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A 'CD recorder' is a compact disc drive that can be used to produce discs readable in other CD-ROM drives and audio CD players.
A 'DVD recorder' produces DVD discs playable in stand-alone video players or DVD-ROM drives. ("DVD recorder" may also refer not just to the drive unit, but also to consumer set-top devices which record video onto DVD media.)
A 'Blu-ray disc recorder' produces BDs playable in BD-ROM drives.
Optical disc recorders are generally used for small-scale archival or data exchange, being slower and more materially expensive than the moulding process used to mass-manufacture pressed discs. Nevertheless, they (along with flash memory) have displaced floppy disks and magnetic tape in most cases because of the low cost of optical media and the near-ubiquity of optical drives in computers and consumer entertainment hardware.

Contents

Standards and formats

Compatibility

Performance

Recording schemes

Recorder Unique Identifier

See also

Notes and references

External links

Standards and formats

A recorder encodes (or ''burns'') data onto a recordable CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R, BD-R or HD DVD-R disc (called a ''blank'') by selectively heating parts of an organic dye layer in the disc with a laser in its write head. This changes the reflectivity of the dye, thereby creating marks that can be read as with the "pits" and "lands" on pressed discs. The process is permanent and the media can be written to only once.
For rewriteable CD-RW, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM, BD-RE, BD-R DL, BD-RE DL, BD-RAM, HD-DVD-R, HD DVD-RW HD-DVD-R DL, HD-DVD-RW DL, HD-DVD-RAM and HD DVD-RAM media, the laser is used to melt a crystalline metal alloy in the recording layer of the disc. Depending on the amount of power applied, the substance may be allowed to melt back into crystalline form or left in an amorphous form, enabling marks of varying reflectivity to be created. Most rewriteable media is rated by manufacturers at up to 1000 write/erase cycles.
The competing DVD+R and DVD-R disc formats use very similar dye-based media, but differ mainly in the way timing hints for the write head are laid out on the disc surface. This is also the case with DVD+RW and DVD-RW.
Most internal CD recorders for personal computers, server systems and workstations are designed to fit in a standard 5.25" drive bay and connect to their host via an ATA, SATA or SCSI bus. External CD recorders usually have USB, FireWire or SCSI interfaces. Some portable versions for laptop use power themselves off batteries or off their interface bus.
SCSI recorders are less common and tend to be more expensive because of the cost of their interface chipsets and more complex SCSI connectors.
Some drives support Hewlett-Packard's LightScribe photothermal printing technology, using specially coated discs.

Compatibility

	Pressed CD	CD-R	CD-RW	Pressed DVD	DVD-R	DVD+R	DVD-RW	DVD+RW	DVD+R DL	Pressed BD	BD-R	BD-RE
Audio CD player	Read	Read	Read	None	None	None	None	None	None	None	None	None
CD-ROM	Read	Read	Read	None	None	None	None	None	None	None	None	None
CD-R recorder	Read	Write	Read	None	None	None	None	None	None	None	None	None
CD-RW recorder	Read	Write	Write	None	None	None	None	None	None	None	None	None
DVD-ROM	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	None	None	None
DVD-R recorder	Read	Write	Write	Read	Write	Read	Read	Read	Read	None	None	None
DVD-RW recorder	Read	Write	Write	Read	Write	Read	Write	Read	Read	None	None	None
DVD+R recorder	Read	Write	Write	Read	Read	Write	Read	Read	Read	None	None	None
DVD+RW recorder	Read	Write	Write	Read	Read	Write	Read	Write	Read	None	None	None
DVD±RW recorder	Read	Write	Write	Read	Write	Write	Write	Write	Read	None	None	None
DVD±RW/DVD+R DL recorder	Read	Write	Write	Read	Write	Write	Write	Write	Write	None	None	None
BD-ROM	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read	Read
BD-R recorder	Read	Write	Write	Read	Write	Write	Write	Write	Write	Read	Write	Read
BD-RE recorder	Read	Write	Write	Read	Write	Write	Write	Write	Write	Read	Write	Write

★ Some types of CD-R media with less-reflective dyes may cause problems.

★ May not work in non MultiRead-compliant drives.

★ May not work in some early-model DVD-ROM drives.

★ A large-scale compatibility test conducted by cdrinfo.com in July 2003 found DVD-R discs playable by 96.74%, DVD+R by 87.32%, DVD-RW by 87.68% and DVD+RW by 86.96% of consumer DVD players and DVD-ROM drives.

★ Read compatibility with existing DVD drives and recorders was found by EMediaLive in November 2004 to vary greatly with the brand of DVD+R DL media used.

★ May not work in non DVD Multi-compliant drives.

★ Recorder firmware may blacklist or otherwise refuse to record to some brands of DVD-RW media.

★ As of April 2005, all DVD+R DL recorders on the market are Super Multi-capable.

★ As of October 2006, recently released BD drives are able to read and write CD media.

Performance

The recording speed of a drive is determined by the speed at which the spiral groove of the disc passes under its recording head, or its linear velocity. The rate at which the disc spins is its angular velocity.
Early-model recorders were CLV (constant linear velocity) drives. The recording speed on such drives was rated in multiples of 150 KiB/s; a 4X drive, for instance, would write steadily at around 600 KiB/s. The transfer rate was kept constant by having the spindle motor in the drive vary in speed and run about 2.5 times as fast when recording at the inner rim of the disc as on the outer rim.
There are mechanical limits to how quickly a disc can be spun. Beyond a certain rate of rotation, centrifugal stress can cause the disc plastic to creep and possibly shatter. This limits the maximum reading and writing speeds for CDs to about 52x (around 10000 RPM) at the outer edge of the disc. Some drives further lower their maximum read speed to around 40x on the reasoning that blank discs will be clear of structural damage, but that discs inserted for reading may not be. Without higher rotational speeds, increased read performance is still attainable by using multiple lens assemblies or by simultaneously reading from more than one point on the data groove[1], but drives with such mechanisms are expensive to manufacture and are uncommon.
To keep the rotational speed of the disc safely low, more recent high-speed recorders tend to use the Z-CLV (zoned constant linear velocity) scheme. This divides the disc into stepped zones, each of which has its own constant linear velocity. A Z-CLV recorder rated at "52X", for example, would write at 20X on the innermost zone and then progressively step up to 52X at the outer rim.
In the late 1990s, ''buffer underruns'' became a very common problem as high-speed CD recorders began to appear in home and office computers, which—for a variety of reasons—often could not muster the I/O performance to keep the data stream to the recorder steadily fed. The recorder, should it run short, would be forced to halt the recording process, leaving a truncated track that usually renders the disc useless.
In response, manufacturers of CD recorders began shipping drives with "buffer underrun protection" (under various trade names, such as Sanyo's "BURN-Proof", Ricoh's "JustLink" and Yamaha's "Lossless Link"). These can suspend and resume the recording process in such a way that the gap the stoppage produces can be dealt with by the error-correcting logic built into CD players and CD-ROM drives. The first of these drives were rated at 12X and 16X.

Recording schemes

CD recording on personal computers was originally a batch-oriented task in that it required specialised authoring software to create an "image" of the data to record, and to record it to disc in the one session. This was acceptable for archival purposes, but limited the general convenience of CD-R and CD-RW discs as a removeable storage medium.
Packet writing is a scheme in which the recorder writes incrementally to disc in short bursts, or packets. Sequential packet writing fills the disc with packets from bottom up. To make it readable in CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives, the disc can be ''closed'' at any time by writing a final table-of-contents to the start of the disc; thereafter, the disc cannot be packet-written any further. Packet writing, together with support from the operating system and a file system like UDF, can be used to mimic random write-access as in media like flash memory and magnetic disks.
Fixed-length packet writing (on CD-RW and DVD-RW media) divides up the disc into padded, fixed-size packets. The padding reduces the capacity of the disc, but allows the recorder to start and stop recording on an individual packet without affecting its neighbours. These resemble the block-writeable access offered by magnetic media closely enough that many conventional file systems will work as-is. Such discs, however, are not readable in most CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives or on most operating systems without additional third-party drivers.
The DVD+RW disc format goes further by embedding more accurate timing hints in the data groove of the disc and allowing individual data blocks to be replaced without affecting backwards compatibility (a feature dubbed "lossless linking"). The format itself was designed to deal with discontinuous recording because it was expected to be widely used in digital video recorders. Many such DVRs use variable-rate video compression schemes which require them to record in short bursts; some allow simultaneous playback and recording by alternating quickly between recording to the tail of the disc whilst reading from elsewhere.
Mount Rainier aims to make packet-written CD-RW and DVD+RW discs as convenient to use as that of removable magnetic media by having the firmware format new discs in the background and manage media defects (by automatically mapping parts of the disc which have been worn out by erase cycles to reserve space elsewhere on the disc). As of February 2007, support for Mount Rainier is natively supported in Windows Vista. All previous versions of Windows require a third-party solution, as does Mac OS X.

Recorder Unique Identifier

Due to pressure from the music industry (as represented by the IFPI and RIAA) Philips developed the so called Recorder Identification Code (RID) to allow a media to be uniquely associated with the recorder that recorded it. This standard is contained in the Rainbow Books. The RID-Code is the opposite to the Source Identification Code (SID), an eight character supplier code that's placed on every CD-ROM.
The RID-Code consists of a supplier code (i.e. "PHI" for Philips), a model number and the unique ID of the recorder.

See also

★ Compact disc, CD-R. CD-RW

★ CDDA, CD ripping, Cue sheets

★ DVD, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW

★ ISO image

★ List of optical disc authoring software

★ MultiLevel Recording

★ Overburning

★ Receiver (radio)

Notes and references

External links

★ Understanding CD-R & CD-RW

★ The Authoritative Blu-ray Disc (BD) FAQ by Hugh Bennett

★ The Authoritative HD DVD FAQ by Hugh Bennett

★ Guide to CD Writing and writing standards

★ CD-Recordable FAQ

★ Why Audio CD-R Discs Won't Always Play