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Topic: Future of CD-Rw and DVD-RW ?

Leo Enticknap
Film God

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

posted 06-19-2014 05:18 PM

quote: Claude S. Ayakawa
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.

For a laptop, I can see the logic of not including an optical drive, because in a portable device you want to minimize (i) moving/fragile parts, and (ii) weight. An optical drive has both. For the same reason, I have an SSD in my laptop but not my home desktop/tower PC, in which it isn't (to me, at any rate) worth paying a big premium and capacity penalty for solid state and lightness. But even before flash sticks became widespread I was probably only using the optical drive in my laptop once or twice a year, and if my next laptop doesn't have one, that won't be a major problem for me. It'll be several years at least before I'd be willing to leave one out of my desktop machine, though.

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Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 06-19-2014 08:35 PM

quote: Bobby Henderson
I haven't tried out the music streaming service yet. I guess Amazon intends to compete with rival music subscription sevices from Google Play, Sony and others. The obvious question I have is: what's the bit rate of the streamed music? The tunes sold by Amazon are 256kb/s variable bit rate encoded .MP3 files. If the music streaming bit rate is similar that would make it quite a bit better than the free versions of Pandora, Rhapsody, etc.

I found an article on Billboard.com that answers your question -- here's the answer:

quote:
For streaming, sound quality will be adjusted for available connectivity, which will range from a high bit rate of 256k to a low of 48k.

I have a pretty decent stereo in my pickup and I listened to quite a few tunes. They all sounded very good to me (not muddy). I don't know how or if you can monitor what the bitrate is, but to me it was better than satellite radio, but not quite as good as CD.

The experience was smooth except one time the music went to "pause" for no reason. I assumed it was because it lost connectivity. I exited and restarted the app and it worked fine from then on.

I was kind of wondering about phone battery drain, but it was no worse than web surfing on the phone.

One thing I noticed is that the biggest of the 3 major labels, Universal, home of a TON of excellent artists, is not included on the deal, which sucks. I suppose if it really does well, they'll come around.

Here's a link to the article which gives a ton o'details.

Billboard: Amazon launches Prime Music Streaming Service

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

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

posted 06-20-2014 01:40 PM

I gave Amazon's Prime Music a try. Overall it seems pretty good, although I find it kind of confusing how to simply play a song or album without necessarily adding it to my music collection. Amazon has a lot of interesting custom play lists of music, but it seems like they all add themselves to the collection. That could make it a pain to keep things organized.

I'm not too surprised about Amazon Prime Music not getting every major music label on board. The lack of Universal Music does hurt, especially if you're a country music fan. OTOH, when you look at the movie streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video they don't have everything included there either. I would expect some content to come and go from Amazon's music service over time.

Back on the DTS CD topic, I can rip DTS CDs using Windows Media Player or Adobe Audition. Either will rip the data correctly. Unfortunately very few applications will actually play the data properly; they only see it as LPCM data and not DTS encoded data masquerading as LPCM. Foobar2000 with the DTS decoder 0.3.3 add on component is the only one I've found that will work reliably regardless of how the ripped .WAV file is named or piggy-backed with other metadata. PowerDVD is hit and miss with playing individual ripped DTS encoded .WAV files. I tried a plug-in with Windows Media Player that only worked briefly but reverted to the white noise. I'll have to keep experimenting.

I was hoping the new version of Audition would have a little more import capability with regard to DTS encoded audio files as in seeing the DTS data and offering the options to keep the data as is or import it as six demux'ed tracks to save as a multi-channel LPCM file or even encode in Dolby Digital or Dolby Digital Plus.

If anything I can use Foobar2000 for playback on my computer system or passing the bitstream to the home theater system. At least I have some recourse for backing up those discs.

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Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 06-20-2014 03:54 PM

quote: Bobby Henderson
Overall it seems pretty good, although I find it kind of confusing how to simply play a song or album without necessarily adding it to my music collection.

Well it doesn't really add it to your collection, it adds it to your library which (on Amazon) is just a list of songs you can play. The songs are never actually stored on your own piece of equipment, unless you buy and download them.

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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today

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

posted 06-20-2014 07:03 PM

quote: Terry Lynn-Stevens
We do burn DVDs from Redbox on occasion.

I suppose that the MPAA are already calculating how much prison time to give you to put a stop to your pirating ways.

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Brad Miller
Administrator

Posts: 17775
From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall)
Registered: May 99

posted 06-20-2014 07:14 PM

I have a 2013 Jeep and let me tell you...their stock radios SUCK! When playing a CD, there is high frequency sampling "splatter". Other people don't notice this, but it's aggravating to me. I can usually ignore it to a reasonable extent.

Then there's FM. It's got about the same amount of splatter. Nothing great, but listenable.

But the Sirius satellite radio...dear lord it is horrible. Even just the voice of a dj sounds garbled there is so much splattering it's as if Joe Redifer intentionally made an overly compressed bit of audio as a joke.

And they couldn't understand why I wouldn't sign up for the satellite radio when the free demo expired.

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Monte L Fullmer
Film God

Posts: 8367
From: Nampa, Idaho, USA
Registered: Nov 2004

posted 06-20-2014 11:44 PM

Agree with Sirius radio - not worth the subscription due to poor satellite service.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

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

posted 06-21-2014 07:22 PM

It's all about the bit rate. I can't remember which audio codec Sirius/XM uses, but I do know it varies between a paltry 64 and 96 kilobits per second. HD Digital Radio operates at the same horribly low bit rates.

At least Amazon Prime Music will stream a 256kb/s audio stream if you have a reasonably decent Internet connection. It sounds better than Sirius and it sounds better than online radio services like Pandora and Slacker.

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Claude S. Ayakawa
Film God

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

posted 06-21-2014 08:24 PM

Having a laptop with a optical disc drive is very important to me, Leo because my photography business requires it. The trend today is clients seem to prefer digital files instead of prints when I am hired to photograph fitness shows and other functions. I can also send print orders to my local lab using the internet but I still prefer doing it the old fashioned way by burning my order on a cd and hand carrying it to my local lab. When the order has been printed, the cd I is stored with a another disc that has all of the original files from each photo session I do. The same files are also saved on a external hard drive but the disc is a backup should anything happen to my HD.

I had my new Mac laptop computer with a disc drive for over a month now and I love it

-Claude

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Brad Miller
Administrator

Posts: 17775
From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall)
Registered: May 99

posted 06-21-2014 09:14 PM

Bobby, the company car has XM radio in it and it doesn't have that blatant splattering. Keep in mind my comments on the Jeep radio were NOT from "critical listening". It's obvious to anyone that listens. It's the Jeep head unit.

Still satellite radio has never been all that great.

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

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

posted 06-23-2014 11:39 AM

Claude: I'm guessing that your laptop is your main work computer and that's why you still need the optical drive. As I wrote earlier, I still want one in my home desktop tower PC, and at a guess it'll be 3-5 years at least before I'll no longer be using one at all. Incidentally, that PC still has a 3.5" floppy drive in it, though I literally can't remember the last time I used it. It certainly wasn't since the PC was shipped from Britain to California, so it might not even work now!

That having been said, my impression is that USB flash sticks are effectively the new floppy discs. The smaller ones (as in, up to 4GB) are now literally given away with trailer DCPs on them - there's an enormous box of them in the office downstairs. At work we're now in the bizarre situation whereby if a trailer or short arrives as a file of some sort (which from indie filmmakers, students etc. is frequently), our publicity person walks to the booth with the thing on a USB stick and then hands it over to me, at which point I put it through DCP-o-Matic and onto our servers. Sooner or later the Internet will be fast enough that for anything smaller than a few gigabytes this will be unnecessary. But the mentality among a lot of people now seems to me to treat small volume USB sticks as a replacement for floppies and optical discs.

The next major milestone, IMHO, will be the removal of the 20 megabyte limit for email attachments. That is the essential reason why people are walking up and down stairs with flash sticks in my workplace. Yes, I know that a simple shared sever drive or NAS device would solve that problem, but again, the mentality of most people seems to be that removable, physical media or email attachments are the only two ways of moving files from A to B.

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Terry Lynn-Stevens
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1081
From: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Registered: Dec 2012

posted 06-23-2014 12:26 PM

quote: Leo Enticknap
The next major milestone, IMHO, will be the removal of the 20 megabyte limit for email attachments.

There are work arounds for that already. FTP sites and sites such drop box already help achieve that. I believe Google Drive addresses that issue as well.

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Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 06-23-2014 12:53 PM

Dropbox needs to step up its game -- its free storage space is laughably small next to Google's.

Physical media is still needed considering how slow download speeds are (or can be) in a lot of areas.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

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

posted 06-23-2014 02:23 PM

Download bandwidth is the main thing making physical media still necessary. The video quality for movies on Blu-ray routinely trounces that of any streaming service. The only way the two formats can be equal is when the viewer is streaming the same video encode at the same high bit rate Blu-ray typically yields. Very few people get such a benefit through movie streaming.

I'll only stream a movie via Amazon's Prime service when 2 requirements are met: 1., it doesn't cost me anything extra to watch the movie and 2., it's a movie I've either already seen or don't care so much about seeing in the best manner available.

quote: Leo Enticknap
That having been said, my impression is that USB flash sticks are effectively the new floppy discs. The smaller ones (as in, up to 4GB) are now literally given away with trailer DCPs on them - there's an enormous box of them in the office downstairs.

I'll agree USB memory sticks of smaller capacities (1GB, 2GB & 4GB) are given away free in a lot of manners. I've picked up a few of those things at trade shows. Unfortunately some of those freebie USB memory sticks are not very reliable. I've seen some of them fail. Thankfully I had copies of the same data backed up elsewhere. I've had bad luck with Lexar brand memory sticks (which are often cheaper). I usually buy SanDisk brand flash memory devices, whether they're compact flash cards for my DSLR, MicroSD cards for a phone or USB memory sticks.

Optical discs still beat flash memory in terms of cost per gigabyte by a wide margin. The main problem with optical discs is they quickly accumulate and waste space in the office or on the bookshelf.

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

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

posted 06-23-2014 02:24 PM

Terry - agreed that there are lots of ways to move large files online, assuming that the Internet connection speed at both ends is up to it (an unsafe assumption in many cases, as Mike points out).

What I've seemed to notice, however, is that your average, non-technology geek (or at least, someone who has not had to move >20MB files regularly and thus has not been motivated to explore the other options) tends to assume that there are only two ways to move files: by attaching them to an email, or putting them on a physical object that can be removed from the computer and put in their pocket or purse. Therefore, when either the email 20MB limit goes away, or another method of moving files online gains widespread, non-geek acceptance, the days of all portable physical media (i.e. anything smaller than a hard drive) will probably be numbered.

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