CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, and all the rest

Your videos are like a good, informative, entertaining lecture from everyone's favorite hilarious teacher

Joe Bush

CD-ARRR

Nick Sloan

Probably depends on the player, in my case it didn't play anything. Interesting though, I didn't know about those

That’s data first then audio, which you couldn’t put in CD players of the time, without the risk of frying the speakers. Enhanced CDs had the data at the end, which audio players didn’t read, but computers could. They usually included a music video, or an offline website there.

Bastien Nocera

All the filming had to be done with the computer off. It's quite loud. So, I worked with masking. Immediately after I filmed the talking head, I switched on the computer and filmed what I needed. The desktop portion is just a still image, with chromakeying done on the background the change the color.

Technology Connections

I think I remember that older CD players played data tracks like audio (which was pretty loud noise), while newer devices muted them. The fact that more than 74 minutes can be stored on a CD, and this also was used on music albums, was almost a kind of copy protection for a while (at least a motivation to buy the original), because at the beginning of MiniDisc it had only 60 and 74 minutes recording capacity.

Also the data + audio cds were rather common in video games, I remember Rayman using the format, for both pc and playstation

I kinda expected Myst, as they were pioneers for the use of the CD, cool anyway

Your use of humour is getting ever better! Love it, mate!

I bought my first CD burner in 1998. Back then 650 MB / 74 min CD-Rs were easily available and 700 MB / 80 min was hard to find. In fact some software/games intentionally had more than 650 MB on the disc just to make it harder to copy them. Also 650 MB CDs were more reliable and older CD-Players could read them better than 700 MB CDs. I still have TDK CD-Rs burned in 1998 that work fine while almost anything I burned in 2000-2003 is unreadable. - CD-Text was a neat idea but for a long time it was only used on Sony/Columbia Audio-CDs and it took a long time for other labels to use it - maybe they had to pay Sony to use it? I think Sony developed it. Today almost any Audio-CD you buy has CD-Text but most people don't notice because the CD player they have can't read it and on a PC the titles are automatically downloaded from the internet. But almost all newer car stereos support CD-Text - if they still can play CDs...

Robert

FIRE LASER!!!! I remember my first Iomega ZipCD CD-R drive.

Jason Wellband

I'd love to see the SACD gone further into, it's just such an oddball format that's still pretty popular in certain circles and the whole concept of DSD audio is something i'd love your take on since it's made so over complicated by everyone else who tries to describe it

YOSO

Were all the images on the screen put in post, because I genuinely can't tell if you just perfectly kept the mouse in the same spot, filmed a black screen the whole time, or masked different parts of the frame.

I love the bloopers . great job very informative

h.drew foy

We used to call the multi session ones CD+R (plus r). Vs the cheaper CD-R (minus r).

Nathan Blubaugh

Im curious how the GD-ROM for the dreamcast operates different from the purple book standard. I wonder if the only difference between them is just pit density.

"CD-ROMs", I think. If it were spelled out, I suppose it would be "compact discs, read-only memory", but I'd say that the term "CD-ROM" is well-used enough to have graduated to being a word in its own right, with standard plural "CD-ROMs". CD-ROM is a stupid name anyway, since they're not memory in the traditional sense but storage. It feels like an ad hoc name invented by an engineer who needed to call it something, and ended up sticking.

If I may be additionally pedantic: Your PC isn't misrepresenting anything, it's just not using a standard board's preferred redefinition. "Kibibyte" and friends didn't exist until 1998, and a Kilobyte was 1024 before then technically, although some manufacturers used multiples of 1000, particularly megs and gigs, incorrectly. If you think about it in context of a CD-R, if the CD-R was printed before 1998 it would be 700*1024*1024. It's absurd to expect the manufacturers to change the packaging. The choice to not use Mebibyte for 1000*1000 feels more like a marketing decision, as that was the undefined value, and I think it's logical that it's caught on so poorly over the past 2 decades.

Kyle Olson

That pirate joke was amazing because it's a double entendre. "Arrrr" like a traditional pirate and also a computer pirate because before there was broadband internet the best way to pirate games was to burn them to CD-Rs.

Jason McMillon

Man, that offhand delivery of the pirate joke... Perfection.

Kevin Kostka