March 22nd, 2008

Hexalock, a developer of digital copy protection solutions, announced today a new copy protection technology for both data and video stored on DVD recordable discs.

The company released HexDVDR-Video, which protects against copying video DVDs and HexDVD-DATA, for protection of software and data.

According to Hexalock, HexDVDR-Video does not allow direct 1:1 copying of a DVD video disc, by forcing any copy program to stop or require extended time (multiple hours) to copy. Duplicating the complete DVD by file based copying is also not possible.

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February 3rd, 2008

The Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA) and Ecma International announced today that the International Standards Organization (ISO) has approved ISO/IEC 10995, a global standard for optical media archive life testing for recordable and rewritable DVDs. The standard will enable the optical storage industry to offer reliable archival-grade optical discs to help end-users select the media life expectancy best suited to their application requirements.

Approval of the new standard is the culmination of joint development efforts by OSTA and ECMA to define standard procedures for media archive life testing and classification, and then fast track the archival-grade optical disc testing specification through the ISO process.

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January 1st, 2008

We thought we’d take a second to wish everyone a happy and prosperous 2008. Happy New Year!

We have many new features planned for the site as well as the addition of several guest authors, so stay tuned for more CD and DVD media news!

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December 11th, 2007

Taiyo Yuden filed a patent suit in the United States against two Taiwanese makers of DVD discs for violation of manufacturing technology for DVD-R discs.

Taiyo Yuden filed a suit at a California district court against Prodisc Technology on Oct. 30 and Ritek on Nov. 21, Taiyo Yuden spokeswoman Rieko Kimoto said.

Taiyo Yuden said the two Taiwanese firms infringed three patents regarding the manufacturing process for recording functions of DVD-R and had refused to pay patent fees.

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November 18th, 2007

Q: What causes a bad master disc error message in my CD DVD duplicator?

A: Master disc(s) that are scratched, smudged or that have marks such as fingerprints or marker residue on them can affect the quality of the disc. Also, burning errors which result in data being misplaced during the burning process can also contribute to the making of a bad master disc.

Another cause is using cheap/discounted media for your master copies. You may save a few bucks by buying the lesser know brands, but the amount of coasters you’ll end up making will normally outweigh the savings. Stick to manufacturer recommended blank CD DVD media, or you’ll end up wasting money and time.

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November 12th, 2007

Filed under “it’s about freaking time” is the long overdue announcement of color-background blank DVD-R and DVD+R media. What took so long? The fact that gold background media is currently the only option definitely hindered adoption by the masses, in my opinion.

Verbatim announced today the world’s first Color-background LightScribe 16x DVD-R and DVD+R media.

The new 4.7GB LightScribe DVDRs are available in shades of red, orange, yellow, blue and green in addition to the original gold color. Verbatim has begun shipping them in the US market in 25-packs which include five discs of each color.

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October 28th, 2007

Pioneer Corporation (Head Office: Meguro-ku, Tokyo; President: Tamihiko Sudo) and Mitsubishi Kagaku media Co., Ltd. (Head Office: Minato-ku, Tokyo; President: Shigenori Otsuka) have together succeeded in commercialization of recordable Blu-ray Discs (BD-R) with organic dye in the recording layer, and also in developing technology for multiple layered, high speed recording for BD-R with metal nitride in the recording layer.

BD-R with Organic Dye Recording Film
Both companies had been collaborating to develop BD-R with dye since 2004. With this development, Mitsubishi Kagaku Media was responsible for improving organic dye recording materials and producing sample discs, while Pioneer was responsible for evaluating the samples, as well as disc structure design based on verification and simulations for compatibility with disc drives. The synergy of these two areas of expertise has led to a successful development of the 2X organic dye BD-R.

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October 8th, 2007

Maybe not 100% related to optical media (CD and DVD), but very interesting nonetheless. I’m blown away at the speeds offered by Solid State media such as this.

Advanced Media, Inc., manufacturer and marketer of the popular Ridata brand of recordable CD and DVD media, electronic storage products, and digital media accessories, announces its new, non-volatile 32 GB SATA Solid State Disk (SSD) drive. The new SSD drive offers performance that is almost twice as fast a conventional Hard Disk Drive. Look for a 64 GB version of this 2.5″ SATA drive to be available in late November.

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September 12th, 2007

AOpen announces the new 20x multi-format internal DVD RW drive with the SATA interface, called the DSW2012SA. With its blazing fast 20x writing speed and “All You Can Write” capability, AOpen DSW2012SA supports virtually all disk formats, including DVD±R/R DL/RW, DVD-RAM and D-R/RW. Being one of the few complete DVD/CD RW solutions in the industry, AOpen DSW2012SA is also the first DVD writer in the industry to use the SATA interface, making a giant leap in data transfer rate between DVD Drive and motherboard to a level of 150MB/s Ultra-DMA5. This allows users to always pioneer in major PC trends.

AOpen DSW2012SA is one of the few DVD RW drives that supports up to 20x DVD±R and 12x DVD-RAM writing speeds. Its DVD±R DL Double/Dual Layer technology can also write up to 8.5GB data to a DVD disk at 8x speed. With its already mature CD writing technology, AOpen DSW2012SA lets you write disks of all formats using one single drive.

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September 6th, 2007

I’ve had my eye on LightScribe direct disc labeling since it was first announced because I truly feel that the technology could be huge. Having a duplicator tower that burns and “prints” (more like labels) is not only really convenient, but it saves valuable space in a production environment as well.

It looks like LightScribe has improved the print resolution via a free upgrade to the label software, and according to the article below they’re now claiming silkscreen quality? I haven’t seen these first hand, but I think that it would be pretty tough to match a four color print process like silkscreen just by laser etching an image onto a disc. Hmmm…looks like I’ll have to test and provide a review here.

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