Testimonial - DVD Duplication - Wood County Electric Cooperative

The DVD's look great and we are very pleased. (Order 20081353-0) I'd recommend your service to anyone that wants a manufactured DVD that looks professional, but is affordable.

You guys did a fab job!



Paige Eaton
Director of Communications
Wood County Electric Cooperative

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Testimonial - DVD Duplication - MLC Advertising

Mike –

I just wanted to take a minute and thank you and your team for the great job on the rush DVD for me. The project arrived at the hotel before I did and played beautifully.

Thanks again for working with me on this project and helping me out of a jam.

I look forward to our relationship growing in the future.

Thanks,

Andy

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Andrew P. Vanhook
Creative Director
MLC Advertising

View Related Product: DVD Duplication

Testimonial - CD Duplication - WHDT TV

Order arrived on time. Looks great!

Thank you for your professional service.

Günter Marksteiner
WHDT-TV

View Related Product: CD Duplication

Multiple Form Access for CDs & DVDs

Multiple Form Access, MFA, is a present rage in CD enhancements (at least in the eyes of the CD manufactures that are offering it) - additives made to duplicated discs to greatly increase their perceived or actual value. As of April 2008, MFA is utilized primarily by the music industry to stimulate more user interest, generate more sales, and permit interaction and feedback among end user, distributor and duplicators.

In reality, the average music CD uses about 77% (60 minutes) of its potential 670 MB content (78 minutes), leaving about 23% (130 MB) of available space wasted - or what can otherwise be used or reused now for CD enhancements. Examples include, adding MP3s, videos, photo libraries, ringtones, wallpapers, tour dates, etc.

When the same CD is placed into a computer, the MFA concept permits the user to get much more out of the CD than from a music player. The CD duplication client is charged more for this enhancement process in producing the master content; the end user gets more value added; and (theoretically), the manufacturer gets more repeat orders and even user feedback information.

More examples of CD Enhancement
CD enhancement uses a wide variety of materials added to the audio CD that significantly enrich the value of the originator's project. When placed in a CD player the CD functions normally, playing the audio. However, when placed in a computer, either Mac or PC, the bonus value-additives become available to the user.

Almost any kind of video can be added to the CD, from a short music video to a complete documentary. Other types of materials may be added as well. Examples include photo galleries, scrapbooks with lyrics, credits, stories and comments.

Regardless of the content the developer decides to place on his enhanced CD, CD and DVD duplication companies can also design and develop an interface that suits particular needs and budget. For example: produce a simple, traditional folder which contains the materials to be viewed, or an interactive, multimedia extravaganza that will dazzle and excite the viewers and their friends or affiliates.

The CD Enhancement Production Process
Many of the enhancement materials are encoded in "self-contained" files which do not require the end users to have any particular programs installed on their computers. Other items (such as photos and video) are encoded in formats that are widely supported and common on most computers, such as JPEG, Quicktime, and Adobe Reader PDF files. Interactive programs, such as those written in Visual Basic, C++ or JAVA, are compiled and can be used by all end users since the application or executable programs are contained therein. Either way, nearly all users will be able to view materials quickly and easily without having to install any new software programs on their computers.

What the Future of MFA CDs and DVD's Portend
While much of the above CD Enhancement is not peculiar to the music use of CDs, expect the MFA process to show up in DVD movie and other applications. Examples include video use, data applications, and the business world of catalogs, slide shows like Power Point presentations, and interactive dialogues to further explain a working process, educational material, instruction manuals, and the like. It should be expected that the MFA process will expand in some areas so rapidly, that they no longer will simply piggy-back on music, video and data discs. Rather, they will become the primary, if not all the information on many dedicated discs. Time will tell...

visit www.datadisc.com for more information...

Tech Tip: Compression for CDs and DVDs Part 3: Video

Written by Donald R.J. White

As mentioned twice above, the real CD and DVD compression advantages are nearly all reserved for images. This is readily understood when looking at a typical photograph. If an outdoor landscape, note the blue sky may take up 20% of the photo. Why waste all the hundreds of thousands of pixels when a few bytes will describe the sky color and then its location, height and width take up a small amount more. Only when the neighboring pixels are exhibiting a change does that information need to be preserved. Thus depending upon the simplicity or complexity, video compression techniques may provide for lossy compressions from 5:1 to 200:1 with 50 being a typical order of magnitude.

Read more at http://www.datadisc.com

Tech Tip: Compression for CDs and DVDs Part 2: Data

Written by Donald R.J. White

There are different compression techniques that can be used for compressing plain text languages such as English, latin-based, Slovak and the like. Two examples are (1) RLE for Run length encoding and (2) LZ encoding to cover entropy encoding and Lamped-Ziv compression. While impressive compressions are available for video, as described in the next section, the best that can be expected for plain text is about 3:1.

Thus, a strong argument can be used for not bothering to compress alphanumerics at all, especially if there is embedded video such as graphics, sketches, drawings, and photos. For example, assume a report has 80 % plain text and 20% graphics.

Read more at http://www.datadisc.com/

Tech Tip: Compression for CDs and DVDs Part 1: Music

Written by Donald R.J. White

One Byte = 8 bits = 28, or 256 options or quanta levels. CDs can store 670 MB of information and DVDs (single sided) store 4.7GB. DVDs store 4700MB/670MB = seven times more capacity. For example, 50 CDs of music can be stored on seven DVDs. Compression tools can compress disk space from about three to 200 times, depending on the stored information (i.e. text, music, video, etc). Music compresses from 1.2x to 3:1 times (MP3 format for 10:1 times), and text compresses only about three times. But, video can compress enormously, depending upon if is (1) stills, like a picture gallery or a power point presentation, or (2) movies which compress the best (roughly 100 times). The amount of compression of video depends upon the acceptability level (quality control) of lossy compression techniques.

Read more at http://www.datadisc.com