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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."
I wonder how the compressed data is stored. Linux kernel seems to support compressed ISO9660, but I don't know if that has anything to do with Plextor's method.
This certainly looks like a good burner to me. It seems to have some cool features, like Silent Mode, and SpeedRead. (Yes, I did read the article, you should too.) And the SecuRec (encryption) and GigaRec (compression) sound great.
Since the GigaRec feature doesn't compress the data; it just makes the pits it burns on the disk smaller, you could zip the files and then burn them for even more space! However, not all CD-ROM drives can be expected to handle the smaller pits correctly, which is a major downside.
The SecuRec sounds good, because it can be read with any drive, provided you have the SecuViewer software. It is free, but only for Windows. That means trouble for MacOS and *nix users, like myself.
Another issue is whether cdrtools can support all these features. I'm not going to switch back to Windows just to use this burner. It'll be interesting to see how this catches on.
/usr/bin/complain >
I already compress my files with gzip and bzip2. My images are PNG and JPEG. What good is this to me? Surely this will just slow me down and make my files larger?
Stick Men
this is nothing new...