[HN Gopher] A tool for burning visible pictures on a compact dis...
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A tool for burning visible pictures on a compact disc surface
(2022)
Author : carlesfe
Score : 187 points
Date : 2025-06-07 08:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| globular-toast wrote:
| If only this existed 15 years ago when I got rid of my burners.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I don't even remember if the CD/DVD drive I have in my desktop
| is a writer or not. I distinctly remember purchasing one about
| a decade ago, but I think I was looking for an external one.
|
| Hell, I'm not even sure if it's plugged in at the moment, I may
| have unplugged it to plug in another hard drive...
| lhoff wrote:
| I had a DVD Burner in my self build PC and discovered a year
| ago that it wasn't plugged in and that it must have been like
| this for years. That was the moment I decided it's time to
| remove it.
| sandreas wrote:
| I still use my bluray to rip audio CDs... Pretty oldschool but
| with navidrome and audiobookshelf it is a pretty solid
| workflow...
|
| See https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/
| al_borland wrote:
| After many years without an optical drive in my home, I bought
| an external one within the last year or so. It's one of those
| things that occasionally comes up, and is useful to have
| around, and I figured the longer I waited the more difficult it
| would become to find a decent one.
| valianteffort wrote:
| Optical media is unmatched for archival purposes. I have
| photos, videos, and documents I'd be devastated to lose. I
| simply cannot trust magnetic or solid-state storage over the
| long term.
|
| Luckily blurays are still somewhat cheap in Japan so I stock
| up when I visit. Stored properly they should outlive me.
| toast0 wrote:
| If you care about your data, you need to have a regular
| process where you check the copies and remake them from
| time to time.
|
| Hopefully some of the copies live on after your death.
| Optical does well, but I've seen reasonably treated cd-rs
| degrade, and well treated pressed cds decay. Sometimes some
| mistake in production takes years to become apparent, but
| results in a fixed lifetime below the estimates.
| Milpotel wrote:
| I have so many CDs/DVDs that cannot be read anymore that I
| stopped using them for backups.
| gambiting wrote:
| Blu rays are meant to be like the old M-Discs and they
| should last ages. I've been burning my archives to BDXL
| discs for years and never had any issues reading them
| back.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Regular optical media can suffer corrosion of the aluminium
| reflector layer, and breakdown of the dye. Sure, they do
| make archival grade discs (e.g. with a gold layer) but
| they're expensive.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| It did! I remember playing with 'Disc T@2' when I was a kid. I
| had a lightscribe then too, so I put pictures on both sides
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Cool idea. Like a more accessible version of lightscribe. (if you
| use a dual-sided disc)
|
| I assume this isn't possible with a DVD/bluray due to the much
| much smaller pits.
| zapp42 wrote:
| I love the Github username!
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| I gather it's a reference to the pop singer Adriano Celentano?
| myself248 wrote:
| Ol rait!
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| I fondly remember LightScribe, that was a pretty awesome
| technology.
| gambiting wrote:
| I was going to say, I still have a 5 pack of Lightscribe DVDs
| unopened in a box specifically to save something "special" but
| obviously nothing has ever been special enough to warrant using
| them. And now that they aren't made anymore it would feel
| downright sacrilegious to use them, not to mention 4.7GB of
| capacity is just not enough for anything nowadays really.
| layer8 wrote:
| Someone would probably buy them on eBay for a good price.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| There are definitely people that collect older media for
| use in the retro setups. I constantly buy New Old Stock
| when I find Floppies, Mini Disc, Cassettes, Zip Disks, hell
| just about anything. We're a weird bunch of collectors but
| we're out there.
| jajko wrote:
| Somebody here is going to be very rich one day, just
| safeguard them against elements
| gambiting wrote:
| Looks like you can still buy 10-packs on eBay for PS15, not
| really collectible yet it seems :-)
| yaky wrote:
| 4.7GB is quite enough for a standalone Linux DVD (for devices
| that still have DVD drives). Plus some cool art.
|
| Might be a good idea to preserve a known-working distro for
| some old PC, especially for discontinued or less-used
| architectures. Just saw a discussion the other day about
| finding 32-bit Debian for an old laptop.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > preserve
|
| I don't know how it ended up with later generations, but
| all the CD-R and DVD-R discs that I thought I had archived
| everything on became entirely unreadable after something
| around 7 to 8 years.
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| Yeah! I have had that exact same feeling! The one I remember
| burning the most was a collection of photos and movies of my
| family. I printed across the disc a photo of everyone. It was
| just so cool, even in black and white, but I always held back
| because they were a little expensive, and I wanted to save
| them for something really special! Had they been the same
| price as other discs.. I think I would have used them more.
| axoltl wrote:
| It's a slightly more involved project, but tmbinc managed to
| write arbitrary pictures to a DVD surface:
|
| https://debugmo.de/2022/05/fjita-the-project-that-wasnt-mean...
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Back in the day, there was a Yamaha burner with a feature called
| "DiscT@2". It could burn images and text onto the unused area of
| a CD-ROM. I just _had_ to get it and did so, and I had a bit of
| fun with it.
| xattt wrote:
| It seemed especially badass when the model number was the
| CRW-F1, released in 2002.
|
| It was also cool because the activity would blink purple
| (orange + blue) during writing. This set it apart when blue
| LEDs were all the rage.
| jonah-archive wrote:
| I still have mine (in a firewire enclosure)! Last tested the
| DiscT@2 feature about four years ago, at the time qpxtool had
| a utility for burning the imagery under Linux.
| m-s-y wrote:
| Same. I had one of these in '98/'99. The disc didn't even go
| into a standard tray---you had to use a caddy that completely
| enveloped the disc.
| 4rt wrote:
| any idea what the caddy did?
|
| some sort of feedback for rotation angle maybe?
| chaboud wrote:
| The caddies were just a simple loading mechanism, with a
| spring door like a floppy disc. I suspect they had the life
| they did because someone was hoping that we would all buy
| ultra-expensive caddies for our collections instead of
| moving discs in and out of cases.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Caddies were fairly common in early CD-ROM drives. Tray-
| loading (and, even later, slot-loading) drives were a later
| development.
|
| One theory I've seen is that caddies were developed in part
| to protect valuable data CDs from accidental damage, and
| faded in popularity as software became more affordable.
| Early multimedia software could be quite expensive, with
| some titles running into the hundreds of dollars.
| ramses0 wrote:
| Discs always used to be in cases/sleeves. The caddies were
| a natural extension of that same metaphor.
|
| 5-1/2: "floppy" plastic outer shell with a rectangle cutout
| across the disc, and a circle cutout so the disc could be
| squeezed/grabbed and then rotated. Stored in a paper sleeve
| to protect from scratching, all those were usually in a
| plastic case that held 10-100.
|
| 3-1/2: hard outer shell, metal exposed ring/hook in the
| middle, spring-closing door to protect from scratching.
| These had gone from ~360kb to 1.44mb (4x increase) and
| space hadn't bloated out yet. They were durable enough not
| to bend, and the protective door meant it was semi-
| dust/sand-proof.
|
| Then along came CD'd... jewel cases, but you're carefully
| handling the actual media (ie: that magnetic disc/vinyl
| "record" from within the 5-1/2 floppy).
|
| Caddies gave you the feel and protection of the 3-1/2 hard
| case disks, and were actually pretty useful if you had like
| a 6-CD encyclopedia set (eg: Encarta 2003 -
| https://news.microsoft.com/source/2002/06/27/microsoft-
| encar...).
|
| You'd generally install a 50-100MB program and have to swap
| CD's depending on what program you had open (or what it was
| asking for). Even! There were IIRC 3-disc changer drives
| (like car audio) where you could load up a cartridge and
| switch (slowly) between discs 1, 2, and 3.
|
| In some cases they were really useful! We had one with like
| a 20-slot Rolodex style storage box and you could load up
| the caddies (and type labels!) and keep the optical media
| safe from grubby kid's hands.
|
| Zork, Myst, 7th Guest, Encarta, Clip Art bundles, font
| bundles... at a time when Nintendo was the contemporaneous
| technology, switching "cartridges" to whatever you were
| working on was an incredibly efficient use of space and
| money compared to how expensive hard drives were!
| bayindirh wrote:
| I still have that particular Yamaha burner (CRW-F1). Besides
| DiscT@2, which I used to burn all types of useful information,
| it had really good burn quality. Given I used a good brand,
| none of the discs had rotted or lost data even after a decade.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I suppose these shapes could be made _incredibly detailed_. There
| must be some kind of application for that.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Its basically a bespoke diffraction grating printer, indeed.
| So, you could probably print holographic images?
| _def wrote:
| This github issue mentions a paper about holographic images
| on a DVD:
| https://github.com/arduinocelentano/cdimage/issues/14
|
| But I can't actually imagine what it would look like. Sounds
| amazing though!
| meindnoch wrote:
| LightScribe reinvented?
| Animats wrote:
| Right. See [1]
|
| It was really slow, but it did work.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightScribe
| jccalhoun wrote:
| No. It is reinventing DiscT@2
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DiscT@2
| amelius wrote:
| Can it still hold data?
| _def wrote:
| I assume no
| https://github.com/arduinocelentano/cdimage/issues/16
| classichasclass wrote:
| But a multisession disc with this technique should be
| possible, using a data track and then the rest as "picture
| audio."
| ziofill wrote:
| +1 for the GitHub user name :)
| grishka wrote:
| Oh wow, the readme to one of the mentioned projects is in KOI8.
| It's been decades since I last saw that encoding used.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Congrats to the author - a few decades ago I attempted the same,
| with very little success (using data tracks, not audio, which
| might have been my mistake).
|
| The challenge (as I saw it) was that the drive has the option to
| toggle the state of the laser every sector, effectively letting
| it invert all your data if it wants to. To have control of the
| laser state, you need to be able to do perfect predictions if the
| drive will toggle or not.
|
| Any unpredicted bit leads to the laser state toggling and the
| image being ruined.
| lucianbr wrote:
| Assuming control of the decision to toggle, could that be used
| to draw something even while burning useful data? Of course you
| would have very low precision, but still. Maybe an outline or
| something.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Yes. You get the option to toggle the laser every 33 bytes,
| which is a lot of controllable toggles to make cool patterns.
| eahm wrote:
| 30+ years of computer and I had no idea you could do this. These
| are the kind of things I get excited about!
| ungawatkt wrote:
| I gave this a go about 3 years ago when the hackday project[1]
| first got published, it turns out choosing the parameters is
| _very_ disc dependent, since every disc is a little bit different
| (possibly even between lots of the same type, not published
| anywhere, and quite sensitive. I got it working for the CD-R's I
| got, but it took ~50 experiments to get ok parameters (the image
| was pretty good, but still wobbly in some areas of the disc).
|
| That said, the end result is pretty cool, if hard to photograph.
|
| [1] https://hackaday.io/project/186303-burning-pictures-on-a-
| com...
| danjc wrote:
| It would be awesome if you could encode data using this technique
| bestham wrote:
| Just burn a QR-code.
| hiatus wrote:
| Are not visible pictures encoded data?
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| Can you encode holograms, similar to scratch holograms?
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(page generated 2025-06-08 23:01 UTC)