Rewritable Media
The dawn of cheap rewritable Media in Home Theater
Rewritable media is one of the most significant, yet unexpected advances to hit Home Audio. While the latest industry buzz in transportable media is wireless, rewritable media is still the cheapest way to go. Borrowed from the computer world CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW and the less popular Panasonic format known as DVD RAM are being stuffed into home DVD, CD players and other optical media. The catch is, sensors indicate this rewritable media is expected to perform as well as their store bought counter-parts. Consumer electronics companies who make the players we use to play our writable media are gladly answering the call for compatibility. Most CD and DVD players today post compatibility with rewritable discs as part of their specifications and play them with minimal failure.
The first few groundbreaking souls who tried to play a copied CD on their home audio player may have been admonished by their player's firmware citing unreadable disc or some other digital curse. There's a motion among mainstream media companies to dampen your efforts to play back copy protected media in a standard player. Many CDs on the market today don't even follow the Red Book standards which outline the technical definitions of what a CD can be. By adding obscure copy protection methods they will sometimes deviate from the Red Book standards and sell the disc in stores as a media disc that will generally play in most CD players. As a result, even store bought CDs aren't necessarily reliable.
To further compliance with rewritable media, most players are capable of playing back MP3 and WMA. In some cases, DVD players will play back other forms of audio/visual compression such as DivX and AVI and will often include a jpeg photo viewer. Today, a DVD player armed with the ability to read MP3s and offer a display menu system that allows you to navigate content of a burned DVD is a great boon to data rippers everywhere. You can store a library of songs on a single DVD in MP3 format and, if your DVD player comes with a random shuffle mode, you can keep the party rocking all night long without so much as a pause to reload a disc. A multi-disc DVD carousel with MP3 playback capabilities adds a dimension to your playback that is downright scary. You could literally get lost for days in an ongoing playback session without a single repeat.
It's ironic how on one hand bigwigs in the entertainment industry will push for content protection on their media, use HDCP compliant digital delivery methods and admonish all file sharing as illegitimate use of their products. At the same time the same company will gladly enable all of the above by selling DVD and CD players that will playback burned media filled with ripped MP3s. It's a Catch 22 situation and for companies like Sony not to play the game, they'll kiss away valuable profit- where there is a demand there is someone there to produce the market.