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High Density CDs
goofrider writes "Sanyo introduced a new format called HD-Burn, supported by their new DVD+/-RW chip. It allows the drive to burn up 1.4GB of data using a regular 700MB blank CD-R blank. The resulting HD-Burned CD-R can only be read by supporting DVD/DVD-ROM drives and CD-ROM drives. Most DVD/DVD-ROM drives can support the format via a firmware upgrade. It's unclear how easy and how likely will it be for future drives to support this format. In contrast, Plextor released their new GigaRec technology in their new PlexWriter Premium (read a review here). GigaRec also records on regular blank CD-Rs, allows up to 1GB of data on a 700MB disc. however, the disc can be read on any modern good-quality CD-ROM drives with no firmware upgrades required. So now I can record 2x the data on a CD-R but I still can't have filenames longer than 64 characters. :)"
Been there, done that. They're just buying time until DVD media takes over (which it is already beginning to).
This will probably flop, unless it becomes an integrated standard in all DVD +/- RW drives. No one wants to buy a special cdrom drive just to read high-density CDs, especially when better (read: DVD) technology exists.
we stop worrying about sticking more data on CDRs and DVDs and start creating INEXPENSIVE (free) software for DVD authoring?
When I say "DVD Authoring" I mean a FULL feautured suite including menu creation and beautiful buttons, etc.
Joe Blow (and for DVD burning this includes me) wants to buy a DVD burner, take it home, and put his movies onto a DVD with a purty menu. He doesn't want to pay $330 for a nice DVD+-R/RW drive, take it home, and find out that the ULead Demo software does NOT work. He then does not want to shell out $200 - $1500 for DVD authoring software.
If DVD burning is to catch on software has to be created that is free and that works well.
DVD-RWs are cheap enough (and going to continue to drop) that we WON'T need to find new ways to store more info on 700mb CDs.
Sounds fishy to me. "To read these new DVDs you must upgrade the firmware on your DVD. Oh, by the way, the region coding firmware will be installed too. Happy reflashing!"
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
The trouble is that since it's not a ubiquitous standard, it's not really all that useful. Compare to old optical media standards - there were plenty of optical medias that you could record to (and even re-record) long before CDR came out. But CDR took off like all crazy because it was standard media you could play back anywhere.
2 CD's is just about the amount of space you need to hold a good quality conversion of a DVD to DIVX format.
And since CD's are so much cheaper than recordable DVD's, it seems like a good way to back up a DVD collection cheaply.
"old technology" that was used by the GD-ROM drives that SEGA put into their Dreamcast system? As nice as it is to see double data capacity on a cheap medium, it is quickly becoming more affordable to jump into DVD+R/RW or DVD-R/RW format which holds 3 times that of a DD CDROM for only twice the cost of a blank CDR.
Another hack that is too little too late. I already have my DVD burner, and it already burns 4.7 GB discs.
No thanks!
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Why would you want a file name of longer than 64 characters? Surely a proper filing systems including directories etc would be best more suitable.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
Floptical disks were floppies that used an optical tracking mechanism to align the magnetic head with the floppy tracks to achieve increased track density.
A trick which, of course, wouldn't help with optical media to begin with, although didn't Bernoulli drives use magnetism to increase the CDROM track density?).I remember systems such as the Dreamcast had their discs designed to hold more than 700MB specifically so people pirating them couldn't do a perfect job, requiring audio tracks and cutscenes to be surgically removed from the game to fit on a normal CD. I know some PS2 games are just out of reach for CD pirates due to their > 700MB size as well. It seems to me it's quite possible for a soldering iron based firmware upgrade to put those games within reach for pirates now.
:).
Pirates are always the early adopters of these kind of technologies
Overrated Moderation: This posts sucks... because.
My favorites collection is something that I backup along with my normal data. It's quite easy to go > 64 characters with the ways some web pages title themselves. The easy solution of course is to just zip 'em up in a file, or export to bookmark.htm, but it's still one more step that I have to do becuase of some arbitrary 64 character filename limit.
Sanyo's technology shouldn't stand a chance in surviving, much like Iomega's 250MB disks/drives. I would bet that most people (excluding techno-elitist) who are still using Zip drives regardless of their drive capacity, use only 100MB disks, since sharing them utilizes the much wider installed base of 100MB drives. Since CDR and CDRW has replace much of Iomega's usefulness, 250MB drives are pretty useless, especially in a cost/size comparison.
Likewise, why would anyone bother to use a technology with a very limited install base to double the capacity of a CD when DVD's are getting cheaper, hold even more data, and the installed base is much more prevalent.
However, plextor's solution should be more ideal despite the smaller 'overburn' rate. Since people can use it right away on the existing install base without worrying too much about compatibility when they go to share their media.
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:)
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Apparently (and I know almost nothing about CD-ROM formats, so I'm sure to be corrected in the following 10 posts), Sega accomplished this by basically removing some (all?) of the error correction that a normal CD-ROM has on it. Yes, there's that much.
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Here is that correction you predicted
Actually it has nothing to do with error correction (There isnt that much, and even so, a GD-rom has the same error correction used on CDs and DVDs depending which part of the disc you are referring to)
The GD-ROM disc has two sections. One is formatted like a normal CD track. The other is much more dense and 'custom' but best described as 'DVD like'
The CD track can only hold about 400mb. In the remaining, usually, 300mb, it has DVD-like formatting, which actually can hold over 600mb, which is why the disc can hold just over a gig.
I dont remember the exact specs of the discs, but if you google around you could find more details than either of us wants to know
In dual layers they can, but a consumer dvd burner cannot burn 2 layers. The layers are physically glued together after burning I believe so that can't be done at home.
You forget why region codes were introduced in the first place
No, you just haven't realized that it's an excuse, not a reason.
There's no reason movie studios can't release movies simultaneously in all regions.
This can lead to a situation where a movie is available stateside on DVD before it has even been shown in Europe.
If international distribution is really the reason region codes exist, why are movies like Jaws (1975), Gone With the Wind (1939), or The Maltese Falcon (1941) region-coded? Are you suggesting that these movies have yet to be released in Europe?
I can imagine lines of people, somewhere in $EUROPEAN_CITY, desparately waiting in line to see Lee Marvin in The Dirty Dozen, 35 years after it was released in the US.
Region Coding is simply a way for movie studios to create artifical boundaries, to practice predatory pricing.
Actually, there is NOT. Even if the studios didn't release the movie simultaneously in all regions - I own the player, I should be allowed to pay extra and import any film I want and watch it on the player.
If I am willing to go the extra distance to import, I should be allowed to play it. Plain and simple. Or, as others have stated, they could just release worldwide with the same or comperable features... Or would that make sense?
Isn't this similar to Sony's DDCD format (that also never left the ground) ? Okay so now they're using a DVD-Rom laser to do it, but it's the end result is the same.
This is another almost-good idea that's just five years too late. And I don't plan on waiting for Pioneer to release a firmware upgrade for my drive, it's already hard enough getting support as it is.
What I really want is high-speed DVD-9 burning. Yes, 9.4gb with at least 4x speed, preferably 8x. Now get rid of these inbred 1x DVD-R media manufacturers who haven't realized nobody has 1x burners anymore, and let's get cracking!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Well, my wife has a ton (~200) VHS tapes that I'd love to put on VCD just so they'd take up less space, physically, but they won't fit on 1 VCD and she doesn't like the 'think of it as an intermission' answer...
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Now, first things first (but not necessarily in that order). Unicode is not a standard from Microsoft, and using the two bytes 'm' and '$' does not make you cooler, nor does it make me cooler to nag about (darn).
Claiming that a filesystem should use 8-bit values for all their files is like going back to the times when there was no internet for the common computer user, when each computer used only one character set all of the time. Today, I come across both US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1, 8, 16 and 32-bit Unicode and the good old codepage 850 daily. What would happen if an OS had support only for one of these character sets? Believe it or not, most computer users are not natively English speaking, and most users get in touch with many different funny looking characters or languages each day. At least so I presume.
Regarding the choice of encoding, I suppose 16-bit Unicode maybe isn't the best choice for storage. UTF-8 would seem appropriate to me, but then, there might be some issues with Thai filenames, reducing the numbers of allowed chars to 32 or so, for Thai filenames, while 128 for the American. That might be considered unfair.
All in all, we need a common character set. Unicode is the solution (although some characters codes don't have the most optimal order) and it's here to stay. At least I think it's funny to have Thai filenames on the Thai MP3's I've got, and the Icelandic names for the Icelandic.