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All posts tagged "dvds"


Thursday, May 21, 2009

2000 Movies on a Single DVD? You Betcha'!

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home News" @ 12:30 PM

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105...feed&subj=Crave

"Last month, GE revealed that its research scientists had discovered a way, using holographic technology, to store 100 DVDs worth of information on a single standard DVD. What a difference a few weeks make. In what can only be seen as a "serving" (or pwning) of the GE researchers, the B-Boys researchers at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, have gone way past 100 and on to 2,000. While standard DVDs are made with three spatial dimensions, the Aussie researchers added two more. Using nanoparticles--extremely small bits of matter--the Swinburne team was able to introduce a spectral (or color) dimension and a polarization dimension."

Let's get this right out of the way first: the researches are talking about a 5-10 year timeline on when the methodology for imprinting these discs would be commercially available. It's fascinating technology, to be sure, but as they point out in the article, even if you could fit every James Bond movie onto a single disc, how many people would be willing to pay the $300+ it would likely sell for? Still, business models aside, this is yet another example of how nanotechnology is going to shape our world over the next decade.


Friday, March 27, 2009

Rip Your DVDs to ISO Files for Safe Keeping

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Talk" @ 01:47 PM

We've talked about the issue of old home-burnt CDs and DVDs no longer being readable before on this site, but I did something this week that you may want to emulate: if you have CDs or DVDs, especially ones that contain a fully produced end product (like a DVD with menus), use ImgBurn to rip ISO files of the discs. An ISO is basically just an image of the disc - a big file that, if burned back to a DVD or CD using the proper program, gives you an exact duplicate of the disc. ImgBurn is a free program (but do donate if you use it and like it - I did) that makes the task of both ripping and burning disc images wonderfully simple.

Over the past ten years or so, I've created a handful of wedding DVDs for friends, and last week I thought "You know, if I'm the keeper of the master copy, I should make sure these never fade away" and I ripped them all to ISO files. It's a good thing I did that, because the oldest of the DVDs (about eight years old) gave me a few read errors on one computer - which likely means it's starting to degrade. It's kind of mind-blowing how fragile home-burnt CDs and DVDs can be - you should trust nothing to them, always having a solid backup of the information on them (hopefully on a hard drive).


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