Philips introduces SolidBurn - improves DVD burn quality, ends MID mess

Source: http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/12056

Posted by Jan Willem on 05 July 2005 - 22:05 - Source: CDFreaks


Today Philips demonstrated SolidBurn to us, a new self-learning DVD burning feature that ensures the optimal writing conditions for DVD-recordable media. SolidBurn is able to excute a series of tests on DVD media and automatically determine the optimal writing strategy. SolidBurn should be able to do this much faster than existing technologies. Currently only single layer DVD recordable media is supported and according to a Philips spokesperson the best results are reached on DVD+R as there are still many low quality DVD-R discs on the market.



The write strategy of a DVD drive is the way in which it writes to a blank DVD media. Normally these write strategies are determined by extensive media tests at the drive manufacturer and listed in the firmware of the drive. But unfortunately these media lists are not complete. And with new DVD media regularly coming to market, consumers need to update their DVD writers with the latest firmware to ensure an up-to-date media list for best recording quality, also different batches of drives and media can distort the results. To keep the media strategies up to date users will need to update their firmware and according to Philips, many users simply don't update their firmware. With SolidBurn there is no longer a need to update the firmware for better writing strategies.



When a new disc is inserted into the drive, SolidBurn executes automatically a series of tests on the DVD media. Based on the DVD writer’s measurements capabilities such as jitter and PiSum-8 , the SolidBurn algorithm delivers a multiple of unique parameter settings that control the drive during the normal writing process. The drive writes a small part on the disc (The OPC area) to be able to do tests.



Users have the ability to decide if they want to use SolidBurn. Applications that support the Philips drives DVDR1648 and DVDR1628 will give the user the ability to uncheck the feature, SolidBurn is by default on. The company is not planning to allow users to do jitter tests to check the quality of burned discs.

Philips will introduce SolidBurn in its new DVDR1648 and DVDR1628 drives, available in August 2005. Also other drives that use Philips chipsets (E.g. BenQ) will have the functionality.