EFM and 2 sheep burners

does anyone know where to find an updated list of 2 sheep burners. is there an official site maybe.
and what does the acronym EFM stand for.

 

P.S You cant bold headings.....

Regards
CoZZa

 

Could someone answer this question for me.

I've bought a Dell 5150 with a 4x dvd/cd rewriter. Thing is I have no idea who makes their cd drives. Any of ye know is it a 1 or 2 sheep drive.

Also, have any of ye guys backed up C and C Generals. I'm tried Alcohol 120 but it didn't work. Start up screen came up but after that it didn't work.

Niall

 

Sorry, just to add I'm using Cdrw disks on C and C Generals.

Is this a bad thing. Don't RW disks work to back up stuff like games ?
I think they're TDK CDRW's btw.

Niall

 

i presently have 2 burners installed

HP cd-writer+ 8000
HL-DT-ST RW/DVD GCC-4120B

as listed in device manager. I highly doubt any of them are 2 sheep burners. i hear that plextor premium is a good buy but i saw a list and none of the plextor drives were 2 sheep. i'm looking to buy the best burner for copying protected games.

 

thanx for notifying me about the bold thing. i was wondering why it didn't work.

the Eight- Fourteen Modulation rings a bell, i saw some DVD burners capable of 8-16 modulation, now that i know about EFM i would take a leap and assume 8-16 is a better capable burner than an 8-14.

CD-RW media is incapable of handling subchannel data and therefore it is not advisible to copy games to rw media. unless its a dvd+rw which i think some can handle the sub channel data. the + and - have something to do with that aspect but i am not too sure. your best bet is to use cd-r, they are cheap.

 

I have some info here about EFM encoding.


EFM Encoding

With compact discs, as in life, the best way to avoid errors is to keep them from happening in the first place.

Because of the extremely small size and close proximity of the pits on a surface of a CD, their placement is very important to the performance of the player. When a CD plays, it uses the string of pits to keep the laser on track. That means that if there were a long stretch where there were no pits (which could happen with a long, continuous string of zeros, for example), the laser would probably get lost! This would cause tracking errors and a whole lot of bits to get missed. On the other hand, too many pits isn't good either. If there are a lot of 1-to-0 and 0-to-1 transitions in the data track, it makes the pits very small, which are hard for the laser to detect. This would make missed bits much more common, and make the parity checker have to work that much harder.

The solution is to arrange the pits in such a way so that there aren't too few, or too many, pits on any given segment of the data track. This is done with an extremely clever technique called EFM, which stands for Eight to Fourteen Modulation. In EFM, every possible 8-bit word (from 0000 0000 to 1111 1111) has a 14-bit equivalent. The 14-bit "substitute words" are chosen such that there are always more than two, but less than ten, consecutive zeros. Every 8-bit byte of data in a CD frame is converted to a 14-bit word using EFM before it is written. This ensures that the data spiral has no pits smaller than 3 bits or larger than 11 bits in length. Not too small, and not too big, but just right. This keeps the tracking mechanism running smoothly and the laser happy!

This works great for manipulating the occurrence of pit-to-land transitions within an 8-bit word. But wait... what about the transitions between EFM words themselves? What happens if you have an EFM word that ends in a "1", and the very next EFM word begins with a "1"? This breaks the "always more than two consecutive zeros" rule, and results in a pit smaller than 3 bits. This is why 3 merge bits are always inserted between EFM encoded words on the CD. These 3 merge bits can be anything, but are chosen to eliminate consecutive "1"s between EFM words and to maintain the minimum pit size of 3 bits.


A list of 2 sheep burners can be found using this link.
http://www.makeabackup.com/burners.html
Thanks to Nephilim i checked it out and it seems up to date.Thanx.

 

I'm just curious, everyone keeps saying the plextor premium is a best buy, but there are no plextors on the 2 sheep list on the link above. so how does everyone know that plextor is good? more importantly when i go to the store and pick up the plextor premium burner, what exactly do i look for on the box that would indicate that the burner i hold in my hands is a 2 sheep badass burner?

 

So guys. Any advice on burning Generals. I've tried Alcohol 120 with a cd r and no good. Would using fireburner toburn be any help ?

Niall

 

I got it.

Instead of writing the iso file to a cd, I instead put the iso directly onto the cd. Then using daemon tools emulator, I mounted the file off the cd directly to the computer.

Works fine.


Niall