Friday, December 16, 2005

Lightscribe!

Check out Lightscribe.

It's a way to label your custom CD's and DVD's. After you burn your CD/DVD, you just flip it over and Lightscribe uses your burner to label it.

How cool is that!

Later,

3 people have spouted off:

tom said...

"I've seen it; it's rubbish." -Marvin, the Paranoid Android.

You need a specail burner and special CD-Rs. It seems a bit excessive to me; a simple Sharpie works fine.

John said...
Yeah, I know. It's still cool.
It's incuded on new hp pavilion notebooks.
12/17/05, 9:08 AM
phil said...

Hey, I had a similar idea like two years ago. Only I was thinking of writing some custom software for a regular cd burner using regular cds that would just burn an image into the disc. There are a few problems with this idea though. The data encoding is not quite as simple as a pit for a bit. Each bit is a series of pits and lands(?) - it's an error correction encoding. You can see the data on a cd - you can tell where it's been written to and where it hasn't, but if you wrote half a disc of all binary 1's and half a disc of all 0's, I don't think that you'd be able to tell the difference - because each is actually made of a bunch of pits and lands.

The lightscribe drive has to be able to burn a solid line into the disk in order to make a high contrast image - the discs have a special layer that gives a high contrast image, though I bet you'd be able to see it if you burned it to a regular disc (not label side of course).

The drive probably can detect the difference between the data side and the label side and won't let you burn an image to the data side or a regular disc