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:
“Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“We have got to know what both life and death are, before we can begin to live after our own fashion. Let us be learning our a-b- c’s as soon as possible.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If learning to read was as easy as learning to talk, as some writers claim, many more children would learn to read on their own. The fact that they do not, despite their being surrounded by print, suggests that learning to read is not a spontaneous or simple skill.”
—David Elkind (20th century)