Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Man, it felt like maybe an entire generation ago since I felt I last needed discs for any level of pirating.

The last time I used one was just to get some linux distros to install when the USB flash method wasn't working.

I burned 4 low quality kids movies on a disk for the dvd player in my wife's SUV.

Of course they all have devices now and access to jellyfin

I've been on a retro kick. Recently I've been messing with a Pentium 233 MMX. I burned a tinycore Linux CD a couple days ago so I could make this:

Haha I talked to my kids about burning CDs in the way of talking about old tech they've never encountered. They wanted a CD burner after that to try it out, so I found an external USB burner and a cheapo little boom box. They ended up downloading songs from our media server and some stuff from NewGrounds and burning a bunch of mix CDs. It was fun!

A PS2 game to test FreeDVDBoot on the PS2 Slim https://youtu.be/ez0y-hz3VuM

Probably like a dreamcast game or a mixtape for the car

CT Scan imagery. Apparently medical clinics have finally graduated from faxes to optical media. This was in 2025.

DVD was to make a physical media of streaming content for a relative who doesn’t use technology but wanted to watch it. This would’ve been about 5 years ago ish since we don’t see them much anymore.

CD was about 3 years ago for my car since its head unit didn’t have car play. We’ve since purchased an iPod 7th gen to do the job.

The last DVD burned was a release candidate for Debian buster. The last CD was a full i386 install of OpenBSD 6.4 for a ThinkPad T43p. Both happened in the last decade (2010's).

I've ripped several music CD's and movie DVD's since then, but using it as a storage device just isn't a thing any more.

Last year a friend of mine was feeling romantic and wanted to give a physical audio disc to a crush. It's not a mixtape but still ...

I recently purchased an older vehicle that came with a standard CD player and no AUX input. Setting down to plan and burn a dozen CD-Rs was quite nostalgic. I was surprised the local mega-mart actually had them in stock.

I had a college sports team reunion and several teammates asked for a copy of a championship game. I still had the digital file, so posted it in a Dropbox thinking that would be easy enough for people whose hobbies don't involve computers.

Nope, I was spending too much time on tech support so offered flash drives with video files.

Nope, still too much for two teammates so after a phone call to understand what tech they had at home and were comfortable with, I burned them each DVDs.

It didn't get that far, but I was prepared to use my library's digital-to-VHS-to-digital workstation to copy them an old-timey VHS tape if the DVDs didn't work. The library even has a stash of never-unwrapped VHS tapes they'll sell you.

I burned a custom johnny cash cd for my mom using some of her favorites. She played it for about 9 years before accidentally leaving it in the cd player when she sold her old car

Abstract: I burned a pair of audio CDs three days ago for listening to in my cars. Two (nearly) identical discs, one for each car. I have largely moved away from optical discs but am making an effort to re-embrace them.

Full text: So when I went to build my PC, I wanted a Fractal Meshify 2 Mini case. I built my cousin's PC in one, I wanted one too, but they had apparently been discontinued. I wound up with a Pop Air Mini case instead, which in many ways isn't as nice, but it does feature a pair of 5 1/4" bays hidden behind a magnetic panel at the front of the PSU basement.

One of my little projects was to install one of those multi-format card readers and an old optical drive there, and I got it done a few days ago. I have a USB optical drive, in fact a couple of them, but an internal one is just a nicer thing to deal with. It is my understanding that no one is actually manufacturing those external optical drives anymore; that the ones you see on Amazon with god knows what branding are old laptop drives of whatever spec stuffed into a new case with a USB controller. They're flaky, janky, and flimsy. Plus there's never anywhere to put them; they come with short little cables so they're invariably hard to plug in. So instead I ganked a blu-ray reader/DVD writer drive out of an old Dell I have lying around and installed that, and man is it nicer.

My inaugural project was to make a couple of audio CDs for the car. This project involved little to no piracy; all of the audio came from legitimately purchased CDs that I bought as directly from the band as I could. I want to fund the artists, not the sniveling IP hoarders. So I've got discs now that have my favorite 25 out of ~120 tracks I bought from them in my cars. I ripped the discs to FLACs the second I had them and have been listening to them on my phone, my precious originals safely stored in a CD rack.

I also bought a new spindle of CD-Rs, which is also getting harder to do. The ones I bought have inkjet printable labels. And it just so happens my old inkjet printer has a disc printing feature that I've yet to use. So I tried it out. Getting this particular printer going in Linux for more than basic features is a no-go; CUPS+Gutenprint is available for at least a thousand makes and models of Epson printers including the models above and below mine in the range, but specifically not mine. I chose to take that personally, but in the meantime I have discs to print. Funnily enough the printer can do this without a PC at all; it has a feature specifically for printing JPGs onto discs, and another feature that I have to assume is designed specifically for piracy:

My Epson XP-830 Expression Premium "Small In One" printer has a built-in feature to copy a CD from the scanner bed to the disc tray. That is, put a CD label side down on the scanner glass, put a printable CD-R on the disc tray, and it will figure it out and copy it. I can think of no purpose for that other than to hand out copies of Now That's What I Call Music 7 or Windows Vista Home Premium to all your high school friends. It's useless for things like "File Archives 2011" or "Iron Butterfly Beach Party Mix" but it's a very user friendly counterfeiting workflow.

So mostly I installed this optical drive for reading rather than writing. I can see a future where I replace this drive with an M-disc burner; I keep threatening to start a Youtube channel, and that might be how I archive video footage, but...I don't know.

I burn exactly one DVD every year.

The school where I teach wants us to deposit all tests done in digital format (I teach programming) at the end of the year on a DVD-RW.

I keep an old USB DVD drive around specifically for this, but I also have some old PCs that I could use. I use k3b to make these discs.

I have an old car so I burn CDs all the time. After streaming music on shuffle for awhile, I find it refreshing to listen to an album all the way through.

The last CD I burned happened to be legally obtained music off of Bandcamp (a mix of some Trocadero songs).

Though of course a lot of the time, the songs I burn come from other sources.

I still used CDs, I recently got out all my music CDs again since I setup a new hifi system. But I haven’t burned a cd or dvd in about 15 years. In fact as I came across copies of burned cds in my collection I have gone and bought cheap used copies to replace them.

No idea, it was a long time ago. If I have to guess it would probably was a linux distro, I remember some problems making a bootable usb or booting a laptop from usb so I might ended up burning a cd.

I rip music to play in the car for my kids. Mostly mix tracks they like.

I burned an audio CD just last week. My old Chevy truck has some mid 2000'S radio swapped into it and it doesnt have bluetooth or aux (well, has aux but it's buried in the back of the dash). So I burn a CD once in a while to pop in and enjoy.

I backup stuff on blurays and DVDs a couple times a year. I also wrote a copy of FreeDOS and some software onto a stack of floppies recently.

I want to burn some family photos on an M-Disc, I bought a bluray burner and some discs and they wait on the shelf now.

Mine was a live CD of Ubuntu about 3 years ago. It was an older computer and the front USB ports weren't plugged in so no USB drive.

My summer mix '08

I burned a HeXEn dvd last year for modding purposes on the original Xbox. Only thing I've burned in years. Still have a stack of blanks and an external USB disk drive, just in case.

Burned, was probably a Linux ISO about 15 years ago. I still prefer to buy physical media (CDs and DVDs), just haven't had a need to burn any in a while.

This past summer my GF took a trip to Canada and took her laptop. To preempt any fuckery at the border when she came back into the US I full-disk encrypted it with Veracrypt and I burned an emergency recovery DVD at the time of encryption. She didn't have any trouble crossing back in, but better safe than sorry.

Once ventoy became a thing i stopped needing optical media. The last one i burned was most likely a linux distro.

I do remember the last bluray i burned was a bunch of roms for Mame and other emulator to mail someone. I think i burned all of maybe 4 bluray discs with that burner, it seemed like a good thing to get when i built the pc in 2010,but i almost never used it.

I maintain a collection of PCs stretching back to the late 90's, so I still regularly burn CDs and DVDs of install media for the ones that can't boot from USB. I should try to get PXE working on my network, but using physical media is fast and convenient for me. I also occasionally burn extra backups to BD-R media.

One of my professors in college demanded the class turn in a video production assignment as DVDs.

..... This was in 2018

I was the only one in the class who even had a DVD burner (.... Because I'd used it some years prior for PS2 games piracy and it was still in my storage box)

So the class bought a spindle of DVDs and I spent an afternoon burning everyone's assignments to DVDs.

No idea what would have happened if they didn't have a pet ultranerd like me. Like, did teach expect 'em to go and buy a USB DVD burner just for that?

I burnt a freedvdboot disc yesterday to flash a freemcboot memory card for my PS2.

That's the first time I've burnt a disc since I chipped my PS1 in ~2018

Probably like 2010, 2011 was my last time? It would have been movies for our dvd player in our bedroom when my (now) wife and I were in University.

I got an iPod Nano for my birthday in the fall of 2005, which brought the burning cd factory that was my computer to a screeching halt. I'd still back up files and stuff using CDs, but it went from like going through a carousel of blanks a month to going through a carousel of blanks in like 3 years, within a very short period of time.

About a year ago, burned my family photo collection as yet another backup. Took a stack of DVD-R's to write, but now I also have it in one more format!

Hey kids! Pirating is cool, right? Who here likes to pirate, my friends? /s

2018/2019 map update for a 2003 Mercedes. Didn't work though, probably bad optical drive or something.

I burned a selection of Expedition 33 songs as a Christmas present for my mother.

oh man. totally don't remember. I wish they were more robust and lasted longer as there is tons I would do if it was less common for them to die when sitting around.