.
This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
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!
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?