A DVD-R carrying an anime illustration: an open-source tool built by one person, from 5 stars in 63 days to 7,600 stars

Burning visible pictures onto the data side of optical discs was done by Yamaha 2002 years ago, and someone open-sourced the idea 2022 years ago. DiscImageStudio did not invent it. It was the first to let ordinary people burn a real picture with the optical drive at home and a few-dollar DVD-R, and then post photos of the result. Below: how it was lit up in China and Japan on the same day in Nov 2, why its predecessors got only 748 stars while it got 7,600, and what you can take from it if you want your own open-source project to spread the same way.

A Japanese tweet and a "goods" tutorial

On 2026 Nov 2 at 8:05 (UTC), Sspai's Matrix community published a tutorial titled "New-style goods: a tutorial for burning visible illustrations onto discs," and it made the homepage recommendations that day. "Goods" is the Japanese-influenced term for fan merchandise. The opening line reads: "It lets you burn a visible picture into the data area of any optical drive with any disc." The author, Catho168, is the repo's second contributor, with 29 commits.

An hour and a half later, Japanese X user @osakanataro2 posted: "やべぇな、CD-R/DVD-R/BD-Rディスクに作成したISOイメージファイルを焼くと絵が出るって" ("This is wild, burn an ISO image to a CD-R/DVD-R/BD-R and a picture shows up on the disc"), with two real photos: a disc under a desk lamp, with an anime illustration in the rainbow reflections. The tweet reached about 3M views, 33k likes and 5.4k reposts (X page figures). X also generated a trending topic for Japan: "A tool for burning illustrations directly onto CD-R and DVD-R is trending." The next day, another Japanese user, @hajime0512P, posted their own burned disc, with 350k views.

That same day 13:52, the author released v1.3.6, which caught the wave. This version alone was downloaded 8,126 times by 11-06.

What it actually is

A free Windows desktop program (C#, GPL-3.0), with a Linux / macOS command-line version as well. You give it an image, it converts the image into burn data, and you burn that data to a CD, DVD or single-layer BD-R with any ordinary optical drive. The picture appears on the data side. Beyond the picture, ordinary files can also go on the inner or outer ring.

The principle is explained clearly in the Sspai article: burned and unburned spots reflect light differently, which at a macro level shows up as light and dark. As long as you know which radius and angle each sector sits at on the disc, you can print the image ring by ring. The hard part is the position table. Every manufacturer and model's disc has slightly different real inner and outer radii. An inner-radius error of 0.002 mm visibly distorts the image; an error of 0.05 mm turns the whole picture into concentric grooves.

The GitHub account of author JiaFeiMiao-K-Cat was registered 2020 years ago, has 69 followers, and its other 17 repos are Hohai University coursework and thesis projects, each with single-digit stars (inference: a current or recent student). This repo was created in Aug 23, the core was written 8–September, real-photo calibration was done in Oct 4, and between 10-25 and 10-28 it shipped v1.1 through v1.3.3, adding blue-light support, calibration, and direct burning. In other words, it was already a finished product before it blew up.

How fast it grew, and whether it was botted

Peak single-day gain of +2,702 (11-03), with a best global GitHub trending rank of #12. On HN someone said "star graph looks very inorganic," and someone replied immediately, "This is what it looks like when a project suddenly takes off from one translated tweet." The evidence that fits: the surge timing lines up with the Japanese tweet and the HN front page, and the Releases total about 15k downloads, mostly Windows exes, meaning people actually downloaded and burned discs. I found no sign of paid acquisition or star botting.

Where users come from

In chronological order (UTC):

1. 11-02 08:05 Sspai: a tutorial by Catho168, featured on the Matrix homepage; 11-03 Sspai's official X account reposted it.
2. 11-02 09:38 Japanese X: a tweet by @osakanataro2 with 3M views, followed by trending topics and users posting their results. This was the biggest single channel.
3. 11-03 01:33 Hacker News: submitted by bpierre, 360 points and 79 comments. Someone had submitted it the day before, and it sank at 3 points.
4. 11-03 to 11-04 media: Chinese outlets IT之家, 驱动之家, HKEPC, 4Gamers; Japanese PC Watch (syndicated via Yahoo Japan); English outlets Adafruit (#ArtTuesday), Korben, Windows Forum; Korea's GeekNews. Plus YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and Chinese X repost accounts ("5.9K-star open-source gem").
5. Community relay: someone on the AUR published a discimagestudio-bin package, and someone built a native macOS port. In the past few days the author pushed 40 commits and expanded the README to 7 languages (Simplified and Traditional Chinese, English, Japanese, Turkish, Spanish, Czech).

I found no evidence of how the Japanese poster discovered the project, or whether the author pushed it to them.

Why this one and not the 2022-year-old one

GitHub already had a project doing the same thing: arduinocelentano/cdimage, which made Hackaday in July 2022, then made HN (203 points) and Tom's Hardware in June 2025, and currently has 748 stars. In this HN thread someone posted it again, and someone else said, "I knew this was possible years ago, I just couldn't find the program."

Same effect, ten times the reach. The difference comes down to these points:

• cdimage only does CD and requires compiling Qt yourself, and hasn't been updated since 2022. DiscImageStudio supports CD, DVD and BD-R, has a GUI, and burns directly. DVD and Blu-ray tracks are denser, so the image is finer, and the photos look better. Spread depends on that picture.
• The hardest step is built in as presets. The software ships with disc types the author tested: Verbatim DVD-R AZO (43533), Richoh medical-grade blue CD, Verbatim CD-R AZO (43438), Richoh BD-R 10x, Verbatim BD-R (64099). The Sspai article puts it bluntly: calibrating a disc yourself, "without experience, the first calibration takes several days and 10 ~ 30 discs get wasted," so "if you just want to burn a few for fun or give them to friends, the simplest path is to buy a model the author has already calibrated." Get the right disc and the first one works, and people who succeed are the ones who post photos, which drives the next round.
• It came with a reason. The title "new-style goods" (谷子, fan merch) turns it from a geek toy into something you make yourself as merch and give away. In the Japanese trending posts, almost everything shared was anime illustrations.
• Nostalgia. LightScribe and DiscT@2 were discontinued more than a decade ago, and half the HN comments are reminiscing: "This is exactly what was missing in the 2020s, something tangible with a bit of artistry that reminds you of the early 2000s" and "Would have blown up in the 90s or early 2000s for sure."

Where it falls short

• Calibration is still a barrier. If your disc isn't one of the preset models, you have to burn and photograph test discs one by one and adjust the inner radius by bisection. Sspai spent most of the article teaching exactly that. How many users drop off because presets don't cover them is unknown.
• Mac is second-class. On Mac there is only the command line, and each Linux / Mac CLI release has only one or two hundred downloads. A community SwiftUI port, NaiveTomcat/DiscImageStudioMac, was created at 11-02 and currently has 4 stars.
• Images compete with data for space. On HN someone asked whether the disc is still readable after burning. The answer is yes, but the area carrying the picture can't hold data, so capacity is limited.
• Heat is fading. 11-06 gained +781 in a single day, under a third of the peak.

If it were you

C: worth learning from, not worth chasing. "Burning images onto discs" has already been built, and HN, Japanese X, and Chinese, Japanese and English media have all covered it; another clone would likely end up like the 4-star Mac port. What's worth taking is the way it spread, applied to a different topic.

Who it suits: developers with an open-source project whose output can be photographed as a good-looking picture (physical, visual, shareable), or developers looking for this kind of topic; a bit of Chinese or Japanese community knowledge helps.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone who wants to copy a disc-burning image tool, or who plans to wait for stars after making a Mac or web version. The original is still updating daily, and the community is already doing ports, so yours won't be seen before the original.

How to do it: find an old trick that once needed specialized hardware and is now discontinued (like LightScribe) and revive it with ordinary devices; make the hardest step a preset so newcomers succeed on the first try; finish the product before launch. This repo iterated for two months before it blew up and shipped v1.3.3. If you insist on staying on the disc line, the only real gap is calibration: a tool that calculates parameters from a phone photo of a test disc and pools everyone's calibrated disc types into one table. You could submit it as a PR to the original or release it separately, though it would likely get an order of magnitude fewer stars (inference).

How to get users: don't just write a README; prepare three or four real photos. Write a scenario-driven tutorial for Chinese communities like Sspai ("goods", "gifts"), have a respected individual account in Japanese post a real photo, and time both to go live the same day, then hand off to English channels like HN and Adafruit. Don't expect HN alone to drive traffic; a first submission got only 3 points.

What's the deadline: for the disc topic, the window closes before end of November, since heat was already clearly fading from 11-06. If you're borrowing the method for a different topic, there's no hard deadline.

What would show I'm wrong: ① a derivative project (a native Mac version, a web version, a disc-calibration database) gets over a thousand stars within a month, which would mean the space is still open; ② the original's stars keep growing by several hundred a day after November, which would mean sustained demand rather than a one-off spike, and a longer window to follow.

Data and sources

• GitHub repo, Releases, contributors and commit history (11-06); daily star counts are snapshots from 11-01 to 11-06.
• Sspai, "New-style goods: a tutorial for burning visible illustrations onto discs" (2026-11-02, sspai.com/post/118211).
• X: @osakanataro2, @hajime0512P posts and Japan trending topic pages (views and likes as shown on X).
• Hacker News 讨论(news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50346849,360 分、79 条评论)。
• Coverage from IT之家, 驱动之家, PC Watch, Adafruit, Korben, GeekNews, 4Gamers (11-03 to 11-04).
• Competitors: arduinocelentano/cdimage, Hackaday (2022-07), Tom's Hardware (2025-06).