A tool for burning visible pictures on a compact disc surface
37 comments
·June 7, 2025Cockbrand
xattt
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.
Molitor5901
I fondly remember LightScribe, that was a pretty awesome technology.
gambiting
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
Someone would probably buy them on eBay for a good price.
ganoushoreilly
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
Looks like you can still buy 10-packs on eBay for £15, not really collectible yet it seems :-)
londons_explore
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
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.
HPsquared
I suppose these shapes could be made incredibly detailed. There must be some kind of application for that.
isoprophlex
Its basically a bespoke diffraction grating printer, indeed. So, you could probably print holographic images?
_def
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!
extraduder_ire
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.
axoltl
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...
grishka
Oh wow, the readme to one of the mentioned projects is in KOI8. It's been decades since I last saw that encoding used.
zapp42
I love the Github username!
ziofill
+1 for the GitHub user name :)
globular-toast
If only this existed 15 years ago when I got rid of my burners.
sandreas
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
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
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
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
I have so many CDs/DVDs that cannot be read anymore that I stopped using them for backups.
HPsquared
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.
pavel_lishin
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
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.
mystified5016
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
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.