CompTIA A_ Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition - Michael Meyers [215]
Windows Media Player makes an excellent DVD-watching application, but for DVD burning you need to turn to a third-party tool. Nero and Roxio make excellent software that handles every DVD recordable standard your drive can use (as well as CD-R and CD-RW).
Ever wanted to make a perfect copy of a CD so you can keep your original in a safe place? You can do so by using a special file type called an ISO file. An ISO file is a complete copy—an ISO image as we say—of a CD or DVD. As you might imagine, they are huge files, but they are also very important to techs. Techs use ISO images to send each other copies of bootable utility CDs. For example, if you want a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD, you go to their Web site and download an ISO image. You then take your third-party burning program (Windows XP/Vista built-in burning software can’t do this) and go through a special process called burning an ISO image. Learn how to burn ISO images with your burning program; you’ll use it all the time.
Figure 13-38 Change CD drive letter option in Disk Management
Blu-ray Disc Drive Considerations
Physically installing, attaching, and maintaining optical drives is pretty straightforward, but a Blu-ray Disc drive installation requires some special considerations. If you plan to use your Blu-ray Disc drive primarily for storage purposes, for example, system requirements are minimal. If you plan on watching Blu-ray Disc movies in HD resolution (720p, 1080i, or 1080p), on the other hand, the requirements are quite hefty. Here’s a list of recommended minimum specs.
Processor At the very least, a Pentium 4, Pentium D, or dual or multicore processor; or an AMD Athlon 64 X2 or Phenom multicore processor.
System Memory At least 1 GB RAM for Windows XP; 2 GB RAM for Windows Vista.
Figure 13-39 Typical third-party CD-burning program
Video You need an HDCP-compliant (either DVI or HDMI) video card and drivers. That’s a lot of initials in one sentence! Here’s the scoop. The High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) is a standard developed by Intel to ensure copyright protection on behalf of the Motion Picture Association of America. The Digital Video Interface (DVI) and High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) standards enable fast uncompressed connections between an HDTV, PC, and any other DVI/HDMI component. HDMI, which transmits both video and audio signals, has all but replaced the older DVI standard that only supports video. ATI and NVIDIA both offer Blu-ray Disc-compliant PCIe video cards with enough horsepower to get the job done.
CyberLink provides an awesome tool called BD Advisor that will tell you if your system meets the requirements to play Blu-ray Discs. You can get it at http://www.cyberlink.com/prog/bd-support/diagnosis.do.
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EXAM TIP Be sure you are familiar with the Blu-ray Disc requirements discussed in this section, especially the stringent requirements for supporting high-definition video and audio. Also, be aware that CompTIA expects you to be somewhat knowledgeable of DVD/BD region codes, so pay attention to those as well.
Region Codes
Production movies on DVD and Blu-ray Disc can feature a region code, encoding that enables you to play those movies only on a player that shares the same region code. This was instituted to try to stop piracy of movies, though it didn’t manage to accomplish