LightScribe: HP's Clever Twist on the CD Burner
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- čas přidán 9. 11. 2018
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I remember when LightScribe was first marketed, and let me tell you I thought it was the coolest thing to ever happen. Burning labels with lasers? No way! Well, it worked amazingly well. LightScribe wasn’t without its flaws, though, and in this video we’ll discuss a bit of its history, how it worked, and why it wasn’t a runaway success.
Some links and stuff!
Basic info and some details of operation came from here:
www.pcworld.com/article/12129...
This is a patent you can look at for a LightScribe drive made in 2011 (kinda near the end of the run)
patentimages.storage.googleap...
If you happen to have a LightScribe drive and some media, but you’ve never installed anything to let you use it, check out Steve’s website. Some notes on compatibility--Apparently his free labeler doesn’t work with Windows 10. The LightScribe utilities do, and so does Nero 8 for what it’s worth. But if you’re desperate to get your Win10 PC into the LightScribe universe, you may face some challenges.
lightscribesoftware.org/
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CZcamsrs are underappreciated. You have literally documented, researched, and presented tech history in a straightforward and memorable manner whilst also making people laugh with shenanigans.
You should watch Cathode Ray Dude. He does the same stuff.
I think the level of appreciation is apt. He has a million and a half people who want to actively consume his content
i Had a Lightscribe burner in a Compaq Presario. It quickly became a PITA to flip cdr to burn label.
For the record i barely tolerate the shenanigans however clearly i stay for the amazing information, but hey if jesus christ couldn't win everyone over why should he? Guys a good dude, just a bit fuckin annoying.
@@amiga2025 I was so excited when our new computer had one, then immediately disappointed when it turned out all greasy/blurry looking haha. If I knew CDs were so much better than DVDs I might have at least played around with it so much more.
"Professional looking labels like this:"
*Shows Papyrus and Comic Sans typefaces*
I love this channel
Right?!? So subtle, so dry. Jokes for those who will get them, and aren't annoying to those who won't.
Pretty sure there were implied air quotes in the way he accentuated the word "professional".
You know, I actually wasn't certain he was kidding bc he mentioned his 'great' CD later again. But I'm glad I found this comment. Phew!
i s t h a t a n u n d e r t a l e r e f e r e n c e
/s
Now that I think of it, that's probably where the names for those Undertale characters came from. I've never played Undertale, but people will not fucking shut up about it.
“Back when Apple had optical drives and headphone jacks” ouch!
Now it's just a fact of life that modern smartphones are going to require either bluetooth or a dongle
@@brendancross2767 According to who? Over 99% of phones on the market currently have built-in headphones jacks. Phones are used primarily as multimedia devices.
@@chrismanuel9768 Ok I stand corrected, the majority of flagship phones and all but one pocketable devices from apple
@@brendancross2767
Bluetooth as a subversive mechanism allowing inter-device transmission of data
scavenged from users devices including a various assortment of 'Smart' devices
and being ultimately relayed to APPLE - GOOGLE - AMAZON - and readily available
Government Alphabet agencies - such as NSA - FBI - CIA et. al
5G and 6G will make the surveillance system more reliable.
@@andrew_koala2974 what
I had a Lightscribe drive in high school on my first custom PC. I did a lot of personal movie projects and school video projects. It made it look so much better. The common reaction was, "Whoa! How did you do that?" Considering I still only burned less than 100 DVDs during its entire use, it was still pretty cool. I still have my "first film" with my lightscribe logo on it, even with a fake PG-13 label and everything on it to make it look like a commerical dvd.
So, something interesting. UCLA researchers are using Lightscribe to print graphene circuit boards on a thin layer of graphene oxide.
Normally, graphene, much more graphene circuit boards, would take forever to make. Then, they discovered, the rust form, graphene oxide, was sensitive to intense light. Then, one of them recalled that Lightscribe is able to print on really thin layers of photosensitive material to make images. They make a thin layer of graphene oxide on top of a Lightscribe disk, Let it dry, and design their circuit boards on something like the Nero essentials
This has to be an episode someday.
I was wondering if somebody would bring that up here, as I was in that lab at that time. LightScribe drives were already hard getting hard to come by when we were working on it, so we had to order "new old stock" drives by the (literal) dozen, since we were burning out about one a week. We were switching over to low-power laser tables by the time I left.
Holy shit, I thought you were trolling newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-researchers-develop-new-technique-243553
@@yoymate6316 I didn't.
I'm wishing for a field trip to see this--as an episode.
9:09
*uses Papyrus and Comic Sans*
"and now I think that's a delightful design, worthy of a LightScribe label."
Should've used the gnome
Namelessnake yessss.
You're gonna have a bad time
Geez, Comic Sans is my favorite font for disk labels. Nice clean look, but not too formal, nor goofy or distracting. I only use it for disk titles though, and typically just use either one of the common sans-serif (Ariel or Calibri) or serif (Times Roman) for 'body text'. thus conforming to 'good practice' as I learned it whilst studying editing and professional page layout many moons ago.
At least he didn’t use comic papyrus. That would be truly abysmal.
my dad was very "early adopter" with all kinds of technology and we had a couple lightscribe burners and spindles of discs kicking around for years. as a kid i thought it was the coolest thing ever and i always thought it was a shame the technology just kind of died out. thanks for visiting it and shining some light on what i consider a forgotten gem from the disc burning era!
My dad had at least one too. But he later got something that would do colour more like a regular printer, and not take quite as long. I went to a private school that did a lot of musical programs so he'd record those and then people who wanted to could get a copy of the program to watch at home. I kind of miss those days because now that video files are HD or 4K and much larger, you can't just hand someone an SD card with a 20GB+ video on it, and it's too big to email, so it's like you upload it unlisted to CZcams, or don't share it at all. I mean, he does still have all that gear, dozens of DVD-Rs and an old PC specifically saved to use apps that don't work on new Mac systems so he could still do it, but a lot of people don't use DVDs anymore. Laptops don't come with disk readers, and a lot of people don't have a DVD player for a TV since everything went to streaming.
@@joyloxI mean, there are blank Blu-Rays but they never had Lightscribe so they'd never look professional unless he invested in a screen printing setup.
You are right about LightScribe being underappreciated. I bought a bunch of these drives and disks in 2013 for use in my personal lab and when I ran out a few years later, I couldnt find them anymore. I always wondered what happened. I loved Lightscribe and made thousands of CDs and DVDs for coworkers. Thanks for this.
Just buy up old HP laptops with Lightscribe to harvest parts, even got one at home here catching dust.
Put out by your mom definitely.
@@lillexus5589 Can confirm. Have 2 old HP PCs laying around (desktops) and now have a 2007/2010 Lightscribe drive and a newer 2016 regular drive in my large case lol!
See if you can buy a junk lot of old DVD drives. I did that once. Paid about 15 dollars NZD for like 12 or 13 DVD drives of which at least 8 were lightscribe but there were at least 50 drives in there. I recommend going to a e waste or a local second hand or landfill store (If you have one)
I am such a moron. I had a light scribe CD burner. I thought it was just a name.
same here
Related to that, I've had a Labelflash DVD/CD drive for years and thought just that.
I'm surprised NEC of all companies made it, this one is kinda versatile though.
I was like this for a good while until I ended up seeing discs with the LightScribe logo on it. I had no clue, I ended up buying it and making a few discs with images.
Im ashamed i never tried it i had tons of CDs.
Same here
A quick explanation as to why the laser diode is lit all the time; what you're seeing when it's not writing is the laser diode in bias mode, laser diodes are very slow (relatively speaking) when switching from off to on, so the diode is kept on at low (bias) power which enables it to switch to writing power much faster.
This channel has the best comments
I was just away to say something similar, that the laser is lit all the time to keep the diode hot as warm up time from "off" state is slow.
I pulled out my old Lightscribe and I thought "I bet someone like Technology Connections made a CZcams video about this". You didn't disappoint :)
Loved lightscribe. If there was one thing I can say that helped my popularity in high school, it was the fact that I was one of, if not the only person in my class that had one, and made mix CDs for people.
Everyone wanted a mix cd from me, so everyone brought me music to burn lightscribed CDs for them. Good times
it’s bad enough you were engaging in copyright infringement, I hope you weren’t profiting from it as well. 🤨
@@dennisthemenace3695 you be quiet 🤨
Me, when I grill a steak:
**Burn, flip, burn**
CD’s are round. Burgers are round. Also about the same size. Coincidence?
@@JohannGambolputty22 **x-files music**
@@JohannGambolputty22 Probably what they were hoping to connect. Marketing just failed to get the message out there.
@@JohannGambolputty22 instructions unclear burger stuck in cd player.
Matt the 2nd, Call the Helpdesk
I still use lightscribe all the time when I want to make music CDs from artists that don't release their music on CDs.
It's a lot of fun to design your own CD covers for lightscribe. The trick is to print to the disc 3 times. It may take a long time, but it makes the design a lot bolder and more crisp.
I was wondering if it could be done. I don’t remember much, but I think I had started one once and had to do it over again. I believe it was on the same disc but I just can’t remember.
What software do yo use
@@themessenger6560 Nero 9 Essentials always worked pretty well for me
I’ve never thought of doing it more than once.
@@TheSonicSegaNerd Nero? Wow. I had to check the date on this post. I remember using Nero like 20 years ago.
I find it funny that "smell-o-vision" removes the "tele" or "far" part from television but keeps the "vision"-part, the sense it's not about :D
lol, "telesmell"
Telescent
As an audio mastering engineer I loved LightScribe discs. Much better than paper stick on or a Sharpie when tagging a reference CDR for a customer. Really looked professional.
The phrase "new old stock" will always make me think of Techmoan.
Well he certainly is new old stock :)
It makes me think of my russian vacuum tube dealer
I think of NOS car parts, Thankfully, NOS computer gear is smaller, leading up to a SOMEWHAT better chance of survival.
I'm familiar with the phrase from the guitar/bass amp tube market, people buying ancient but still new in box tubes from like Russian aircraft and stuff because they are so reliable, lol.
Fun fact: If you leave a lightscribe disc in the sunlight too long, they all end up with that picture from 4:17
lmfao
Joshua Pearce hahahahaahahahahahahaha
Coffee, meet monitor.
LOL
*_THAT IS A CURSED IMAGE YOU MUST RUN BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE_*
Another point for lightscibe:
Let's say you drive in your car and want to change the cd. You'll have to put your interior lights on to see what your past self wrote on it in sharpie. Not so on lightscribe, as the disk is opaque, while the burned in text is transparent, so you could just hold it against a light and read the text right through the disk!!1!
And have a heads on collision in the process.
@@TheWeepingCorpse yes, one hopes they pulled over first. 😏
Almost all of the computers we had growing up had light scribe, I loved the idea of custom labeling all my cds.... never used it even once.
Man why do I only learn about cool things after they’re not a thing anymore?!
Samuel Charpentier
Answer: Because you do not make an effort to read and study,
and you lack the curiosity factor. Simple as that.
@@andrew_koala2974 There's so much new technology in the world every day and most of it is garbage. No matter how curious you are, there is a limited number of hours in the day. If your options are between learning a new language and experiencing an entirely new culture of literally billions of people OR looking for stupid niche technology that will 99.99% die off in a month, you aren't "more curious" to waste your time.
Stop justifying wasting your life and just admit you're a disappointment. Your parents will still love you.
@@andrew_koala2974 ratio
Because cool things stop being cool once they are normal.
Touchscreens would have been the most awesome thing in 1970. Now it's normal
@@andrew_koala2974 ironic
I had one of these and made my girl friend a music mix and lightscribed the label. She is now my wife, it worked. Lol.
Gotta look for an old LightScribe drive in my wardrobe and keep it safe and ready for a similar need :D
@Menschen Gegen 5G well, the girls of my age still have got some resistance to mobile devices :)
I thought sharing mix tapes was just a meme haha
@@wizard7314 It wasn't a meme back then. This was when MP3 was first coming out, so CD was still a big thing.
@Newsbender She didn't have a smart phone then. Only a flip phone. Those were the good days. Lol
I used to buy 50-disc spindles of red discs from Amazon for my band's demo in 2011. It worked well but I had to burn twice to get decent contrast. A total of ten discs failed to burn on the label side, so I can say 190 copies exist. At least it didn't take much effort to burn two at a time on my machine, but it did shorten the lives of my drives--replaced long ago.
Pioneer had something called labelflash which worked the same way but could also burn a message around the unused edge of a normal disk if you had room after you'd burnt the movie or cd.
He mentions this during the end credits.
Which software did you need to use Labelflash?
@@charlesferdinand422 LIM.exe
Yup. It was actually developed by NEC, but quickly spread amongst their partners Pioneer, Fujitsu and Yamaha.
The ability to write on the data side was called a Disc tatoo. Which they called "DiscT@2" for some reason... early 2000s marketing was weird.
Me and a friend both had LightScribe burners. He'd use it constantly to label pira... back-up copies.
I was fine with using a marker. Never used the thing.
porating is ok in my book
ah yes i loves piranhas so GOOOOD
I hate how people still think "piracy" (file sharing) is somehow "bad" and "dodgy". This view is outdated in our modern society.
I loved Lightscrbe and used it all the time back in college. I was so sad when it died out. And yes, I have a vivid recollection of the smell of the new spindles.
i still use all sorts of burners from 1999 till the recent ones made today, and was a big nerd with them but i never heard of lightscribe.
@@NewsBroadcasting they still make CD burners? And why on earth are you still using them?
@@littlejackalo5326 i have an usb one,
i had needed it as reader to instal a program i bought to verify it .. it was only slightly more expensive to buy a writer...
can't say i use it over a couple of times a year... i mean to use it to re-read old dvd's and back them up before they become unreadable...
and laptop have no build in onces any more for years now :).
During my 2008-2012 high school years, I was the tech-video guy in my small town high school and ran an entertainment company doing DJ'ing & wedding videos. I sold SO many wedding videos with Lightscribe labels on customized color DVD's with matching plastic case. That was sometimes peoples favorite part. I know EXACTLY the smell you're talking about. RIP Lightscribe.
i always wondered what the "lightScribe" was when i saw the dvd drive on my computer with that icon. and now i know 8 years later. and its impressive, HP does something cool for once
all my downloaded Wii ISOs are on lightscribe DVD''s and I burned a cover for all. They look real nice and I miss the damned thing!
Same for my PS2 erm.. backups.
@@ez45 backups lol
This is something I hadn't thought of. I should've used that for my Dreamcast backups. They are backups, I have the original discs.
Oh wow, I remember having and using lightscribe. Haven’t thought about it in such a long time
it´s one of those thing you were braging about to your friends and then used it twice, realized how expensive it is and then heart that there are regular printer that than do colour pics for much cheaper ... and never used them either :D
You should make a Lightscribe Metal video! I don't know what it would entail, but I'm sure it would be great!
I didn't expect you here XD
@@kokos742 Haha yes that is funny but true. I remember buying an LG drive that had it. Used it about 4 times and never again
My mum's first PC had lightscribe she was excited about it then never actually used it more than once I'm it's lifetime lol
My dad bought and installed a lightscribe drive in our family computer around 2005 or so. He had slightly more patience for it than I did, and continued to use it to make labels for disks he burned backups of his digital camera photos onto for years.. I loved the idea, but hated how long it added to the already long process of burning a disk, so I only used it a few times.
This video truly took me back to when I was a kid!
I opened my ancient laptop with a light scribe drive and quickly ran into dependency hell getting label making software working, the good old days of installing software…
Worst thing is when the Nero software crashes 15 minutes in to a Lightscribe label burn!
Fuck. You just brought back my ptsd.
That happened to me when I was trying to make a copy of my violin practice audio
Goddamn it I felt that comment
I was a computer nublet who talked his parents into switching from Windows to Ubuntu.
I know today why I could never get my lightscribe to work :(
fuck I hated Nero. I had completely erased that garbage software from my memory until I read this comment
one of my favorite lost memories was a lightscribed picture of my dad and i on a mixtape he burned me.
edit: my dad found it !
Mixdisc?? Haha!! I say tape all the time without thinking about it! Good job Dad! I’m sure he liked what you did with the program
I hear you bro, I converted all my families home movies from VHS to dvds with lightscribe images. it was awesome made 40 dvds total all were very unique. they are holding up to this day.
@@JV-wl6ex people say mixtape for CDs still, hell even playlists
YESSS that's beautiful, that's such a dad thing
We need an Imgur link, I do believe.
My very first laptop (HP Pavilion) had a LightScribe drive and I loved it. Yup it had a few issues but it did the job. I ended up burning about 120 discs for our school and also LightScribing them all with text etc. Took so long but everyone loved it.
VERY impressed that you used typeface and font correctly @ 8:48. MS and Apple have a LOT to answer for in using the word "font" incorrectly to describe typeface. Now most people have no idea of the difference.
I actually had a job where we needed to provide 5~10 copies of custom professional DVDs to clients every week or so - LightScribe was definitely our preferred label option. Because of the time they took, we'd print them as soon as we possibly could, typically several days before the DVD content itself was ready to be burned. We had a couple LightScribe burners on computers that were otherwise being used, so we would simply start the printing process for a disc when we were getting ready to go to lunch or go home for the day. Due to typically 1 or 2 bad label burns, per client, we also ended up needing to print more labeled discs than we actually needed, which added to costs, but was still significantly less costly than other professional-looking options.
For our purposes, LightScribe was almost perfect, but if you needed more than about 10 good labels a week, there were definitely better options!
I only found out toward the end of my time in that job that you could re-burn them, but it helped on several occasions and was just downright pretty cool to do (I'm not sure why it made me happy, but it did).
Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Used to use LightScribe to label DVD for clients. Loved it! Looked a lot more professional then a sharpie or a dodgy paper label.
My sister messed with those full sized stickers that covered the whole disk.
I had a tower with 5 or 6 burners on it. Charged a buck for each disk, buck fity for a DVD. Back in the day when people would keep giving mix disks to each other, I made a solid return on that tower.
It was a great idea that I wished would have stuck around for a while. I still occasionally will (try if it completes) burn a custom CD for road trips or such. Wish they would have had Blu-ray discs for lightscribe. I would use it more frequently. Still have a spindle of cd's & dvd's for lightscribe, and my portable blu-ray burner actually does lightscribe.
Thanks for this awesome video! It certainly brought back fond memories!
I had a LightScribe drive and loved it. Back in the day, I made tons of video and audio CDs and DVDs for friends and family. I wanted decorative labels, but somehow I could never get my printer aligned with my label software, so the printouts were always skewed. LightScribe saved me tons of frustration. (Yes, I could have simply used a marker, but for gifts that just looked too tacky to me.)
I didn't mind the long print times and occasional snafus because it was still much less hassle than making a bajillion wasted paper labels. Now that CDs/ DVDs are no longer much of a thing, I send my friends and family streaming links instead. Somehow that's just not quite the same, though.
PS: Back then I also had a Netbook that I loved. Thanks again for the memories!
I picked up a working LightScribe drive at a thrift store, not knowing what it was specifically meant for, I just wanted a working DVD writer.
Thanks for telling me what it really is.
Howdy! I feel icky for the use of a particular word in the closing section and I need to say something about it because... icky.
I regret saying that other channels "resort" to outside sponsorship. A much better word would have been "rely". Or even better, I should have not said anything. However channels make themselves possible is fine with me, and there are some people (like Jay Foreman, for example) who make the best and most hilarious sponsorship spots you can imagine. Nonetheless, I find it delightful that with the support of Patreon, this channel can keep going with complete editorial freedom. Especially when it gets all weird and cringey.
That's why I'm always thanking the Patreon crew. It's amazing what people like you can do.
So please pardon the inadvertent shade thrown on others. That was not intended.
Be a nice person. It's always better.
Thank you for reading this mushy comment.
I knew what you meant, but it was good to make it clear anyway since most people on CZcams (and, well, anywhere) don't usually take the time to practice the Principle of Charity these days. Thanks for another great lesson on technology and its history.
Do you have plans to see up the writing methods to other disc-based media storage ? I'm thinking non-optical methods or so... would be interesting I suppose ! Though I could understand they'd very obscure and very hard to procure.
Cool video, if you need any help with a DVD-R episode then I would love to help, I worked for one of the major manufacturers in the early days to the technology.
I seem to remember a device that would not only burn discs, it also had a printer that would label them with ink. I seem to also remember the ink would get sticky and it just sucked. Would love to see that one shown too.
What's the name of the outro music? I actually kinda like it.
LightScribe was great!!
It was a easy, professional-looking way to label a disc.
I haven't had much luck getting adequate drivers for Win7, let alone Win10.
Wish it would have survived!
I remember getting a disc with a full Tinkerbell design on it in 2009 for my birthday and I was so fascinated that I saved up my allowance for months to buy a light scribe drive and a couple discs.
We would use Light Scribe discs at work until we finally moved to USB media. Paper labels would eventually come off, so Light Scribe discs were professional looking and were effective for a small company’s software discs. Thanks for producing this video on this great product.
“and headphone jacks “ I love your brand of rapid fire passive aggressive abuse
Sole reason I upvoted this video.
( I don't have the habit of upvoting )
@@phs125 So you just upvote because you hate. Shows what type of a person you are. You really should go get a life.
@@thatscienceguy9458 Don't bother. These type of people are so stupid that get off on bashing other things people like. Fanboyism at it's best. This is a sign of a low IQ and them being childish. Best to move on as they must hate their life so much they have to make fun of other people and things to make themselves feel better. They just need to grow up and we all know that won't happen. Don't worry they will die alone.
@@thatsciencedude4552 but somehow bashing others for their comment is not childish?
Appreciate the humour and move on..
@@thatscienceguy9458 Wow, that came out of left field. Do you always make broad assumptions and generalizations?
I love this dude. He's so well-spoken and says the things I want to hear.
Big gay al then
A couple years late to comment on this, but I had a LightScribe burner many years ago, back when I got a brand new HP Media Center PC for college. I actually used it quite a bit and was totally about it. Then one day the drive stopped reading and burning and I moved on from the novelty. I'm glad I came across this video and channel as this clarified questions I actually had about this way back when, but long since forgot about. Great stuff!
Happy to see that the thumbnail is actually extracted from the video.
9:18 "You pulled the tray out... why?" Made me laugh so hard! XD
It has to open a certain distance and then close again before it will recognize that a new disc has been inserted and try to read it.
@@WarrenGarabrandt Usually the distance it travels when pressing the eject key (through the help of a spring or magnet) is enough, like it was in this case
As I watched, I thought there was a small piece of plastic on the right that was in the way to pull it straight up, then I saw the text. It had to go back to read it. I was viewing the video on my phone so it was a bit obscure.
I actually remember this. I only used it a few times, to make designs for my own band's demo CDs, but I always thought it was amazingly cool. It worked really well!
Did you use Papyrus too?
Yes
Same here. Did our very first EP demo CDs. It was a cool feature.
Also, picking a silver tone of the data layer contributed to a great demo CD.
Just your mention of the Lightscribe disc smell brought me back. I definitely have memories of taking a nice big sniff every time I cracked open the spindle.
You know why I wartch this channel? Not for all the smart stuff, but because you're such a delightful person. It's good to see and be around.
Me: Did he seriously just write that in papyrus
*writes the next line in comic sans"
Me: OH GOOD it's on purpose
haha had the same thought :D
Why are those two fonts universally bashed? :P
I've always heard it for comic sans but never heard any context.
ahums16 They are fine, but somewhat overused, and sometimes the context does not lend itself to such a font.
Personnally, i love handwritten fonts, but you have to admit getting a convocation to national exams written in Chiller is disturbing. I mean, were They trying to be creepy? About exams?
My old Vista PC had lightscribe, and It kept telling me to Try It, and I kept telling myself "wow this sounds awesome a shame I don't have the disk"
@@wordart_guian No, they are not fine. they are the worst kind of "hand written" fonts: The kind that does not resemble actual hand writing in any way. that's why they are frowned upon. They are horribly designed fonts with unpleasant spacing, line weights, curves and, in Papyrus's case, texture. There are good looking "hand written" fonts out there, loads of them, and designers love them.
@@noalb3108 well, this is possible, but I wouldn't be so categoric with what handwriting should look like.
I am fairly positive my 5th grade handwriting did not resemble handwriting tbh.
As flawed as LightScribe was, I wish it would have stuck around and had some time to improve. It was a really cool tech and despite its problems I actually did use it surprisingly frequently.
I still have one blank lightscribe cd. I remember taking a VERY long time to draw the picture onto it.
Great for running a small business. WAY more professional than paper labels. I still use them, have a stock of burners and disks for when clients need a physical media for proof of purchase (even when buying cloud software).
@@ClydeWarden that's nice touch. I would appreciate effort if I'd see something like this.
I assume if it had ever been popular that by now most of the problems would have been ironed out.
I *assume* Blu-ray laser diodes are more powerful than DVDs, so faster or higher resolution would be possible. Or of course a second laser could have been added to really speed things up.
Clyde Warden
I used discs with a all white label built onto the disc. So it wouldn’t just come off like a paper label. I could pop into my epson printer and print directly onto the disc. I could get discs that were all white on the one side right down to the center hole. They were fantastic. I just don’t burn discs much these day. Generally I’m ripping discs to put on my NAS. But I could really make nice color labels on my disc where it looked professional. They would never peal off.
Excellent and informative video. I had one of these in a laptop years ago, probably about 2004. Thought it was a great idea, then did one label and realized how incredibly slow it was. Last one I ever made. I felt deceived as nowhere did the marketing give a hint of the time involved. I was not making disks for others, just my own backups, so I did not mind the scribbled text.
I can't believe this! I owned and built many systems as a hobby back then and was not aware this was a feature of lightscibe CD burners back then. How in the world I wasn't aware even after the many many hours spent building and tweeking.
Man, you just don’t know how badly I want that CD with your face on it.
You actually made me sad, becouse LightScribe was one of things I really wanted to use back in the days when I had all the time and no money. Now when I dont have said time, but have the money (and I dont have any use for cd/dvd's) its.. gone. I missed on it. Damn.
The graphics you made to illustrate your explanations are so good!
I had a Lightscribe drive in my first laptop. I loved it. A gamechanger was learning that you could run the disc through multiple times to increase the image contrast. Doing it in a photo editor first would be faster though 😂 I still have the laptop and I might even have some blank discs somewhere....
I loved lightscribe. I was the only person I know that used it though.
Probably why it is gone sadly.
Me too
I’ve had computers with light scribe and never knew what it was or looked into it. I wish now I had looked into it.
Me too! sadly expensive now to get the discs
I had it too, came bundle with my PC from Circuit City when they went out of business, hated it cause of the slow speed plus being so new back then I never knew when it was finished cause I never had something so slow, now I know it was my fault after this video for adding too much at once, for the record I never finished one under 30 minutes back then
me 2
"back when they had optical drives... and phone jacks"
Back when we had optical drives with the headphone jack built into it...and phone jacks, get it right 😂😂😂
back when we had phone jacks with optical drives with phone jacks
@@fsmoura 😂😂😂
I remember my dad making these for us in the 90s, I never really knew how they worked though, thanks for the nostalgia!
You gotta love it when a customization feature, even a limited one, can be added to a standardized product at little additional cost or complexity. The *possibility* of a nice label just makes it cooler.
I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that, despite these being what we regularly bought in my later high school and early uni years...I never knew you could burn a label on them. I just thought they'd figured out we all know the capacity of a disc, so they'd skip telling us and give us more space to write on.
you also had the blanks with a paper like coating for use in inkjet printers. alec touched on paper labels but that was the adhesive kind and it was hard to apply it perfecly without misalignment and bubles.
@@NicolaiSyvertsen I have a press that lines up the sticker type labels. I also have a Lightscribe, but IDK why I had troubles finding those disks even at peak.
I actually had a spindle of discs like this from Big Lots of all places. CD-R on one side, plain reflective silver on the other (almost looked like a mastered CD on the label side). No idea what brand they were and I never found them again, but they sure were cool while I had them around.
It wouldn’t be 2006 if it wasn’t comic sans
*Megalovania intensifies*
+Lucas Croft
...
*_MEGALOVANIA INTENSIFIES_*
Why does everyone hate Comic Sans???
XtremeBudgetMusician I for one don't hate It. Only sometimes the context doesn't lends itself to the use of a light-hearted looking font.
Body Massage Machine GO!!!
I had a lightscribe drive in one of my PCs growing up and I never had any idea what it meant. It was just the replacement drive my dad happened to slot in at the time. I don't think any of us knew what it did let alone how it worked. Thanks for the video!!
Thank you so much for the wave of nostalgia. My parents actually had these I remember loving how the white and grey/silver looked as a young kid.
I also think they were the last blank CDs my parents bought, because they were all I could find when I was old enough to start burning, so I saw them a lot.
My band burned CD-Rs with Lightscribe labels and used them as the _official limited edition CD release_ of our album (it was good enough, our focus was on vinyl anyway). Our album sleeve design was pale yellow (#FFFFB3 FTW! The _B3_ is an homage to Hammond) with detailing in mostly shades of grey, so Lightscribe discs were a perfect fit! I remember having to burn a bunch of CDs before a gig and forgetting to take into account the time it takes so I ended up bringing everything to work and "scribing" while "working". Still ended up with only about half of the amount of CDs I intended to make. Never got around to doing the rest so I probably have a couple of spindles of unused Lightscribe CD-Rs somewhere.
It's a really cool technology, it was just introduced too late, when people were increasingly starting to use MP3 players instead of burning their own mix CDs.
I could listen Alec for 25 minutes even if he was going to talk about spoon. There's an interesting story behind anything which remains untold until Alec comes and fills the gaps. Alec, just talk about anything that comes into your mind, don't be afraid of if people might not be interested, that shouldn't stop you. I remember GFCI breakers video, which I thought I was not interested and I watched all video, turns out I was interested. Now waiting for Arc Fault Breakers and may be whole story behind US split phase system and US home electrical wiring and design. All good wishes!
I've enjoyed and used it a lot and even though I'm technically oriented and inquisitive, I have to say I was surprised at how much new I learned about technology from you. Your videos are well worth watching.
I loved my lightscribe DVD burner. A Sly soft little fox helped me backup many of my favorite previously purchased videos "back in the day" and Lightscribe helped add a little something extra to the experience.
Should I ironically use Papyrus and Comic sans in the video?
93% Of course
4% Good grief, no
3% What do you mean, ironically?
I've always liked Papyrus. Fight me!
Y not both?
laughingsquid.com/comic-papyrus
@@tristan6509 Well I'm going to use that for everything now! :)
@@_Piers_ wish there were one with impact also included tho
Papyrus reeks of incompetence trying too hard. Pretending to be fancy and classy but actually coming off as lame.
Comic sans reeks of incompetence unable to take anything seriously. Like a 9 year olds MySpace page or the churches website thrown together by bored housewife who doesn't know what they are doing.
It's not the fonts' fault... it is the abuse of them by incompetent people that ruined it. It was mostly solidified by my generation(born in 1984). The internet used to be a very ugly place with no power tools to make professional looking websites,you needed to be able to do it manually from HTML, the tools all made generic repetitive garbage with only a handful of universal fonts, and specific ones repeatedly were used to produce very unprofessional and childish things.
To be honest, it was precisely because they were good fonts which caused them to get overused, abused, and ruined for everyone.
Loved undertale, btw. I love that they made their personalities related to the negative connotations you get from seeing the fonts :P
Oh man! I remember 2007 😍 I was one of the only people in my high-school class with light scribe it blew some minds for sure
Cameron D.F Chisholm Ditto, only I did the same thing 4 years later.
I had a Lightscribe drive for many years and I used it all the time. I remember having a whole binder of Lightscribe labeled media that I used for working on computers.
I just bought a bunch of older PCs for cheaps and nearly all have lightscribes. Never heard of them till I heard another CZcamsr talk about them briefly. Cool stuff !
When making cd labels nothing beat a xy plotter armed with a sharpie, at least until faculty staff found out...
Or AVERY labels .... and you are done.
@@38911bytefree until you put the AVERY labels in a slot loading player in your car a few times and the paper label started to roll up at the edge resulting in not being able to eject the disk ! Then the fun would begin :-(
Now that's a good one!
I'm 14 minutes into this and I kinda feel like this might be the most objectively useless video ever. I'm also endlessly fascinated by it (hence why I got 14 minutes in to make this remark), and I subscribed after seeing a video about traffic lights. Traffic lights. Who the hell cares about that? I do, even though I never thought I did. Thanks for stuff like this. You're doing a great job of illustrating the beauty and effort behind the forgotten and mundane.
I think he should start doing the stupid face everyone does in thumbnails and add "OMG!! NOT CLICKBAIT!!!!!!!!" to every title.
....and not change the content at all, just to see what happens.
Omg, Yes! I feel the same. Can someone summarize why it didn't succeed because I would really like to know but I'm not watching 20 minutes of babbling to know about it. Really shame. I remember this guy had good material some time ago. I mean this can be informative for some people but @Max Power you didn't deliver this time.
I agree
Our XP machine in 2004 came with Lightscribe and I genuinely loved the idea. I only ever had one cd I got to use it but if I ever had to burn another CD I'd love to get more (if I even can anymore...)
I SO appreciate your videos about '80s through '00s tech!
One note though, is that we were more flexible and forgiving of things that took 10+ minutes back then. Seeing it through "modern" eyes makes it seem like forever in our instant-this and auto-that world, but as no one back then had the experience of things happening in seconds as a norm, we weren't bugged by a 15 - 25 minute process.
Just a thought.
Shoot, I still remember trading mp3s back in the pre-Napster days. And I mean actually TRADING, as in "ok, here's a list of albums I have, I'd like song X from you, do you see anything you'd like?" Then once they picked something, you'd go find the CD, rip just that one track to MP3 (which would take usually 3-5x longer than the runtime of the song) then you'd swap them over something like IRC, over a 56k modem you'd take maybe 10 minutes each way. A lot of work for each individual song...
I had one of these and burnt every disc I had with all my favorite music and labeled them with the cover of the artists in a collage on the face turned out great and still have all the discs
Still have some lightscribed disks. I liked the tech. 😥
would you like more.
@@michaelmiller367 I would!
Me too :)
Same here....
It was the Rube Goldberg way of labeling a disc.
I /still/ have a LightScribe drive in my computer, and as long as I can keep it functioning, it will always find its way into any computer I may upgrade to in the future. I've never been able to get any LightScribe disks, but it seems really cool and I hope to be able to get this to work for me sometime. The drive is from my first computer; an old Compaq Presario desktop PC, for anyone who was wondering.
I still have a Lightscribe drive (bought the first more than 10 years ago) but I have not seen these burning errors with it before. LG still sells LightScribe bluray drives in 2022 and disks from Verbatim are still available so it does not seem that this technology died.
I just looked at my DVD burner, and would you believe it has the LightScribe logo right there on the front of it. I had no idea it had this capability!
@@H3wastooshort Fake hacker.
I don't but my drive can do the same thing.
@JimNS that was such a fail. Never had that issue here luckily. For me they only fail at giving support. I know this because i had free 4 year support from them.
I have a blu-ray burner that even has the Lightscribe logo on it!
I ❤️ LightScribe! My handwriting sucks, LightScribe was not a "gimmick" to me. When I started to burn DVDs, LightScribe was an essential thing I had to have on Burners and discs. I still use it now.
Knew I saw LightScribe somewhere. I've got an old OEM HP PC that has an optical drive with these capabilities! NICE!
I looked at my other HP OEM PC and... I've got TWO! One's off a Windows Vista era and the other is Windows 7 era... Holy crap! I'm putting both of them in my old ATX full tower chassis with the newer optical drive, which'll be my media/NAS/Plex server (maybe Blue Iris) rig (using maybe Docker containers IDK). Still, this is absolutely bonkers!
Apparently they're only $10-40 online for old or newer looking external, but to have OG ones already is pretty cool.
Thank you for this Video. I have been following your channel for a few days now and have loved everything on it. I looked for the LightScribe video and boom, it had to be your channel hosting such a comprehensive case study on it.
So here's what LightScribe looked in India -
I got my LS DVD-RW bundled on a Compaq Presario Desktop in 2006. The LS technology was ridiculously impressive and exciting. I could burn a DVD and Label it like a professional publisher, WHAT?! But those hopes and dreams were short lived when I found out that the LS Media was almost not available around or was extremely expensive. A blank Verbatim DVD-RW that has a LightScribe layer would cost about INR400 ($9) in 2006. That was a lot of money for College goers whose parents got them that computer in the first place. A non-LS DVD would cost INR40 ($1) a pop.
It wasn't affordable tech for sure but it was exciting as hell.
Fun fact - I had ONE LS DVD medium and just never used it because I wasn't too sure of my design skills and wasn't willing to commit to it at all. 🤣
I was a DJ back when using CDs to DJ was standard. Lightscribe was a Godsend back then.
I totally remember LightScribe! I remember the slogan too. I used to be into filmmaking back in elementary school, and I would burn my "movies" onto LightScribe disks.
I LOVED my Lightscribe burner. Thanks for this wonderful view back to the past!
This made my day. LightScribe brings so much memories Thank you for the awesome video
DiscT@2...That is so early 2000s. Sony did something similar with the PlayStation 2 DVD discs where you can see the 'PS' logo on the read side.
Disc T@2 usually referred to just the optical side, no? I used a Yamaha CRW-F1 for a few years and they seemed to refer to T@2 as being only for that drive, within the CD burning software, Nero. Great audio ripping drive, second only to the Plextor Premium.
I had one of the t@2 drives, I had never heard of the light scribe
Love the Papyrus/Comic Sans combo! :D
but what about
c o m i c p a p y r u s laughingsquid.com/comic-papyrus/
+@@hecko-yes just kill me now
Undertaile references? Lol
😂😂😂
Wait, was that intentional? I thought it was just a coincidence.
Honestly i wouldnt notice the mentioned quality decrease because of the phone if it wasn't mentioned, it's just a good image lol
Gr8 production as always, love this channel.
Huge thanks for this video! I have a light scribe drive in an old HP laptop that was given to me.
Not got around to using it, so this has been a great reminder and also very useful.
❤
I still use LightScribe CDs and DVDs and LOVE the way that they work!! I cannot find a better way to label discs -- paper labels are insane, and my handwriting is poor at its best.
Thanks much for such an informative presentation!!
I still have 2 perfectly working Lightscribe drives. Is there a way to burn the images on WIndows 10? (also where the hell do you buy the media nowadays??)
@@fish_bacon I buy the media on ebay. And as far as writing from Windows 10, I typically use other software.
I made a mix CD for my gf years ago. I Light Scribed a photo of her and I together on the face of it. It looked cool as Hell.
Bet you got some special treatment after that one
@@unnamedchannel1237He's probably still getting that special treatment to this day except now she owns him (speaking metaphorically) lol
Danfuerth Gillis only if a shovel was involved ?
@@unnamedchannel1237 LMFAO marriage is a no win situation, you know concessions have to be made and it's always on one side......lol
@@danfuerthgillis4483 that's a lopsided perspective. A sensible man wouldn't marry if all it was about was him making concessions lol
At the time the drive just came with the computer I bought. When I realized what it does I was so excited! Never even tried burning images but was always pretty happy with the text.