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Data Storage Software

Free DVD Recording Tool For Linux? 160

Posted by timothy from the never-satisfied dept.
jobsagoodun writes " cdrecord-ProDVD is OK for burning DVDs but (i) it grumbles pointlessly about device names and (ii) it has a weird binary-only license that expires every six months or so. There are some Free forks off cdrtools - dvd+rw/+r/-r ,dvdrtools and this patch - do any of them make a good replacement?"
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Free DVD Recording Tool For Linux? More

Free DVD Recording Tool For Linux?

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  • Some info (Score:5, Informative)

    by Guiri ( 522079 ) * on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:17PM (#10097723) Homepage
    I use dvd+rw-tools and works pretty good.

    To burn a DVD I just do:

    growisofs -Z /dev/burner -R -J /path/to/data

    A very good option for doing all this very easily is to get K3b [sourceforge.net] which is part of the KDE distribution.

    For authoring DVDs I recently discovered Qdvdauthor [sourceforge.net], and it works like a charm!, I was able to create my own DVDs with menus with custom backgrounds, sound, etc.

    Also check my homepage for help about video conversions: http ://dvdripping-guid.berlios.de [berlios.de]

    • Re:Some info (Score:5, Informative)

      by Corhonio ( 696880 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:14PM (#10098091)
      I've been using dvd+rw-tools (my distro is gentoo) exlusively for burning dvds since I got a plextor 708A last xmas.

      I never had a single problem with it from day 1 :)

      I'd like to mention that with the -overburn flag I can squeeze a bit more of data (above 4.7 billion bytes but below 4.7 million Kbytes(Kbyte=1024 bytes)) when needed.

      In addition I update my dvd burners firmware with PXUpdate for UNIX http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employee s/joerg.schilling/private/firmware.html [fokus.gmd.de], something which is very important for people that don't dual boot.

      As demonstrated in https://expressivefreedom.org/Projects/PVR/Firewir e-Methodology.html [expressivefreedom.org] a 4gb+ single file (ie a backup tar/bz2ball) can be squeezed in dvd, which is something that propably(I can't say for sure since I haven't used windows for ages) can't be done in windows.

      Chris. PS Use the above at your own risk

      • Re:Some info (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        4gb+ single file (ie a backup tar/bz2ball) can be squeezed in dvd, which is something that propably(I can't say for sure since I haven't used windows for ages) can't be done in windows

        Sure it can be done in Windows. Why do think that your aging Windows knowledge is still current?

        • Re:Some info (Score:2, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Sure it can be done in Windows. Why do think that your aging Windows knowledge is still current?

          Why do you think he thinks that? He did say "propably(I can't say for sure since I haven't used windows for ages)".

          What do you suppose he meant by that?

    • Re:Some info (Score:3, Informative)

      by slobbargoat ( 726076 )
      A very good option for doing all this very easily is to get K3b which is part of the KDE distribution.

      Just note that you don't need the entire KDE distribution to have K3b, you only need kdelibs from the KDE distribution.
    • Makes a great tool, but screws it up in his desire for control. Schilly cdrecord is no longer Open Source in its most recent versions due to a license change. GIYF.

      Use the cdrecord that comes in your distro. Red Hat, Suse, and most others now come with patched versions of older cdrecord that handle DVDs fine.

  • k3b (Score:3, Informative)

    by FireChipmunk ( 447917 ) <{moc.etile-ecrof} {ta} {pihc}> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:17PM (#10097732) Homepage
    k3b [sourceforge.net] works great for burning DVDs.
    • This was modded redundant, it was posted in the same minute as the previous, and theres another one underneath that gets informative. Parent probobly hit reply before the other was posted.

  • K3B (Score:5, Informative)

    by g-to-the-o-to-the-g ( 705721 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:18PM (#10097739) Homepage Journal
    K3B [k3b.org], dvdbackup [sourceforge.net], and dvdshrink [dvdshrink.org] (ran under wine, 3.0b5 [www.rty.ca]) work awesome.

  • dvdrecord??/ (Score:2, Informative)

    by kidgenius ( 704962 )
    I could be mistaken, but I thought there was a counterpart to cdrecord called dvdrecord.

  • dvdrtools (Score:4, Informative)

    by mishan ( 146987 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:23PM (#10097765) Homepage
    I use dvdrtools (dvdrecord), which works completely perfectly for me. Debian even has dvdrtools in their distribution already. I use it just like cdrecord.
    dvdrecord -v dev=/dev/dvdrw driveropts=burnproof -dao -data MY_DVD_IMAGE.ISO

  • dvdrtools (Score:5, Informative)

    by james b ( 31361 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:24PM (#10097783) Homepage
    dvdrtools in Debian unstable works pretty well.
    I use it like this:
    mkisofs -f -udf -V "Your Disc Label" -o currentcd.img -r "your-directory-of-data"
    dvdrecord dev=/dev/hdd -dao currentcd.img

    It gives a warning about accessing the drive via /dev/hdd being depracated, but works fine.

  • growisofs is your friend (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:27PM (#10097803)
    I just use growisofs! It comes with the dvd+rw-tools and it works like a charm. It only requires mkisofs.

    So to burn a data DVD:
    growisofs -Z /dev/dvd -r -J my_directory

    and to burn a video DVD:
    growisofs -Z /dev/dvd -dvd-video my_dvd

    I don't know the story behind cdrecord-prodvd and all that license cruft (was Mr. Joerg "you must use SCSI" Schilling involved with that nonsense?)

    The less you have to deal with Schilling the better.

    • Re:growisofs is your friend (Score:4, Informative)

      by Chris Siegler ( 3170 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:46PM (#10099127)
      The less you have to deal with Schilling the better.

      Amen! Back before dvd+rw tools came out and all there was were some hacks to cdrecord I tried to buy ProDVD but gave up. As far as I could tell there's no way to actually buy it. When searching the newsgroups all I found were several Schilling rants, several people like me trying to buy it without luck, and finally a patch to an old cdrecord version that didn't require a license. If it was an intelligence test you needed to pass to get the damn license I failed miserably.

      • When I got my DVD writer I had already been using xcdroast [xcdroast.org] (and implicitly cdrtools [fokus.fhg.de]) for a long time with CD's. It seemed the simplest to just get cdrecord-prodvd for this setup.

        It amounted to downloading one (1) binary file [berlios.de], placing it as executable in the xcdroast bin dir and a copy/paste operation of the license key from a README [berlios.de] found at the same place as the binary.

        It worked right away, took a couple of minutes not counting the download and now I can use xcdroast with DVD's as well as CD's without

  • A lot will answer k3b and the tools it uses to do its "magic", but not sure it could count as a dvd producer in the movie sense.

    But for burning data, or formatting DVDs, or even copying or burning a DVD iso is very good.

    Even love the kde trick of putting a blank dvd and offering me to launch (even by default) k3b to burn something there.

    • k3b (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tiger99 ( 725715 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:49PM (#10097933)
      When I last stuck a blank DVD in the drive some weeks ago, it just worked. k3b did indeed open, it was so uncannily like the way a certain broken OS works for CD writing, if something like Roxio is installed.

      I become more impressed with kde each time I use it, which is daily. The level of integration must surely be the equal of its closed-source rivals.

      BTW I do most of my work on SuSE 9.1, but it (kde) seems much the same on the other machines, Xandros, FC2 and even FreeBSD (although I have not yet tried DVD writing on the latter).

      I get the impression that each of kde and gnome is in itself a much bigger achievement than the kernel, and certainly they are important because new users or prospective users see the GUI first. They don't care about the window manager, or the X implementation, or even the kernel. But Linux distros are clearly doing something right.

      BTW my DVD writer is multi-mode (+/-R and RW, and RAM) and the type of blank disc was correctly identified without any messing about by me, much to my surprise, as I have seen the "other" OS have problems.

      • Re:k3b (Score:4, Informative)

        by unixmaster ( 573907 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:06PM (#10098870) Journal
        FYI K3B recently got fixed to compile/run properly on FreeBSD .
        • Thanks for that piece of info. I will update it when I get a chance. My FreeBSD machine is dual-boot with SuSE, so I have not yet tried to write a DVD under FreeBSD, although all the other KDE stuff seems to be in good order.

          I will say one thing about k3b, it does not mess with the system and cause bugs and instability the way Adaptec/Roxio used to, and apparently still does, on Windoze. Of course Open Source users and developers simply would not tolerate that, it would have to be fixed, either by the origi

  • What I'd like to see... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:31PM (#10097819) Homepage Journal
    Is a a good DVD-Authoring system. Its easy enough to burn DVD's on linux and has been for some time K3b uses the command line tools to do its work seamlessly.

    But i'd like it to be easier to dump footage via my DV Camcorder over firewire and dump it on a DVD with a nice little menu. Just by clicking a couple of buttons. Alas I havent come across anything like this yet. Which is why im still hankering after a powerbook.

    Nick ...

    • Re:What I'd like to see... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:00PM (#10097979)
      I'd like to see that, too, although I am alot happier to discover that video DVDs do NOT REQUIRE menus! Because, personally, I just want to pop in a disc and go. I don't want to do more work than press play, and I doubt my presently-DVD-less parents want anything different from the "play/stop/rewind/ff" interface of a VCR they're familiar with either.

      So here's my formula to get DV to DVD without crufty menus. With almost minimum fuss.

      1. use kino to grab the DV and do basic editing. It can't do much editing (i.e. you can't trim in between clips) and it's sluggish in some respects but it works like a charm.
      2. Inside kino go to EXPORT->MPEG and select option 8 for the file format.
      This uses mpeg2enc, which is amazingly SLOW, but does a good job. Expect many hours encoding 1 hour of footage. My FX-53 is about 1/10th real time. If you want to retain chapters, make sure to select "scene split" before exporting!
      3. So now you have one or more .mpeg files. Use dvdauthor to construct the directory. First you must make an XML file (the second-most annoying part of the whole procedure after mpeg2enc slowness).
      <dvdauthor>
      <vmgm />
      <titleset>
      <titles>
      <pgc>
      <vob file="/path/to/first.mpeg" />
      <vob file="/path/to/next.mpeg" />
      </pgc>
      </titles>
      </titleset>
      </dvdauthor>
      4. Generate the DVD file structure.
      dvdauthor -o my_dvd -x my.xml

      5. Burn it with growisofs
      growisofs -Z /dev/dvd -dvd-video my_dvd

      Voila! Alot of steps and very slow, but not too painful otherwise. And no annoying menus!

    • Re:What I'd like to see... (Score:5, Informative)

      by AstroDrabb ( 534369 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:57PM (#10098399)
      You can get MainActor [mainconcept.com] for Linux. A professional multi-platform editor. Some info from the site:
      MainActor 5 for Linux offers professional features almost identical to the features you already know from the Windows version, including DV capture and MPEG-1/2 import and export in a new interface.
      You can download the demo and give it a whirl. I think it cost about $99.

      For lighter work, there is Q DVD-Author [sourceforge.net]. It is FOSS and works well for making DVD's with menus, etc.

    • I use it under Windows, rather than Linux, but DVDStyler (its on sourceforge, not sure of the exact project name) works well for me. Its a wxWindows based GUI, drag & drop. Very intuitive interface. I think you'll need to convert your files to MPEG beforehand, though.
  • The best DVD recording solution I have found was to take virtualization software such as QEMU and hack in direct ATAPI calls for the DVD device. There is some work involved in figuring out which device on the spoke is the DVD, and I don't recommend allowing direct ATAPI calls to everything (might collide with Linux's use of hda, etc.) but you should be able to determine this from the '-scanbus' call to cdrecord/dvdrecord.

    The other thing to do is to dump some form of Windows (from 95 up to XP) to the virt

    • I know of a guy who runs Nero under WINE and claims to have no problems with it. Would be great if they released a native linux version. I would certainly buy a copy, at least.

      The inability to burn certain (most) image formats with some (all?) of the existing tools drives me crazy more times than not. I know that there are some image conversion utilities, but still..

      I keep a Window box around for burning. It makes me sad....

      Before you reply that you need not burn anything other than ISO, just think o
  • Does anyone know of any Linux DVD burning software to burn global images? (Sonic RecordNow .gi)
    • Why exactly does every windows dvd/cd burning tool have to create its own propriatory format for the images? What's wrong with standard iso images?

      • Re:Global images (Score:5, Insightful)

        by rusty0101 ( 565565 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:47PM (#10098329) Homepage Journal
        Standard ISO images don't lock the user into the proprietary tools that the proprietary software company wants the end user to buy as add-ons or upgrades to the free copy of whatever they got with the DVD(+|_|+_)(R|RW) burner the user bought.

        That isn't to say that the proprietary varient isn't a simple variation of the ISO image, (perhaps both an md5 and/or sha1 signature attached to the end of the image to assure integrity, or additional information the tool does not use in the actual burning, but may update each time the image is used, or even checked to see if the user is 'authorized' to burn this iso, say a hash of the authorization key for the product.

        From what I have seen, all of the burners out there can use the ISO format to burn CDs and DVDs, but everyone seems to like vendor lock in for some reason, and may not provide the ability to create an ISO in the 'free' version included with drives.

        Then again, what do I know.

        -Rusty
        • Sometimes the vendor-specific file is just an ISO image with a proprietary header. Look for the signatures of the beginning of the ISO, and strip what is before that (dd if= of= skip= should do). Then try to "mount -o loop" the image, and if you succeed, burn it.

      • Re:Global images (Score:3, Informative)

        by ionpro ( 34327 )
        One reason that pops to mind is that some people are still running Windows XP on FAT32 volumes. Those people have a 4GB maximum file size limit, which may cause a problem for large DVD ISOs. This, of course, isn't a problem on NTFS, where the default maximum file size (dependant on cluster size) is something like 16 terabytes (minus 64KB).

      • Re:Global images (Score:2, Insightful)

        by vuvewux ( 792756 )
        Because standard ISO images won't take audio tracks. They don't take Dreamcast images. They only take ISO9660 filesystems.

  • 11th Commandment (Score:5, Funny)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:43PM (#10097884) Homepage Journal
    Thou shalt not ask slashdot a question which can be answered by searching the gentoo forums.
    • And why not?

      I ask questions on public "forums" like /. or usenet because I really can't be bothered to figure out what niche forums I should be searching in the first place - especially when I am pretty sure that someone else on /. has already found the answer.

      You don't have to answer any questions you don't feel like answering, but don't bash people for asking on-topic questions.

      • Re:11th Commandment (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Taladar ( 717494 )
        So you can't be bothered to look through the top 5 search results in Google (which are pretty useful for this question if you use something like "linux dvd burn" as search string) but you can be bothered to search through hundreds of slashdot comments?
        • So you can't be bothered to look through the top 5 search results in Google (which are pretty useful for this question if you use something like "linux dvd burn" as search string)

          Let's try googling for DVD burning linux free [google.com] .

          "Pretty useful"? I don't think so. Do you see the solution there? I don't. Believe me, I do check Google first, but if the excerpts on the first search page don't show much promise I'm not going to go about clicking on the links.

          search through hundreds of slashdot comments?

          You

          • Let's try googling for DVD burning linux free

            That's a poorly-crafted search term. Too many words in the query means fewer good responses. In this case, the word "free" is basically redundant with "linux", and "burning" is just extra-syllables onto "burn" (try to use the root form of words whenever possible). "Linux DVD Burn" would've been better.

            But regardless of that, the page of results given by your query is indeed useful. Two of the results go to forum discussions on LinuxQuestions.org [linuxquestions.org], where a

  • Since the post was rather questionable (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:51PM (#10097937)
    let's ask another question that might be more interesting to the majority who seem to already be using K3B.
    I heard that one of the big changes in the 2.6 kernel was that the SCSI emmulation was dropped for optical burning and that this should improve performance.
    Well sure enough, my CD writing speeds went nuts. I had never burnt a CD at 20X using that PC which, granted was only a K62 500, but Nero had never gotten to speeds that high without using up the buffer in a few seconds. But with the 2.6 kernel I was getting 20X sustained without even touching the buffer. I was truly impressed.
    BUT!
    Unfortunately, the same thing didn't hold true for DVD. My DVD burner, which is the same machine, an 8X+/-RW CyQue AKA MET, that was giving me the insane CD writing speeds was still quite slow with DVDs.
    This was disappointing because using the bundled Nero that had come with the burner I could get 4X easily even writing over the network and 8X was technically doable although it spent more time refilling the cache than writing. After seeing the CD write speed so high, I really hoped that the 2.6 kernel would give me equally fast DVD write speeds. Instead, my DVD write speeds are less than one speed which is quite slow.
    However, I'm not saying Nero on Windows is better even though it is faster. I still use 2.6 kernel and K3B to write DVDs because Linux doesn't choke on filenames like Windows does and cheap media that fails in Nero still at least writes in K3B.
    On this last note, I want to clarify that I've used many different media and all of them seem to give the same result. So, this isn't a cheap media related issue.
    There's a better ask slashdot topic.
    • One word: DMA.

      hdparm -iI will reveal all.

      Also try a UDMA 66/100 (80 wire) cable.

  • Media Recording in Linux (Score:4, Informative)

    by Pan T. Hose ( 707794 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:59PM (#10097976) Homepage Journal

    For any kind of Linux-related media recording whatsoever, you should definitely check out dyne:bolic [dynebolic.org], i.e. a free multimedia studio in a GNU/Linux live CD:

    "dyne:bolic is shaped on the needs of media activists, artists and creatives, being a practical tool for multimedia production: you can manipulate and broadcast both sound and video with tools to record, edit, encode and stream, all using only free software.

    "dyne:bolic is a GNU/Linux distribution simply running from a CD, without the need to install anything, able to recognize most of your devices and periferals: sound, video, TV, network cards, firewire, usb devices and more.

    "It is optimized to run on slower computers, turning it into a full media station: the minimum you need is a pentium1 or k5 PC 64Mb RAM and IDE CD-ROM, or a modded XBOX game console--and if you have more than one, you can easily do clusters."

    It is unquestionably invaluable to explore if you are not sure which software do you need to install and use on your own GNU/Linux system (e.g. Debian [debian.org] or Gentoo [gentoo.org]). I hope this helps.

  • ...with tkDVD [freshmeat.net] and xcdroast [freshmeat.net]. Had these both on my system for quite some time. Most likely require dvd+rwtools and growisofs.

  • Not so fast! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:01PM (#10097986)
    Kernel 2.6.8 has effectively killed non root users from burning CDs and DVDs.

  • UDF write support? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I would really like to see packet-writing working properly on linux, so I can use my CD-Rs and CD-RW as a read-write medium like a floppy (an ever shrinking floppy in the CD-R case, but that's okay). similarly for DVDs.

    UDF and packet writing would rock!
    • Already done. See http://w1.894.telia.com/~u89404340/patches/packet/ 2.6/
      • Already done
        Has been there for a while.

        More importantly, do any GUI tools support files larger than 2GB yet? I can make a UDF filesystem on the hard drive with the command line, write large files to it, then write it to DVD, and even put that all in a script that's not too hard to use - but people still want to drag and drop their large files in something like k3b.

        • The 2GB limitation is a flaw in the ISO9660 filesystem -- with UDF write support there should be no such problem. The same thing comes up in Windows in Nero if you try to write more a larger than 2GB file in pure ISO mode (it tells you to switch to UDF/ISO).

          • with UDF write support there should be no such problem

            Exactly - but is there a GUI cdwriter that supports UDF writing correctly yet? The one's I've seen use a broken method to generate the UDF filesystem which is unable to produce files bigger than 2GB - they don't use something that works like "mkudffs".

            Once you have the image file, you can burn it with just about anything - but "mkudffs" is just a bit too complex for a lot of users to deal with, even if you give them a simple script that takes everythin

  • Well i always do my burning on an alphaserver, on which cdrecord-prodvd won't run.. Not because it couldn't compile, cdrecord compiles perfectly on it, but simply because the author doesnt see fit to produce a binary for my platform.

  • Dev=0,x,0 vs. dev=/dev/hdx (Score:3, Interesting)

    by anagama ( 611277 ) <obamaisaneocon@nothingchanged.org> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:22PM (#10098161) Homepage
    Recently I installed Suse 9.1 and discovered that "cdrecord -scanbus" no longer did the job it used to do. Took me a while to figure out I could use a "dev/hdx".

    As I understand it, the author of cdrecord is livid over this issue. I've read a bit on mailing lists, but I still don't understand what the big deal is either way. Although somewhere I heard a comment that it may be a way for the author to make money off his DVD burning program ... I still don't get it.

    Can anyone summarize what this fight is all about?

    • use -scanbus dev=ATA (Score:2, Informative)

      by Hal XP ( 807364 )
      cdrecord -scanbus should still work. But with the new ide direct access (minus the ide-scsi emulation layer), you have to pass an argument to -scanbus to get the bus, etc, ID of your burner. To view the possible arguments, try cdrecord -scanbus dev=help. In my case to get the bus ID I use cdrecord -scanbus dev=ATA. To burn a DVD I use something like cdrecord dev=ATA:1,1,0 (which is functionally, I think, equivalent to dev=/dev/hdd).

      That's unless SuSE did something really insane with their fork of cdrecord

    • Re:Dev=0,x,0 vs. dev=/dev/hdx (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:26PM (#10099011)
      I wish I knew the answer to this as well.

      All I can say is the entire reason I went through the hassle of SCSI on my old system was just to avoid the hassle of ide-scsi with cdrecord. The entire ide-scsi flap seems to be centered around cdrecord and Joerg Schilling's stubborn refusal to accept reality and deviate from his beloved SCSI. Never mind the reality that almost no one carries optical SCSI devices anymore! (Save hard drives you can't find SCSI *anything* anymore!)

      Schilling also has his own "make" program, IIRC, because he refuses to write a makefile that works with GNU's make. This was discussed on the amd64 gentoo forum recently.

      Then there's cdrecord-prodvd and its annoying nagware license. Again, Schilling at work.

      Then recently there was some flap on LKML, though I have not read it because, frankly, I don't know the best place to even look at LKML.

      Heck, you can almost get a sense of his attitude from the wording of his website:
      http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glon e/employee s/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html

      I saw this problem brewing in 2000 when I got my SCSI CD burner--about the last one available. The problem is as long as Schilling is the only person with disc burning software we are all subject to his whims.

      So bring on the free and open alternatives. growisofs, for example, is fantastic, although also dependent on mkisofs (which I think is also Schilling software, but at least it doesn't seem to suck yet). Take Schilling out of the loop and then we aren't 100% dependent on him.

      • Re:Dev=0,x,0 vs. dev=/dev/hdx (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Take Schilling out of the loop and then we aren't 100% dependent on him.

        No problem [icculus.org]. No UDF or DVD support yet though, I think. I've heard grumbles of speed issues as well, but it is 0.2 after all.
      • Perhaps the following comments may clear up Schily's approach to cdrecord... BTW, he is also the author of mkisofs.

        He's stated a couple of times that cdrecord is developed under Solaris, then ported to Linux and other Unix and Unix-like OS's. While his SCSI over ATA may be baroque, it does have the advantage of being portable and consistent over the various flavors of Unix (as opposed to being convenient to use on Linux and a real pain on non-Linux environments).

        Schily is not a big fan of the GNU tools -

      • Cdrdao [sourceforge.net] may do what you want. Only disc-at-once mode, though.

  • from linux weekly news: Alternatives to cdrecord (Score:4, Informative)

    by j1m+5n0w ( 749199 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:29PM (#10098206) Homepage Journal
    Alternatives to cdrecord [lwn.net]
    After last week's discussion of cdrecord, and concerns that recent releases of cdrecord may not be free software, we decided to take a look and see what alternatives exist for Linux users. The answer, unfortunately, is "not many." While there are quite a few front-ends for recording CDs under Linux, there are very few actual CD and DVD-burning applications available to Linux users. Applications like K3b, MP3Roaster, BashBurn and others all use cdrecord to burn CDs.

  • dvdrtools/dvdrecord (Score:3, Informative)

    by kraada ( 300650 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @05:04PM (#10098442)
    Well, I don't know if this is the fault of dvdrtools/dvdrecord or just the fact that I bought generic, cheap disks . . . but 1/3 disks I burn are unreadable immediately thereafter (ie- after the burn is finished, mount the disk and md5sum the files). And some 6 months later I've found that almost every disk I ever burned won't mount right . . .
    I can use readcd to get everything back with errors (~4000-5000 errors per disk), but it's really quite annoying.

    So either it's my crappy disks (bought for about 44 cents a pop online in bulk) or it's dvdrecord. I've no idea which, though I'm leaning towards blaming the dvds (in which case, just be aware that cheap dvds aren't worth it! :)

    Just my .44 worth of useless dvdness . . .
      1. So either it's my crappy disks (bought for about 44 cents a pop online in bulk) or it's dvdrecord.

      It's the media (for sure) and the burner/settings/program (unlikely).

      Why am I certian? The media failing after 6 months means that it is unstable. After all, if you burn the disk -- it works -- and it stops working later though you haven't dropped it back in the burner, how is the burner or the software to blame?

      If the failures were always immediately detected during or just after burning -- no good d

  • OK, I'm serious here. I've been attempting to use ProDVD under Windows for the last 3 months, but Schilling doesn't seem to be responding to requests for new licenses (there isn't a public one for Windows like there is for Linux), so I've abandoned that idea. I'm currently using Nero, but I would much rather have a _free_ _command line_ tool that I can do this with, because then I can integrate it with DVDStyler and have author & burn in a single step. I can burn CDs just fine with cdrdao, but I have

  • OSS DVD Extensions (Score:4, Interesting)

    by stock ( 129999 ) <stock@stokkie.net> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:19PM (#10098958) Homepage
    checkout http://freshmeat.net/projects/ossdvd/ [freshmeat.net]

    install the RPMS for your distro, and after that its a breeze to burn/read your DVD stuff from the commandline:

    http://crashrecovery.org/oss-dvd/HOWTO-ossdvd.html [crashrecovery.org]

    Robert

  • Simple Answer - Lxdvdrip (Score:3, Informative)

    by newdles ( 794384 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:37PM (#10099060)
    http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=l xdvdrip [berlios.de] This above link is where you can find the software. This link below is how you can use it to perfection. Lxdvdrip is quite literally configurable to a 1 click dvd backup software. You can set it up to where all you do is click an icon and you're done as it does everything else for you (if configured right and with a dvd r/w and a seperate dvd rom to read from unless you want to switch dvd's in the middle of the process). http://pcpitstop.ibforums.com/index.php?showtopic= 59445&hl=lxdvdrip [ibforums.com] Read this thread here and you'll find out how to configure it to work for you as well as delete all the temp files when done.

  • lwn.net coverage (Score:2, Informative)

    by pyg ( 10303 )
    Lwn.net [lwn.net] has had articles about cdrecord for two weeks in a row. The first being about the development of cdrecord [lwn.net] and the role GNU/Linux distributers (Red Hat, et. al.) play in adding dvd capabilities. The second is about alternatives to cdrecord [lwn.net].

    In case you happen to live under a rock somewhere lwn.net is possibly the best Linux/FOSS news source on the net.

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