Company type | Incorporation |
---|---|
Founded | 1998 [1] |
Founder | Steve Volk |
Headquarters | Longmont, Colorado, USA |
Key people | Bill Almon, Jr., CEO and President Jeff Roberts, CFO |
Products | DataPlay Engine DataPlay 500MB Optical Media |
Number of employees | ~30 (2006) |
Website | www.DataPlay.com (defunct) |
Optical discs |
---|
DataPlay is an optical disc system developed by DataPlay Inc. and released to the consumer market in 2002. Using very small (32mm diameter) disks enclosed in a protective cartridge storing 250MB per side, DataPlay was intended primarily for portable music playback, although it could also store other types of data, using both pre-recorded disks and user-recorded disks (and disks that combined pre-recorded information with a writable area). [2] It would also allow for multisession recording. [1] DataPlay Inc. was founded in 1998 by Steve Volk. The company's namesake optical disc won the CES Best of Show award in 2001. [3]
DataPlay also included an elaborate digital rights management system designed to allow consumers to "unlock" extra pre-recorded content on the disk at any time, through the internet, following the initial purchase. It was based on the Secure Digital Music Initiative's DRM system. [2] Dataplay's DRM system was one of the reasons behind its attractiveness to the music industry. [4] It also included a proprietary file system, Dataplay File System (DFS) which natively supported DRM. By default it would allow up to 3 copies to other Dataplay discs, without allowing any copies to CDs. [5]
DataPlay Inc. was founded by Steve Volk in 1998. [6] Volk had founded DataPlay in the aftermath of his second company Intégral Peripherals going bankrupt in 1998. Intégral was the first to manufacture 1.8-inch hard drives—at the time the smallest form factor for hard drives—for laptops and other mobile computing devices, starting in 1992. Volk intended for Intégral to supplant the industry-standard 2.5-inch hard drive form factor introduced by PrairieTek—the first company that Volk had co-founded. After the failure of Intégral, Volk decided to aim for the optical media sector. [7]
The recorded music industry was initially generally supportive of DataPlay and a small number of a pre-recorded DataPlay disks were released, including the Britney Spears album Britney . Graphics on press releases show that Sting and Garth Brooks were also set to have DataPlay releases. [8] In 2001 the first DIY DataPlay album was released by the experimental rave producer Backmasker. [9] However, as a pre-recorded format, DataPlay was a failure. The company closed due to a lack of funding. [10] [11] In 2003 a company called DPHI bought Dataplay's intellectual property and reintroduced it at CES 2004. The company swapped Dataplay's DFS file system in favor of the FAT file system. Again, they were marketed as a cheaper alternative to memory cards, with a device being designed that would allow users to transfer data from an SD card to a cheaper Dataplay disc. Each disc would hold 500 megabytes of data and be sold at just US$4.50. DPHI also prototyped 750 megabyte Dataplay discs and announced plans for 2 and 7 gigabyte discs, the latter of which would use a blue-violet semiconductor laser, just like Blu-ray. [12]
There were very few products seen on the market that could write data to these discs. Most notable was the Topy Mini Writer, which retailed for $130 (USD) and housed an optical pickup unit (image No.4) with a USB interface board, allowing the use of DataPlay discs much like other end-user writable optical media (e.g., CD-Rs). Other products were the iriver IDP-100 [13] and the MTV Video Device "MTV FLIP", which both housed the prototype-based model (image No.2).[ citation needed ]
Dataplay discs were first proposed as a low cost alternative to memory cards, which used to cost US$3 per megabyte. Blank Dataplay discs, by comparison, would hold 500 megabytes of data at US$10 per disc. They are also expected to have a 100-year lifespan. [2] [14] [1] The discs would be made out of polycarbonate, just like CDs, but would be just 0.6mm thick, just like one half of a DVD. [5] (DVDs are made up of two halves that are bonded using glue; usually only one (side) contains data)Rewritable Dataplay discs would be similar to CDs, using a phase change alloy protected by a Silicon Oxide layer. [5] Mastered (replicated) Dataplay discs would combine both pits and lands to store mastered data, and grooves containing a wobble frequency to store rewritable data. Just like on CDs, the wobble frequency would store time data, to precisely position the laser on the disc. [5] [15]
It has two rewritable areas: one for user data, and the other for encrypted data, the latter of which would hold the decryption keys necessary to unlock the extra content. [5] They also have a Burst cutting area to uniquely identify each disc. [5] Dataplays can transfer data at 1 megabyte per second. [3] [16]
Other trademark names:[ citation needed ]
The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then released in October 1982 in Japan and branded as Digital Audio Compact Disc.
CD-R is a digital optical disc storage format. A CD-R disc is a compact disc that can be written once and read arbitrarily many times.
An optical disc is a flat, usually disc-shaped object that stores information in the form of physical variations on its surface that can be read with the aid of a beam of light. Optical discs can be reflective, where the light source and detector are on the same side of the disc, or transmissive, where light shines through the disc to be detected on the other side.
Video CD is a home video format and the first format for distributing films on standard 120 mm (4.7 in) optical discs. The format was widely adopted in Southeast Asia, South Asia, Greater China, Central Asia and West Asia, superseding the VHS and Betamax systems in the regions until DVD-Video finally became affordable in the first decade of the 21st century.
A disk image is a snapshot of a storage device's structure and data typically stored in one or more computer files on another storage device. Traditionally, disk images were bit-by-bit copies of every sector on a hard disk often created for digital forensic purposes, but it is now common to only copy allocated data to reduce storage space. Compression and deduplication are commonly used to reduce the size of the image file set. Disk imaging is done for a variety of purposes including digital forensics, cloud computing, system administration, as part of a backup strategy, and legacy emulation as part of a digital preservation strategy. Disk images can be made in a variety of formats depending on the purpose. Virtual disk images are intended to be used for cloud computing, ISO images are intended to emulate optical media and raw disk images are used for forensic purposes. Proprietary formats are typically used by disk imaging software. Despite the benefits of disk imaging the storage costs can be high, management can be difficult and they can be time consuming to create.
A CD player is an electronic device that plays audio compact discs, which are a digital optical disc data storage format. CD players were first sold to consumers in 1982. CDs typically contain recordings of audio material such as music or audiobooks. CD players may be part of home stereo systems, car audio systems, personal computers, or portable CD players such as CD boomboxes. Most CD players produce an output signal via a headphone jack or RCA jacks. To use a CD player in a home stereo system, the user connects an RCA cable from the RCA jacks to a hi-fi and loudspeakers for listening to music. To listen to music using a CD player with a headphone output jack, the user plugs headphones or earphones into the headphone jack.
In computing, an optical disc drive is a disc drive that uses laser light or electromagnetic waves within or near the visible light spectrum as part of the process of reading or writing data to or from optical discs. Some drives can only read from certain discs, but recent drives can both read and record, also called burners or writers. Compact discs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs are common types of optical media which can be read and recorded by such drives.
An optical disc image is a disk image that contains everything that would be written to an optical disc, disk sector by disc sector, including the optical disc file system. ISO images contain the binary image of an optical media file system, including the data in its files in binary format, copied exactly as they were stored on the disc. The data inside the ISO image will be structured according to the file system that was used on the optical disc from which it was created.
A magneto-optical drive is a kind of optical disc drive capable of writing and rewriting data upon a magneto-optical disc. 130 mm (5.25 in) and 90 mm (3.5 in) discs were the most common sizes. In 1983, just a year after the introduction of the compact disc, Kees Schouhamer Immink and Joseph Braat presented the first experiments with erasable magneto-optical compact discs during the 73rd AES Convention in Eindhoven. The technology was introduced commercially in 1985. Although optical, they normally appear as hard disk drives to an operating system and can be formatted with any file system. Magneto-optical drives were common in some countries, such as Japan, but have fallen into disuse.
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HD DVD is an obsolete high-density optical disc format for storing data and playback of high-definition video. Supported principally by Toshiba, HD DVD was envisioned to be the successor to the standard DVD format, but lost to Blu-ray, supported by Sony and others.
A CD-ROM is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both computer data and audio with the latter capable of being played on a CD player, while data is only usable on a computer.
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