does laser read the disc inside-out or outside-in?

Thread Starter

PG1995

Joined Apr 15, 2011
832
Hi

I don't know if my memory serves me right but I seem to recall that I read it somewhere that the laser reads the disc outside-in and writes inside-out and that's the reason the disc in, let's say, DVD-ROM revolves at high speed when we just start watching a movie than when the movie is reaching its end. But now the result from googling suggest otherwise. What do you say? Please let me know. Thanks.
 

R!f@@

Joined Apr 2, 2009
9,918
Well! Mostly it's inside out, but sometimes the pickup jumpes to the end due to the way the menu and the interactive materials are loaded from disc to disc.

At least this is what I have noticed
 

tom66

Joined May 9, 2009
2,595
Well in my experience it starts from the inside and goes to the outside, but it depends on where you begin in the film.

Also I have found my DVD player I was repairing would play for 5 seconds without the disk spinning and would tolerate the disc spinning at less than half the normal speed continually, so I'm surprised that it would have to adjust the speed as the disc plays. But I only tested a few minutes each.
 

R!f@@

Joined Apr 2, 2009
9,918
DVD discs can play even if you hold the disc for a couple of secs due to the fact that the decoder has RAM buffers which stores 5 to 10 secs of video data prior to playing.
It is the shock proof thingy.
 

tom66

Joined May 9, 2009
2,595
DVD discs can play even if you hold the disc for a couple of secs due to the fact that the decoder has RAM buffers which stores 5 to 10 secs of video data prior to playing.
It is the shock proof thingy.
Yeah I guessed it would have some kind of look up buffer but this was in a home theatre DVD player, so what, it plays during an earthquake? :p
 

JDT

Joined Feb 12, 2009
657
It always starts from the inside. At the beginning is menu that tells the player what is on the disk. Then, it can jump to some other place on the disk.
 

Wendy

Joined Mar 24, 2008
23,415
When you look at the burn pattern on a writable (yes, you can see it) it is always from this inside. This is good because it also allows for 3½" disks, which are shirt pocket sized.
 

Potato Pudding

Joined Jun 11, 2010
688
With regard to speed of spin-

Optical drives spiral out with fixed length sectors as opposed to magnetic drives that sector by angular measure over cylinders.

That means that where a Magnetic drive rotates at constant RPM - an optical drive reduces rotation speed as it moves out from the center because each spiral is a longer path than the ones inside and holds more fixed length sectors.

That also means that it has faster seek times near the center because of the fewer sectors and faster rotation.
 
Top