“Hacking” Lightscribe Simple Labeler

My DVD Burner in my G5 Tower died partly. Yes! Partly, because it sometimes decided to kill a bunch of media rendering my trashbin a total DVD dump. I went to the next store and pulled a new LG Burner with LightScribe functionality. Keen on seeing my label bruned into the top coating of a DVD I headed over to lightscribe.com and got the driver package and “Lightscribe Simple Labeler”. Man, this programm is really down to basics. It lets you enter two lines of text and choose from 4 borderdesigns. Absolutely not that what I intended to spent my precious LS-discs for. No way! I want full size, self-designed, graphically rich labels, hence: pictures!

Back on the web I figured that “Disc Cover RE”, which is part of Roxios “Toast 8” should be able to deal with LightSribe. Very expensive…. so nothing for me. Over to Simple Labeler once more, I found out that all those “borders” (as they are called) are packed into the application package and are simple PNGs. Wow! Now here we go – pimp your Simple Labeler.

1 Just take your favorite tool and start designing. Here you can download my Photoshop template: sl_templatepsd.zip

After you are done with your design, save it as PNG and name ist something like “fs00010.png” – fs = fullscreen plus an increasing number of the designs (00001-00008 are reserved by the original designs; if you don’t need’em you can use those numbers as well) .

2 Now make a little preveiw file 86×86 px, save it as 8-bit PNG (PNG8) and name it “th00010.png” – 00010 should be the same number as you gave to the fs-file. Here you can download the default blanko image: LightScribe-thumbnailPNG NOTE: This is an 8-bit image, so you have to set it back to RGB-Mode, if you want to work with PS Layers.

3 Next thing is just a little XML File that tells the program some settings. No need to go into detail here, unless you want to toy around with text color option (it is grey! remember that). I guess, it is just selfexplainable. Changing the name might be interessting for you, though (replace cahoonah.com with your designated name).

{code type=xml}

cahoonah.com
0

{/code}

Name that file “md00010.xml” according to our example – here it has the number 00010 again.

4 Now comes the hard hacking part ;)…. Go to your Lighscribe Simple Labeler and Klick on it with CTRL pressed (right click, if you have a mouse equipped with two buttons) and select “Show package content”. Go to “content/images/borders” and copy your files like this:

“fs00010.png” into fullsize
“md00010.xml” into metadata
“tn00010.png” goes into thumbnails

Now start Simple Labeler et voilá your design is in the list. Select it, delete the textfields, if you jsut want to print your graphic, like me, hit the button and follow the further instructions. I went for a very complex design, having smoke and bad smell of burned plasitcs on my mind, but it worked properly. Completly free labeling software for you LightScribe burner, althoguh a little effort is needed.

Additonal notes:
– remeber, that LS is only capable of handling greyscale images. My PSD template file is set to that mode
– choose a strong contrast on your choosen image. It will be very flattened once on the disc.

Now it’s your turn to come up with good designs, although those over at lighscribe.com are worth a look.

If someone knows about a free label tool for mac that makes picture import easy as click load, I would be more than happy to hear of it. On the other hand, it is quite nice to have a complete programm with fixed designs, that you just install on you colleagues computer and he/she can jsut burn company branded labels right out of the box.