[Libcdio-devel] Re: New MMC functions to detect media type

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

> I remember now You already told me how to to this.
> I spend lot of time trying to understand libcdio, SCSI MMC commands.

I once needed much more time than you to dive
into that stuff. I had a sketchy CD burn library
and the specs. It was an interesting time.


> SimpleBurn [...] is currently using cdrtools
> / cdrkit,

Here i could offer cdrskin as alternative 
to cdrecord or wodim.
Much better with DVD and BD, than the old
MMC-2 model of cdrecord. :))


> I can't remember who asked,

That was me. Because i read about SimpleBurn
that it uses cdrecord and on the other hand
you work with DVD.

For DVD one should use growisofs or libburnia
based tools.


> but it could later use libburn / libburnia (are
> these project different ? it looks
> like they share common enums and functions) with xorriso

We started
  http://www.libburnia-project.org/
in summer 2006 on the base of
  http://icculus.org/burn/
which was slow before and fell into total
passivity afterwards.

So our project is effectively the successor of
libburn-0.2. I recently tried to reach the
founders of old libburn but had no success.

Old libburn can do CD SAO and possibly some raw
modes. I have never explored the raw writing
which would lead to the formats described in
some of the Rainbow books. Mainly because i do
not have any music/video CD players.
(libcdio would be an appropriate test environment
for such an endeavor. My excuse is void now.
So i have to resort to the fact that no user
waits for raw writing. Only CD-TEXT is requested.
But that should be possible with SAO too.)

I added to the repertoire: CD TAO, multi-session,
DVD and BD, pseudo drives emulated on disk file
objects, automatic write mode selection.
Vreixo Formoso and Mario Danic started a new
libisofs because the old one was not usable
for real tasks.

By putting this together i created xorriso, a
burn program that goes one step beyond
growisofs. It does not need to run mkisofs.
What a relief !

Our libburn is API compatible to old libburn.
Old libburn programs (there are few) are supposed
to run on libburn-0.7.6 after re-compilation.
Regrettably i broke ABI compatibility when i
added a component in the middle of a API struct.
I noticed only after release and so i could
not revoke the change without breaking the ABI
again.
That glitch was in version 0.3.2.
We had a mess with libburn.so numbers up to
that version anyway. 

But since march 2007 libburnia is safe for
runtime-linking of old apps with newer
lib*.so.
We also provide means to check at runtime whether
the loaded library is modern enough. So one does
not have to rely on the checks of the package
installers.


Have a nice day :)

Thomas