Re: [Bug-xorriso] Reading contents of fifo/pipe/named-pipe

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

Stephen M. Kenton wrote:
> Do you have a pointer to a good reference(s) about the various dvd +/-R[W]
> formats and their capabilities like random access, hardware TOC etc

On user level, this would be man xorriso:

  Media types and states:
   There are two families of media in the MMC standard:
   Multi-session  media are CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD+R/DL, BD-R, and
   unformatted DVD-RW. These  media  provide  a  table  of  content  which
   describes their existing sessions. See command -toc.
   Similar  to  multi-session  media  are  DVD-R  DL and minimally blanked
   DVD-RW.  They record only a single session of which the  size  must  be
   known  in advance.  xorriso will write onto them only if command -close
   is set to "on".
   Overwriteable media are DVD-RAM, DVD+RW, BD-RE, and  formatted  DVD-RW.
   They  offer  random  write  access but do not provide information about
   their session history. [...]
   DVD-RW  media  can  be  formatted  by -format "full".  They can be made
   unformatted by -blank "deformat".

man cdrskin has a few paragraphs with more media oriented detail:

  Track recording model
  Write mode selection
  Recordable CD Media
  Sequentially Recordable DVD or BD Media
  Overwriteable DVD or BD Media

Minimal demo programs on base of libburn are

  http://libburnia-project.org/browser/libburn/trunk/test/libburner.c
  http://libburnia-project.org/browser/libburn/trunk/test/telltoc.c

On the level of SCSI transactions between burn program and
optical drive, i can offer my cheat sheet

  http://libburnia-project.org/browser/libburn/trunk/doc/cookbook.txt

which refers to SCSI documents SPC-3 and MMC-5.
There might still be copies around in the web. Else you
would have to invest 30 dollar each for official PDFs.


> I'm wondering about things like being able to rewrite the lead-in after the
> fact and how packet writing splices sequential writes together "seamlessly"
> at the pits and lands level.

This is rather the blackbox level described by ECMA PDFs
which are available for free at
  http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Stnindex.htm
Search for text: "Optical Disks and Cartridges".
  ECMA-130 ... CD-ROM
  ECMA-267 ... DVD-ROM
  ECMA-272 ... DVD-RAM
  ECMA-330 ... DVD-RAM, too
  ECMA-279 ... DVD-R
  ECMA-337 ... DVD+RW
  ECMA-338 ... DVD-RW
  ECMA-349 ... DVD+R
Blu-ray specs required a 3000 dollar membership fee, last time
i was curious enough to google.

Actually this will not help you much with operating optical
drives. The lowest level for that is SCSI.


Have a nice day :)

Thomas