2004.01_Dvd Programs-the Essential Linux Dvd Writing Software.pdf

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DVD Burning

Flint and Tinder

No matter whether you have DVD-R(W), DVD+R(W), or DVD-RAM media, the

quickest way to burn a Linux data DVD from an image, or with your weekly

hard disc backup, is the command line. BY MIRKO DÖLLE

on your DVD, it will not involve

a great deal of installation effort.

Of course you will need to equip your PC

with a DVD burning device, if you do not

already have one. And ensure that the

drive supports the formats you require,

as the manufacturers have so far been

unable to agree on a standard.

Three distinct DVD media families

have evolved so far: DVD-R(W),

DVD+R(W) and DVD-RAM. Some new

drives support multiple formats. DVD-R

and DVD+R devices will also burn CD

media. Linux can handle any of these

formats, although you do need a differ-

ent configuration depending on the type.

though your distribution’s hardware

recognition feature may take care of that

automatically. As CD or DVD burning

devices are controlled by SCSI com-

mands, you have to fool the operating

system into thinking that the IDE device

is a SCSI device. This IDE/SCSI emula-

tion is a kernel feature of most modern

distributions, although the boot loader

configuration file, for example, /etc/

lilo.conf will need to be modified. Use an

editor to append a line such as the fol-

lowing to the file,

RAM medium in your first DVD burning

device. You can then enter mount

/dev/scd0 /mnt to mount the medium,

and use the command line (or a file

manager) to copy data onto the medium,

just like any other hard or floppy disk.

Before removing the medium, make sure

that you unmount the DVD-RAM to

allow any data in the buffer to be written

out to the DVD. Sadly, not all drives can

read DVD-RAMs.

Special programs are required to write

data and videos on DVD media. Many

distributions include the dvdrecord pack-

age (dvdrtools [1]), and support

DVD-R(W) drives. The program is actu-

ally a re-worked version of cdrtools.

Growisofs, one of the dvd+rwtools,

is an alternative to dvdrecord and ca-

pable of writing a whole range of

formats; DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, and

DVD+RW. But growisofs’ handling is

completely different from that of

dvdrecord [2].

append = "hdd=ide-scsi"

taking care to replace hdd with the inter-

nal IDE descriptor for your burning

device (in our example, the drive is

attached as a slave to the secondary IDE

port). Then reboot to apply the changes.

SCSI or IDE

Attaching a SCSI burning device to a

SCSI controller that you set up previ-

ously should be quite simple. The

controller and the devices attached to it

– assuming that the bus is wired and ter-

minated correctly – should be visible to

and useable by any Linux distribution.

Setting up an IDE burning device does

involve a few additional settings, al-

Media Types

DVD-RAM media do not need special dri-

vers. If your drive can handle this kind of

media, you can access the medium just

like a normal floppy. For example,

mke2fs /dev/scd0 will format the DVD-

Commercial Programs

If this is too confusing for you, you

might prefer cdrecord-ProDVD, an en-

GLOSSARY

DVD-R and DVD-RW: The DVD-R standard

specifies write-once media, the DVD coun-

terpart of the CD-R. Most drives support

DVD-R. Just like CD-RWs soon appeared to

supplement CD-Rs, it was not long until

write-many DVD-RWs became available.

DVD+R and DVD+RW: The DVD burning

device issue soon split the manufacturers’

camp. While the DVD-R format was adopted

as the de-facto standard, another group of

manufacturers decided to launch its own

format. But neither of these camps has been

able to capture the market completely. This

means that there is a second DVD standard,

DVD+R(W).

DVD-RAM: This format supports capacities

of up to 4.8 GB and up to 100,000 write

operations in theory (DVD+/-RW supports

up to 1,000 write ops). DVD-RAM does not

require additional drivers or tools on Linux.

On the downside, the DVD-RAM media are

more expensive.

SCSI: The Small Computer Systems Interface

is a bus that transfers data between attached

devices and the SCSI controller card. As the

bus can be extended outside the computer

case, this provides the flexibility to attach up

to 15 internal or external devices. There are

some differences between the various SCSI

types. SCSI 2, Fast SCSI, Ultra SCSI, Wide SCSI,

Ultra Wide SCSI, and Ultra2Wide SCSI.

IDE: Integrated Drive Electronics is not a bus,

but an interface that can support a maxi-

mum of two devices. The controller

evaluates the jumper position to distinguish

between the two devices, assigning the mas-

ter role to one, and the slave role to the

other. EIDE means Enhanced IDE and

removes the older 504 MB limit for attached

drives. ATA is an extension of the EIDE stan-

dard. IDE interfaces are identified by their

data transfer speeds: UDMA/33, UDMA/66,

UDMA/100, and UDMA/133, where the fig-

ures indicate the maximum transfer rate in

MB/s.

January 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

DVD burning programs under Linux

N o matter what you want to put

DVD Burning

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hanced, commercial variant of cdrecord

that supports DVD-R/W and DVD+R/W.

The license is free for private use [3].

Pre-compiled packages are available for

a number of platforms.

If you intend to burn DVD media, you

will need to install the dvd+rw-tools,

dvdrtools (dvdrecord) or cdrecord-

ProDVD package, depending on your

drive. RPM packages for your distribu-

tion are available from the Rpmseek site

[4], and some distributions include the

package by default.

ure 1, 0,0,0 and 1,0,0 are both burning

devices. The following example copies a

DVD from the first SCSI drive on the first

(virtual) controller:

The limit for images is again 4482 MB.

Older systems cannot handle files that

exceed 2 GBytes; the command

readcd dev=0,0,0 f=image

dvdrecord speed=2 dev=0,0,0 -v U

image

mkisofs -r -J -split -o /tmp/ U

image .

will split your directory tree into 1 GB

images that dvdrecord recognizes as a

group of image files, storing them

accordingly on the DVD medium.

The first line reads the inserted DVD,

and stores its contents in an image file.

The second line burns this image at

dual-speed. However, this approach is

restricted to copying DVDs with a maxi-

mum capacity of 4482 MB. In addition to

this, DVD-R drives are also useful for cre-

ating backups. The following command

creates an image of the current directory

with subdirectories:

DVD-RW

dvdrecord can also handle rewritable

DVD-RW media (cdrecord-ProDVD also

burns DVD+R and DVD+RW).

dvdrecord / cdrecord-ProDVD

Using dvdrecord and cdrecord-ProDVD is

identical to using cdrecord, so we will

only be looking at one example in this

article. All three burning programs

assign a SCSI ID to the drive using the

0,0,0 or 0,1,0 format. The following com-

mand

dvdrecord -v speed=2 dev=0,0,0 U

blank=fast

mkisofs -r -J -o /tmp/image .

performs a quick format, while

cdrecord --scanbus

A similar command to our last example

will burn the image:

dvdrecord -v speed=2 dev=0,0,0 U

blank=all

outputs a list of SCSI devices, where the

first column contains the SCSI ID. In Fig-

dvdrecord speed=2 dev=0,0,0 -v U

/tmp/image

erases the medium. The write operation

is identical for DVD-RW and DVD-R.

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DVD Burning

Figure 1: The cdrecord -scanbus command lists the devices attached to the

SCSI subsystem; in our example, the numbers 0,0,0 and 1,0,0 point to burn-

ing devices

Figure 2: DVD backups, of the users’ home directories in our example, are

easy to create using growisofs

Differences

By default, and as previously mentioned,

dvdrecord has the same options and fea-

tures as cdrecord and its commercial

offshoot cdrecord-ProDVD. The manpage

also describes options similar to those of

cdrecord; and that is a good thing, as you

can use dvdrecord to burn CDs.

But hands-on tests revealed one or two

rough edges. You can launch a (non-

standard) multi-session mode burning

process for a data DVD-R, but this opera-

tion will abort without returning a

meaningful error message. The only

burning mode that dvdrecord supports

for DVD media is the DAO (disc at once)

format, and you can’t use the --overburn

option. In contrast to this, other options,

such as auto-ejecting DVDs after com-

pleting the burning operation, work fine.

The commercial cdrecord-ProDVD

package does not have any of these

weaknesses. It is a more mature program

altogether; and it supports both Minus

and Plus formats, that is, it works fine

with practically any combination of DVD

burning devices and media.

from [4]; you can use your package man-

ager to install the appropriate package.

But if you prefer to compile the sources,

simply download the source archive

from the homepage and use make and

make install to compile and install.

The installed package provides a num-

ber of command line functions that

allow you to write DVD+Rs; the backup

function being one of the more interest-

ing. A simple command will create a

DVD image of a filesystem tree and store

it on a DVD+R medium:

Closing the DVD session makes it easier

for other computers and drives to then

read the media. The -lead-out option

takes care of this. Let’s look at an exam-

ple:

dvd+rw-format -lead-out /dev U

/scd0

Conclusion

It is typically quite easy to create simple

data DVDs on Linux. cdrecord-ProDVD

and growisofs support almost any bur-

ning device and media types. Un-

fortunately, complex DVD mastering is

still more or less unsupported under

Linux.

After setting up the command line-

based burning process, you can of course

opt for a GUI-front-end, such as X-CD-

Roast [5] or K3b [6].

growisofs -R -J -Z /dev/scd0 U

/home

In this and the following examples, make

sure that you point to the SCSI device file

for your DVD drive. /proc/scsi/scsi

should provide the information you

need. The first SCSI drive in this file will

be /dev/scd0 , the second /dev/scd1 and

so on.

Yo u can use a slightly different com-

mand to write additional files to the

same medium: growisofs -R -J -M

/dev/scd0 /data (-M instead of -Z). And

the following command will burn an

existing DVD image

■

INFO

[1] DVD-R tools with dvdrecord:

http://www.nongnu.org/dvdrtools/

[2] DVD+RW tools with growisofs and

dvd+rw format: http://fy.chalmers.se/

~appro/linux/DVD+RW/

[3] CD-Record and CD-Record-ProDVD:

http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/

glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/

cdrecord.html

[4] RPM search engine:

http://www.rpmseek.com/

[5] X-CD-Roast project homepage:

http://www.xcdroast.org/

[6] K3b project homepage:

http://www.k3b.org/

growisofs

The fact that dvdrecord is restricted to

DVD-R(W), means that you will need the

dvd+rw-tools package to support

DVD+R(W) drives, if you want to use

Open Source only software.

As the Plus tools introduced Minus

burning device support in version 5.14,

growisofs has now started to outstrip

dvdrecord. Pre-compiled RPM packages

for various distributions are available

growisofs -Z /dev/scd0=image.iso

Erasing DVD+RW

Rewritable DVD+RW media are easy to

handle. Both used and new media have

to be formatted first:

dvd+rw-format -f /dev/scd0

January 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

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