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» Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE   » Community   » Film-Yak   » Future of CD-Rw and DVD-RW ? (Page 1)

 
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Author Topic: Future of CD-Rw and DVD-RW ?
Claude S. Ayakawa
Film God

Posts: 2738
From: Waipahu, Hawaii, USA
Registered: Aug 2002

- posted 06-10-2014 03:36 PM      Profile for Claude S. Ayakawa   Author's Homepage   Email Claude S. Ayakawa   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
I just replaced my almost five year old Mac laptop with a new 13 inch MacBook Pro that still came with a disc drive and was told it is the only current new model that has one. I asked why and the Mac person told me the computing world is moving away from discs just like they did with floppy discs and Flash drives are the 'in' thing now. Almost all new Macs will now need a external disc drive to read and burn discs. On top of that, my local Costco where I have always bought blank CD RWs and DVD RWs have not had any for sale now for a while and the sales person does know if they will ever carry them again. I have seen them at Sam's Club and other retailers but for how long? Are CD RW and DVD RW going to be eventually phased out soon?

-Claude

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Frank Cox
Film God

Posts: 2234
From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada
Registered: Apr 2011

- posted 06-10-2014 03:44 PM      Profile for Frank Cox   Author's Homepage   Email Frank Cox   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
CD and DVD discs for computer applications are pretty much dead. The last few computers that I've had built don't have CD or DVD drives.

I haven't actually handled a CD or DVD with anything on it other than an installation image for quite a few years.

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Sam Graham
AKA: "The Evil Sam Graham". Wackiness ensues.

Posts: 1431
From: Waukee, IA
Registered: Dec 2004

- posted 06-10-2014 04:17 PM      Profile for Sam Graham   Author's Homepage   Email Sam Graham   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
It's true. They're on their way out in the name of downloads and Cloud storage.

For laptops, a lack of disc drive and use of SSD hard drives means a far thinner design is possible. And there's fewer mechanical things to break down.

The outboard units are fine, though, and cheap. Even Apple's "superdrive" is only $79.

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Marcel Birgelen
Film God

Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012

- posted 06-10-2014 05:16 PM      Profile for Marcel Birgelen   Email Marcel Birgelen   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
CDs and DVDs are still one of the easier options to use if you want to install an operating system from scratch on a machine. So, whenever I need to load Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, VMWare ESXi, or what not, to a blank machine, I still prefer CD/DVDs above some kind of bootable USB stick. You just burn the image you got/downloaded from the supplier to a blank disc and if the device doesn't have an internal CD/DVD you just hook it up via USB.

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Jesse Skeen
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1517
From: Sacramento, CA
Registered: Aug 2000

- posted 06-11-2014 05:59 AM      Profile for Jesse Skeen   Email Jesse Skeen   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
I always bring my laptop to friends' places so I can rip their DVDs, then burn them to blanks later [Smile]

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Scott Norwood
Film God

Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99

- posted 06-11-2014 07:13 AM      Profile for Scott Norwood   Author's Homepage   Email Scott Norwood   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
The -RW (rewriteable) disks were never a good idea. They did not have a high degree of compatibility with older drives and the -R blanks were cheap enough that the more expensive rewriteable disks were rather pointless.

I still find optical disks useful as a way to distribute data (flash drives need to be formatted as NTFS/ext3/HFS+/etc. and not every platform will read every type of format). CD-Rs and DVD-Rs (I have never found a use for DVD+R) are cheap enough to be disposable and can be read by any system. Flash drives also have a limited life expectancy (more limited that CD-R or DVD-R, both of which are already rather limited).

As mentioned above, optical disks are generally the easiest way to install an operating system.

Also, I like to burn compilation music CDs for use in my car.

I don't necessarily feel the need to have a CD/DVD drive in every computer I use, but I would not want to be without at least one.

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Sam Graham
AKA: "The Evil Sam Graham". Wackiness ensues.

Posts: 1431
From: Waukee, IA
Registered: Dec 2004

- posted 06-11-2014 08:11 AM      Profile for Sam Graham   Author's Homepage   Email Sam Graham   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
quote: Scott Norwood
Also, I like to burn compilation music CDs for use in my car.
I'm still a music CD buyer (another increasingly rare breed) and burned copies for my car...up until just recently when I got a new (to me) car that doesn't have a six CD changer.

The alternative solution (to piles of CD's and changing each on on the fly) was to upload CD's to iTunes as raw WAV files, which I then load onto an old iPhone 4S that I've semi-retired into being a hard drive for the car. I just leave it plugged into the USB interface.

The 16GB model holds about 25 albums worth of WAV files and plays back at CD quality.

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Sean Weitzel
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 619
From: Vacaville, CA (1790 miles west of Rockwall)
Registered: Dec 1999

- posted 06-11-2014 12:38 PM      Profile for Sean Weitzel   Email Sean Weitzel   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
I had to flash the system bios on a fairly recent motherboard yesterday. The flash utility was a pure dos binary. I had to create a bootable CD with dos and the utility on it to accomplish this. www.bootdisk.com is your friend.

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Justin Hamaker
Film God

Posts: 2253
From: Lakeport, CA USA
Registered: Jan 2004

- posted 06-11-2014 02:30 PM      Profile for Justin Hamaker   Author's Homepage   Email Justin Hamaker   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
The problem with optical discs is they don't have enough storage capacity for modern needs. Solid state drives and memory sticks offer a more flexible solution with greater capacity. As mentioned above, the main value for optical discs is installing an operating system or for music discs.

Over the last couple years, the only reason I have had to burn files to a CD/DVD was to give security camera footage to the local sheriff's department.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

- posted 06-11-2014 08:53 PM      Profile for Bobby Henderson   Email Bobby Henderson   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
The worsening plight of the optical disc has everything to do with large capacity external hard discs.

I don't think it has nearly as much to do with "the cloud," as a bunch of computer industry types like to think. Most people have hundreds or even thousands of Gigabytes worth of digital stuff. "The cloud" can't store all that stuff easily or for cheap either. I do use cloud-based services like Dropbox, but I only use it for files I alter quite a bit or for temporarily sharing some fairly big files.

Large capacity external hard discs have allowed a lot of people to clear out a bunch of clutter. I have my entire music CD collection ripped in .WAV format and copies to a couple different external hard drives. The CDs themselves can be stored in a box out of sight instead of taking up a bunch of space on a shelf. I used to backup a lot of art files and other computer data to CD-R discs. Now that hard drive capacity is so cheap it's just a lot easier to have 20 years worth of art files handy on one disc. I can open and alter any of those files. After a certain amount of time or if the hard disc starts acting a little funky the data can be copied over to a new one (I do maintain multiple back-ups of work files).

I still need optical disc drives to a certain extent for work. Some customers will bring in art files burned onto a CD-R or DVD-R disc. Or they'll ask for files burned to one. Once in awhile I'll need to burn something that will play in a DVD player or Blu-ray player. Blank CD and DVD discs are cheaper than USB flash memory sticks.

Movies are still better on Blu-ray than any streaming service. Perhaps that might change whenever Internet connections of 20Mb/s-30Mb/s are common around the country. Right now America's Internet speeds are still laughably, pathetically slow compared to a bunch of other areas around the world. So I'm going to keep using Blu-ray. It's not easy to buy a computer with a built in Blu-ray drive -particularly a Blu-ray burner (my personal notebook and work desktop both have Blu-ray burners).

quote: Scott Norwood
The -RW (rewriteable) disks were never a good idea. They did not have a high degree of compatibility with older drives and the -R blanks were cheap enough that the more expensive rewriteable disks were rather pointless.
The big problem I had with the +/-RW types of discs: they often required some specific breed of disc burning software in order to work. I hated that. After a couple bad experiences with RW discs more than 10 years ago I never used RW again. If I burn data to an optical disc I always make it a burn once/closed session disc.

quote: Sam Graham
I'm still a music CD buyer (another increasingly rare breed) and burned copies for my car...up until just recently when I got a new (to me) car that doesn't have a six CD changer.
I still prefer buying music on CD -provided if the music act in question recorded enough material to make the entire album worth buying.

There's not a lot of options out there for buying lossless compressed music singles. I'm not a big fan of the lossy compressed music files sold by iTunes and Amazon. They've upped the bit rates from a puny 128kb/s to 256kb/s VBR, but you can still hear some noticeable differences. Google Music sells 320kb/s constant bit rate MP3 files. That's not too bad. Nevertheless, lossless is still better. This is despite the fact so many music producers compress the hell out of a song's dynamics just to make it louder.

I usually take my store bought CDs and rip them to .WAV files. I had a few with some strange copy protection tricks, but got around them with the "extract from CD" function in Adobe Audition.

quote: Justin Hamaker
The problem with optical discs is they don't have enough storage capacity for modern needs.
That depends on what the need may be. Sometimes I need more storage capacity than a 4.7GB DVD-R disc will provide. Then there are other times where I don't even have enough data to fill up a 700MB CD-R disc. For the smaller stuff, I'm using Dropbox more.

I wish the BD-R format had grown more popular. 25GB-50GB on an optical disc is pretty damned good. But very few people have Blu-ray burners and the blank discs have always been fairly expensive.

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

- posted 06-11-2014 10:06 PM      Profile for Leo Enticknap   Author's Homepage   Email Leo Enticknap   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Ironically, I'm burning more optical discs now than at any time in my life, just as they're on the verge of obsolescence. I'm back in the theater biz, and we are frequently sent files of trailers (usually H.264 or ProRes) for arthouse and re-release titles that I'm putting through DCP-o-matic, burning to a DVD-R and then circulating to our two sites for ingestion into the DSS200s there. DVD-Rs are the perfect size, single layer ones are now so cheap that they're almost being given away, I'm not at risk of losing any USB flash drives that way and we can store the discs in envelopes afterwards, taking up very little space, for use if we ever get the movies back again.

As long as the Internet connections to our sites are slow enough that feeding the servers through the wire is not a viable option, even for 1-2GB trailer DCPs, this is turning out to be the most effective solution.

Agreed with Bobby on the price of BD writable media. In particular, double layer discs are still ridiculously pricey. I'm almost wondering if this is deliberate, as an anti-piracy measure.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

- posted 06-12-2014 01:08 AM      Profile for Bobby Henderson   Email Bobby Henderson   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
I kind of wonder if the outrageous price of blank BD-R/RW media is part of licking the all mighty asshole of the technological God known as "Apple." Those douche bags on Infinity Drive had something to do with the problem, trying to leverage bullshit iTunes as a movie streaming service. Yeah, I heard of Netflix. I'm actually an Amazon Prime subscriber. But Apple can eat it since they wanted to force low bit rate, low quality bullshit down everyone's throats
[Mad] God-for-fucking-bid any company besides Apple (such as Sony for instance) make a buck off an advance in technology.

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Sam Graham
AKA: "The Evil Sam Graham". Wackiness ensues.

Posts: 1431
From: Waukee, IA
Registered: Dec 2004

- posted 06-12-2014 04:27 PM      Profile for Sam Graham   Author's Homepage   Email Sam Graham   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
quote: Bobby Henderson
I still prefer buying music on CD -provided if the music act in question recorded enough material to make the entire album worth buying.
Exactly. Which is why I buy fewer than ten albums a year anymore. In fact, the only 2014 release I've purchased this year is Rosanne Cash - "The River and the Thread" so far. And I don't buy singles. If the artist doesn't release an album worth of decent material and/or doesn't release CD's, they're out of luck with me.

quote: Bobby Henderson
There's not a lot of options out there for buying lossless compressed music singles. I'm not a big fan of the lossy compressed music files sold by iTunes and Amazon. They've upped the bit rates from a puny 128kb/s to 256kb/s VBR, but you can still hear some noticeable differences. Google Music sells 320kb/s constant bit rate MP3 files. That's not too bad. Nevertheless, lossless is still better. This is despite the fact so many music producers compress the hell out of a song's dynamics just to make it louder.
I've found it's not just lossless, but WAV files specifically.

I don't think it's just compression. There's some re-EQ'ing going on. And I've found that's also true with Apple Lossless. The converted files are far more bass heavy. I upload songs at 320kbps for my current phone and have played around with Apple Lossless. I can't tell the difference between the two. But WAV files are night and day different.

So I consider WAV to be the only way to go to get CD quality.

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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today

Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99

- posted 06-13-2014 02:10 PM      Profile for Joe Redifer   Author's Homepage   Email Joe Redifer   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
quote: Sam Graham
Even Apple's "superdrive" is only $79.
Which is way too much. It doesn't even do Blu-ray and I think it's only USB 2. Only losers still use USB 2. Might as well not even have running water.

quote: Sam Graham
There's some re-EQ'ing going on. And I've found that's also true with Apple Lossless. The converted files are far more bass heavy.
Below is the spectrum of a raw WAV file (left and right channels) and the Apple Lossless M4A version I made from it. No difference at all whatsoever. They are the same.

-

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

- posted 06-13-2014 03:07 PM      Profile for Bobby Henderson   Email Bobby Henderson   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
How do we know that image wasn't Photoshopped?
[evil] [Razz]

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