DualDisk technology has multiple problems

November 6, 2004

Wesociety used our news submit to tell us "A lot of people had high hopes for these new hybrid discs and it was refreshing to see the Music studios actually trying something innovative for a change. Too bad they had to botch it up by using copy protection schemes that always prove to be more damaging to practical use ability."

Last week when it was announced that DualDisc (CD/DVD) hybrids were showing up in stores, I thought this was the first decent thing the music industry had done in while. I"ve been down on the music industry for quite some time but DualDisc seemed like a smart idea. It could add more value to their offerings by giving fans DVD extras along with the music. The movie industry has been doing it for years with good success so I wanted to see the technology in action. I bought the disc mentioned in the article, "Still Not Getting Any" from Simple Plan. I had never heard of the band before but I wasn"t buying for the music. The only thing I knew for sure was the disc would come with some type of copy protection scheme so I anticipated there would be some glitches. The problems showed up immediately.

When you read the full article over at digitalmerging you will see that this DualDisk have many problems, especially when you try to playback the disk on a standalone DVD player, a Playstation2 or when you simply want to copy the content of the disk to your iPod. It seems that once more the used copy protection schemes are the reason for the compatibility problems from a disk that was 'designed to play on most standard DVD and CD player" with even these.

On the other hand we can report that major and independent record labels are on the way to introduce this kind of disks into the market. We can only hope that the labels checked these problems and stay away from the copy protection or use protection schemes that have no negative effect to the compatibility.

Source: Digitalmerging