The Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA) was an international
trade association
A trade association, also known as an industry trade group, business association, sector association or industry body, is an organization founded and funded by businesses that operate in a specific Industry (economics), industry. Through collabor ...
formed to promote the use of recordable
optical data storage technologies and products. It was responsible for the creation and maintenance of the
Universal Disk Format (UDF) file system specification (derived from ISO/IEC 13346 and ECMA-167), which was notably adopted for
DVD-Video
DVD-Video is a consumer video format used to store digital video on DVDs. DVD-Video was the dominant consumer home video format in most of the world in the 2000s. As of 2024, it competes with the high-definition Blu-ray Disc, while both rece ...
. It was
incorporated in California in 1992 and dissolved in 2018.
In the autumn of 2007, OSTA spearheaded a campaign to encourage families and photographers to back up their digital photographs on compact discs.
The web site of the association provides the full digital specification books of each revision of the Universal Disc Format (UDF) starting at 1.02, as well as other whitepapers and information pages related to optical data storage. Besides the UDF specifications, differences between the revisions of the specifications can be obtained. A sub-committee of the group was the "Commercial Optical Storage Applications Group" (COSA), which helped companies implement long-term archival on optical media.
In popular culture
In 2003, the
MythBusters
''MythBusters'' is a science entertainment television series created by Peter Rees (producer), Peter Rees and produced by Beyond International in Australia. The series premiered on the Discovery Channel on January 23, 2003. It was broadcast in ...
visited David Bunzel at the OSTA for an experiment, in which the speed at which discs can be spun before shattering was tested. The episode erronously claims that a CD spinning at "52×" speed spins at 30,000 rotations per minute. The error stems from assuming a linear velocity of 52× at the inner edge of the data area of the disc (see
CD-ROM § speed table).
[ (at 38 minutes and 40 seconds and 40 minutes and 39 seconds) (originally aired in 2003) (mirror: {{cite AV media , url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wKAQw0yU2U&t=42m37s , title=Mysthbusters season 1 episode 02 - Cell Phone Destroys Gas Station , date=2015-07-25 , access-date=2024-12-17 )]
References
External links
Home page of the Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA)(also available i
an
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Understanding Recordable & Rewritable DVD*
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Running Optimum Power Control: Data Integrity in CD-Recording
Technology trade associations
International organizations based in the United States
Organizations based in California
Optical computer storage