A tool for burning visible pictures on a compact disc surface

https://github.com/arduinocelentano/cdimage

113•carlesfe•13h ago

Comments

globular-toast•8h ago

If only this existed 15 years ago when I got rid of my burners.

pavel_lishin•8h ago

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•8h ago

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•8h ago

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•7h ago

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•7h ago

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•7h ago

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•7h ago

I have so many CDs/DVDs that cannot be read anymore that I stopped using them for backups.

gambiting•6h ago

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•7h ago

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•7h ago

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•8h ago

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•8h ago

I love the Github username!

thomassmith65•6h ago

I gather it's a reference to the pop singer Adriano Celentano?

myself248•2h ago

Ol rait!

Molitor5901•7h ago

I fondly remember LightScribe, that was a pretty awesome technology.

gambiting•6h ago

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•6h ago

Someone would probably buy them on eBay for a good price.

ganoushoreilly•6h ago

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.

gambiting•5h ago

Looks like you can still buy 10-packs on eBay for £15, not really collectible yet it seems :-)

yaky•54m ago

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.

axoltl•7h ago

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•7h ago

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•6h ago

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•2h ago

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•6h ago

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•3h ago

any idea what the caddy did?

some sort of feedback for rotation angle maybe?

chaboud•1h ago

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•2m ago

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.

HPsquared•7h ago

I suppose these shapes could be made incredibly detailed. There must be some kind of application for that.

isoprophlex•6h ago

Its basically a bespoke diffraction grating printer, indeed. So, you could probably print holographic images?

_def•5h ago

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•5h ago

LightScribe reinvented?

Animats•4h ago

Right. See [1]

It was really slow, but it did work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightScribe

amelius•5h ago

Can it still hold data?

_def•5h ago

I assume no https://github.com/arduinocelentano/cdimage/issues/16

ziofill•5h ago

+1 for the GitHub user name :)

grishka•4h ago

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•4h ago

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•4h ago

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.

eahm•2h ago

30+ years of computer and I had no idea you could do this. These are the kind of things I get excited about!

ungawatkt•1h ago

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•1h ago

It would be awesome if you could encode data using this technique

bestham•1h ago

Just burn a QR-code.

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