Learning
Many DVD-writers have a learning feature (branded with names like "smart-burn") that allows the drive to collect empirical data from its actual usage. The drive stores data from previous burns in its EEPROM, allowing it to adapt the default write strategies to account for individual drive variations, such as calibration, which may be affected by environment and age.
A newer feature contained in some DVD writers allows a drive to invent write strategies for unknown media types, ostensibly reducing its dependence on firmware to provide explicit compatibility. However, because the drive initially knows nothing of the media type, early burns are frequently of poor quality, and the media's optimal strategy may never be found. Thus, in practice, this form of learning is generally a last resort, and firmware support is preferable. An attempt to address this weakness is online learning, which allows the drives to share learned data. Branded technologies that incorporate this form of learning have been given names like "solid burn" and "hypertuning".
In either case, if the history data is reset, or if the data is skewed by a series of irregular burns, the speed and/or quality of a typical burn may not be optimal until the history is repopulated with proper result data again.
Read more about this topic: Write Strategy
Famous quotes containing the word learning:
“I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me in how to die well and live well.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“Young children learn in a different manner from that of older children and adults, yet we can teach them many things if we adapt our materials and mode of instruction to their level of ability. But we miseducate young children when we assume that their learning abilities are comparable to those of older children and that they can be taught with materials and with the same instructional procedures appropriate to school-age children.”
—David Elkind (20th century)