Re: [Hampshire] [Tech] Software for burning DVDs

On 06/12/2007, Alan Pope <alan@???> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 06, 2007 at 03:36:13PM -0000, Rob Malpass wrote:
> > Howerver in burning an iso,
> > all that's required is to write the data to the disk in precisely the way
> > contained in the iso (no settings to fiddle with) - hence I can't really
> > see how several programs that purport to do this can get (apparently)
> > nowhere near.
> >
>
> You're implying there that it's just a case of feeding the ISO image to the
> CDROM drive when you want it to burn. There's a lot more to it than that of
> course. Including hardware detection, media detection along with handling
> buffers (burnfree etc) and data verification. Much of this is done with low
> level ATA / SCSI commands. I guess different CD burning apps do this low
> level stuff differently.
>
> Cheers,
> Al.
>

DVD writing is actually fairly easy. growisofs (used in k3b) is
written specifically for DVD writing, and cannot do CD writing.
CD writing is rather complicated, due to the many different
proprietary CD writing protocols used by each different CD writer.
I think the other tools try to use cdrecord for dvd writing, which the
free version does not do dvd writing.
So, your previous dvd writing tool might be trying to use a version of
cdrecord that does not do dvd writing.

James