I fondly remember LightScribe, that was a pretty awesome technology.
I gave this a go about 3 years ago when the hackday project[1] first got published, it turns out choosing the parameters is _very_ disc dependent, since every disc is a little bit different (possibly even between lots of the same type, not published anywhere, and quite sensitive. I got it working for the CD-R's I got, but it took ~50 experiments to get ok parameters (the image was pretty good, but still wobbly in some areas of the disc).
That said, the end result is pretty cool, if hard to photograph.
[1] https://hackaday.io/project/186303-burning-pictures-on-a-com...
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...
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.
I suppose these shapes could be made incredibly detailed. There must be some kind of application for that.
30+ years of computer and I had no idea you could do this. These are the kind of things I get excited about!
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.
I love the Github username!
It would be awesome if you could encode data using this technique
Can you encode holograms, similar to scratch holograms?
Oh wow, the readme to one of the mentioned projects is in KOI8. It's been decades since I last saw that encoding used.
If only this existed 15 years ago when I got rid of my burners.
Can it still hold data?
+1 for the GitHub user name :)
LightScribe reinvented?
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.