Here’s an hack that takes on the challenge of burning a visible image into a CD-R.
Data on a CD, or any optical media, is stored as a sequence of pits of varying lengths. To be precise, a 1 is represented by the change from pit to no-pit or the change from no-pit to pit, and a 0 is represented by no change in height (pit to pit or no-pit to no-pit). The pits and no-pits reflect different amounts of light; thus it is possible to draw images on CDs by appropriately arranging these 1s and 0s.
As you can see in the photo above, the results are difficult to make out, mostly due to calibration settings that the author needed to tweak. All of his source is available, though some of it requires Matlab. Anyone care to test this out and link us to a photo in the comments?
What I’d really like to see is something that will take an image and convert it into a wav file that can be placed as the first track on the disk to show an image…
Burning visible images onto CD-Rs with data (beta) – Link
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