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VSO Software to collect recording data

29 March 2005 7:48 by Lasse "cd-rw.org" Penttinen | 5 comments

The VSO Software has announced their plans for gathering usage statiscs from their CD/DVD recording applications CopyToDVD and BlindWrite. The information collected includes media information, recorder model and firmware, but will not contain any information about the recorded data.

The primary motivation of this is to improve the quality of the VSO products. By analyzing the database they will be able to discover problematic drives, firmware versions, or new models or updates emerging on the market. They can gather media information about the compatibility and fail rate, and so on.

We discussed this briefly with Fabrice Meuwissen of VSO. He told us that there are plans for publishing some of the data on the WWW. He was also hoping closer co-operation with manufacturers, with the help of the information in the database. The new versions including this feature will be released for the public soon. The feature is of course optional, and the end user can disable it at will.

Updates of CopyToDVD and BlindWrite are about to be released. The most interesting new feature is an anonymous statistic database connection about the used drive, media ID and speed, and error code if any. You can read technical information about this feature here

Why did we implement this feature ? for VSO, it will be an opportunity to be more reactive and provide more reliable products. By detecting new drives released in the market, latest firmwares, and statistics about media usage and failure rate, the real time information will be used to improve the technical support and knowledge. We don't collect any information about users or the kind of data burnt. Of course, this is optional, and users can desactivate the feature at the installation.

Drive and media manufacturers will be able to benefit of the data collected to improve their own products as well. They can contact us for more information.

Users will benefit of this exciting database by checking which drive and media are the most reliable. A special web space will be available in a few weeks for end-users and webmasters.

These new versions will be released soon, please wait and use the version who will be officially available from our web site and not versions leaked for beta test.

Link: VSO Software

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venomX05 (Senior Member) 29 March 2005 8:13
At first, I was taken aback by this, because an eyebrow was raised about gather "information." But after reading the story the rest of the way, it is really cool that a company is trying to finally be pro-active in order to develop a better product. If what they say is true...then it will definately mean a really great set of products for the masses. ;) [ + quote]
malcdogg (Senior Member) 29 March 2005 11:44
Well there's a disable feature so thats good. [ + quote]
zippyd (Senior Member) 29 March 2005 21:33
I love my CopytoDVD and have always been impressed with VSO's desire to provide the better product. I hope all parties involved (media, hardware and software) work together to help us get better products.... but I think VSO's vision may be left in the realm of fantasy and never achieve reality. [ + quote]
dlc2000 (Member) 30 March 2005 6:09
im a blindwrite user and will not be allowing any data to be collected . thank goodness that its optional . im not a beta tester and software companies should not have consumers doing their testing for them . this seems as a way to cut costs for vso as they wont have to spend so much on testing as they will be having the consumer doing it for them . i really dont think this is going to pan out too well for vso as i dont see many taking part in the gathering of data . its my opinion that software companies should do their own in house testing long before they release a product , not release it and collect data from the consumers and fix what should have fixed before the software was released . afterall they made the software and its up to them to do all the testing of it , not have all of their customers doing it for them . the day this feature becomes nonoptional is the day i no longer use vso software . [ + quote]
phreakier (Inactive) 31 March 2005 12:51
Putain de merde! grenouilles! Je crache sur vous!! ptu,ptu Phreakier [ + quote]