Hacker News

DiscImageStudio: burn visible artwork onto CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs

87 points by bpierre 3 hours ago | 22 comments

apitman 3 hours ago

Throwback to lightscribe which I haven't thought of in many years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightScribe

I have a LightScribe compatible external CD/DVD burner. It came with a LightScribe disc that I haven’t taken the plastic off still to this day. Since it only came with a single one I could never decide which one thing to use that one LightScribe disc for, back when I was still burning things on CD and DVD.

sam1714 2 hours ago

You didn't miss much. It took 20-30 minutes each pass, plus the extra cost for the discs.

But even if you were fine with that, it came out too light under actual lighting conditions, even after you burned it twice, which defeats the use case of making it look professionally labeled. For home use, a Sharpie beat it in every way.

TurkTurkleton 2 hours ago

Huh, that wasn't my experience. I mean, it absolutely was slow especially with sufficiently complex labels, but they generally came out fine. Granted, you absolutely couldn't just drop any arbitrary image into the LightScribe software and have it come out looking good, you'd have to mess with the contrast, but black-and-white text and line art would come out fine. And more legible than Sharpie, with my handwriting.

OptionOfT 2 hours ago

I have the same issue in video games. I always end up at the end not having used my unique items because I only have 1.

unpleasurable 2 hours ago

same but brain

xattt 3 hours ago

DiscT@2 (1), the granddaddy of them all.

This was followed up by Labelflash in 2007(2).

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DiscT@2

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labelflash

Breakthrough 3 hours ago

I had one of these as well... What a trip down memory lane, thanks for sharing.

LeoPanthera 3 minutes ago

Is anyone still making new optical drives?

Animats 2 hours ago

I used to have a label system called Neato, which provided round CD labels you could make on a printer, along with a tool to press them accurately onto the non-recording side of a CD-R. There were even transparent labels, so the resulting disk looked like a commercially produced disk.

linuxkernal 47 minutes ago

Sadly https://www.neatolabels.com/collections/cd-dvd-labels

al_borland 52 minutes ago

I had one of these as well. It was pretty useful in the days when my HHD was 20GB and regularly filled up.

jonhohle 39 minutes ago

Windows 2000 & XP discs had something like this, but on the label side.

FriedPickles 2 hours ago

I've always wondered if this could be used to create 3d holograms.

NDlurker 3 hours ago

Wow! Light Scribe on the data side!

DANmode 37 minutes ago

Do folks here know the data goes “into” the label through the clear plastic?

A fellow xth grader did a science project on this, and I’ll never forget it.

Larrikin 3 hours ago

Do they actually play?

sourweasel 2 hours ago

I can't comment on this particular project, but I know that similar projects have allowed adding images to the unused portions of the disc. A given region of the disc cannot be both image and data, but the disc can contain an inner region of data and imagery in the outer unused portion.

jedbrooke 2 hours ago

DVD codec probably allows for a certain amount of error correction to recover from scratches, images can still look readable to humans despite a bit of noise, I wonder if there’s enough overlap there to meet in the middle and have an image that also stores data

anonym29 3 hours ago

star graph looks very inorganic

kuberwastaken 2 hours ago

That's what happens when your project randomly blows up through a translated tweet haha

carplaybits 3 hours ago

[flagged]

cowlevel 2 hours ago

Truly, China has overtaken the Western world in innovation.

I wonder if the disk can still hold data at the same time.