CD Burners with Built in Compression

EconolineCrush writes "Bored of new CD-R/RW drives that only seem to decrease burn times by a few seconds over their predecessors? Check out this review of Plextor's PlexWriter Premium over at The Tech Report. With an advertised CD-R burn speed of 52X, the PlexWriter is certainly fast, but its ability to encrypt the contents of burned data CDs and squeeze nearly a Gigabyte of data onto a 700MB disc is what sets it apart from other high-speed burners."

Comments

CD Burners with Built in Compression

[florin]

The Plextor's GigaRec feature uses shorter pit lengths to squeeze more data onto a disc. I guess in a way it is indeed a literal kind of compression. Still, the topic title seems somewhat misleading considering that the usual kind of compression people talk is about is something quite different.

A nice feature certainly, but of limited use. Those discs can only be read in that drive (and 1 or 2 older Plextor models). With current DVD-writer pricing who is gonna settle for a CD writer no matter how premium it is?

Re:CD Burners with Built in Compression

[florin]

DVDs have no clear standards at this point. I think I remember someone saying that DVD-RW is the one standard reaching the critical mass market, but is it *there* yet?

Actually, I'm pretty sure DVD+R(W), not DVD-R(W), is going to end up being the standard eventually. It's already leading -R(W) in the retail market. And more importantly the format has the backing of all the companies that matter; Philips, Sony and Microsoft - and many others. DVD-RW has Pioneer and that's about it.

That's not to say DVD-RW is dead or will be soon. Just that + is gonna be the OEM and retail standard of choice in the present and near future.

Using this overburned discs...

[garcia]

Umm, why bother? Nothing reads these overburned discs when they are done...

To test compatibility, I burned four discs: Two data discs and two audio discs, with one of each at the 120% setting and one of each at the 140% setting. I then tried these discs in just about any player I could find. For data discs, that meant copying all the files off the disc onto the hard drive to make sure they could all be read. For audio discs, that meant making sure every track on the disc played properly.

The data discs were somewhat disappointing; out of seven optical drives tested, only two could successfully copy the files from the 120% disc, and none of the drives could copy from the 140% disc. Some drives couldn't even get a directory off the discs, while others failed part of the way through the file copy test. There was no rhyme or reason to the successes versus the failures, either; the two drives that "won" the test were a BTC 48X burner and a Hitachi DVD-ROM drive. The failures included a DVD/CD-RW combo drive, a Pioneer DVD-RW drive, a Sony DRU-500A DVD+/-RW recorder, and the LiteOn burner used in the benchmarks.

The audio discs were both more successful and more surprising. I tried these in three different computer drives, a bookshelf stereo system, a component DVD player, and two car stereos (one OEM Nissan, one my venerable Aiwa CDC-MP3). One of the computer drives recognized both discs, and did OK until near the end of them (failing to play the last two tracks on the 120% disc, and the last four tracks on the 140% disc). Another computer drive wouldn't play them at all, and a third played the entire 120% disc but couldn't play the 140% disc at all.

The bookshelf system and the component DVD player achieved identical results: Both played the 120% disc without any issues, but wouldn't even recognize the 140% disc. Perhaps the most surprising of all was the car CD players; both of them played every track on both discs. I was surprised enough that the wunderkind CDC-MP3 pulled this off, but an OEM Nissan player? Crazy.

He says "Crazy", I say "Duh."

Re:Compressed Data

[athakur999]

"Compression" is a misnomer in this case. The drive fits more data on the disc by making the pits smaller, thus allowing more of them to fit on the disc. Whether the source data is already compressed is irrelevant.

It's encryption and compression...

[Delphix]

Just not at the same time.

GigaRec

The other special feature is GigaRec, which enables the PlexWriter to squeeze up to 40% more data than normal onto a piece of media. The process works by shortening the length of the pits being written to the disc; shorter pits means more pits fit on the disc, and more pits means more data. The problem, of course, is that because these pits are shorter than the standard for data or audio CDs, compatibility with other drives may be hit or miss. Plextor does guarantee that the PlexWriter Premium will read any GigaRec disc, but they make no guarantees about other drives.

So basically this will never catch on. The standard CD format is waaay to entrenched to be replaced. Other than for backup purposes, why would you want to burn a disc that's almost guaranteed not to work on another CD-ROM? The last thing need is another incompatible format of disc to worry about.. (DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM, etc)

SecuRec

Now that we've evaluated the drives' performance, let's take a look at a couple of the features that make the PlexWriter Premium so special. The first of these is SecuRec, which encrypts data before it is written onto the CD. You specify a password before beginning the write process, and once the CD is written, you need that password in order to view the recorded data. If the password is ever lost, so is the data.

There are a couple of limitations with the SecuRec feature. First, discs need to be recorded in DAO (disc-at-once) mode, so you can't burn multiple sessions of encrypted data, and as you might expect, only data CDs (not audio CDs) are supported. Second, in order to view the data, you need a copy of Plextor's SecuViewer software. This isn't that big a deal for Windows users, as the program is freely downloadable from the Plextor website. Linux and/or Mac users, however, are out of luck as far as I know, as SecuViewer isn't available for operating systems other than Windows. Just so there's no confusion, I'll point out that while you need a PlexWriter Premium drive to create a SecuRec disc, any CD-ROM drive can read one with the SecuViewer software and the proper password.

How this is better than a secure install program has got me... There's no real innovation here except that the encryption is moved to the CD Burning software. There are already quite a few tools to build installers that encrypt the installers and prompt for password to extract/install.

Basically it's just encrypting and then zipping except using a proprietary system....

Re:I love you Plextor.

[mr.henry]

I love Plextor too, but their DVD burners are kind of disappointing when compared to the Plex CD burners. They use the so-so NEC drives with a slightly modified firmware, and currently only support DVD+R/RW. I think Sony is much more innovative in the DVD burner arena, especially with their new external 4x DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, combo firewire/USB 2.0 drive.

A Very Bad Idea

[jrst]

Proprietary compression. Proprietary "encryption"? (They don't say enough to make a determination.)

I would typically use those features to archive sensitive information. And the when the drive breaks, or they stop supporting it, I'm hosed.

Thanks, but no thanks. I'll stick with standard compression/encryption tools.

1 GByte data with ANY burner

[Tux2000]

Method 1:

mkisofs -z

From the manpage:

-z

Generate special RRIP records for transparently compressed files. This is only of use and interest for hosts that support transparent decompression, such as Linux 2.4.14 or later. You must specify the -R or -r options to enable RockRidge, and generate compressed files using the mkzftree utility before running mkisofs. Note that transparent compression is a nonstandard Rock Ridge extension. The resulting disks are only transparently readable if used on Linux. On other operating systems you will need to call mkzftree by hand to decompress the files.

(Should not be too hard to port the transparent decompression code to *BSD and Darwin...)

Method 2:

KNOPPIX uses transparent decompression through a loop device to store more than 2 GBytes on a simple CDROM.

Just my two cents.

HD-Burn?

[forkboy]

This is news? HD-Burn has been around for a little while now. It basically doubles CD-R capacity to 1.4 GB by shortening the pit length and using more efficient error correction. Oh, and it works in most CD-ROM drives that are out already.