Old for New ... DVD Drives

[muckshifter]

Inability to support hardware that nobody makes any more

Windows Vista will not have support for really old DVD drives.

When PC DVD drives first came out in 1998, the drives themselves did not have support for region codes but instead relied on (and in fact the DVD specification required) the operating system to enforce region coding, with the further understanding that starting on January 1, 2000 all newly-manufactured drives would support region coding in hardware rather than relying on software enforcement. For the purpose of this discussion, I will call the two types of drives "old" ... manufactured before 2000 ... and "new" ... manufactured on or after January 1, 2000.

It is that software enforcement that is going away. Turns out that the enforcement of region coding in software had its own problems:

• It was impossible for third-parties to compile their own CDROM.SYS from the source code in the DDK because the region code enforcement code was not included in the DDK.
• The region code enforcement code would sometimes mistake a new drive for an old one, resulting in customers unable to play DVDs. Even worse, the driver test team could not reproduce the problem reliably, and the problem went away entirely once a debugger was attached to the system.
• The code to support the older drives is complex, and the drives that the optical storage team purchased prior to January 1, 2000 are dead or dying. Consequently, testing the code that provides support for old drives has become increasingly difficult, and when the last old drive finally gives up the ghost, testing will become impossible altogether.

These were among the considerations which contributed to the decision to stop supporting these old drives.

What does this mean for you? Almost certainly, the answer is "absolutely nothing".

First, there is no change to the way data is read from DVD drives, so data discs will still work the same way as they do today. Second, all new DVD drives will continue to run as they did before; the only change is that the risk of mis-identification as an old drive has been removed. Only if you have an old drive will you notice anything different, namely that encrypted/regionalized DVD movies will no longer play. And since the average drive lifetime is only three years, the number of such old drives that are still working is vanishingly small.


Have you got an old DVDrom drive still working?


My thanks to the "Drive Team"

Mucks


PS, Linux does not have this problem.

 

[Quadophile]

Good post, Mucks

Since we are on the subject of Optical Drives let me mention it here that the Life Span of optical drives in the initial stages was indicated as 5 years, many drives in those days packed up much earlier and some, you will be surprised to note, have lasted twice as much and there are many such examples. I personally have an Interactive CD player from Philips which dates back to 1991 and still performs without any problems whatsoever except that the tray does not come out when the button is pressed but can be manually pulled out and pushed back in, aside from this minor irritant all is OK. The optical drive inside of that player is considered as one of the most reliable ever produced, I believe it is CDM 3 from Philips. and there were many variants including professional versions

In recent times manufacturers have started quoting specs computer drives which read: MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) and POH (Power On Hours). If one carefully goes through the specs one will find out that the figures quoted are extremely generous. For example POH could be 60-70,000 hours which calculates to be something like 7-8 years if the system is on 24/7. MTBF could be quoted as something like 20,000 hours or so. I guess none of us would be having the particular drive for that long. The prices are extremely reasonable and affordable by everyone who buys a computer if upgrading is needed for any reason.

In 1988 when the first CD Writer was introduced to NASA the manufacturer charged US100,000 for a 1x drive We have come a long way since then Probably there are CD Writers out there today with a price tag of just $10 per unit

When the Voyager left the earth long time ago there was no DVD, even the CD was not invented yet but it carried a pure gold Laser Disk on which earth sounds and images were recorded. I wonder what the Aliens might be using now as media, I am sure even they would laugh at the obsolete technology we sent out in space. Even we do not use it anymore How many of you out there have a Laser Disk Player lying around?