DVD burning with mkisofs and cdrecord?

[Graham Campbell]

On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 22:48 +0200, Thomas Zehetbauer wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 14:20 -0600, Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:
> > The bug is that with some burners, DVD+R media is not fixated at the end 
> > of burning.  Such  DVDs are not readable in anything.  Good news is that 
> > you can fixate them after the fact and they will become readable.  Some 
> > people reported that additional invocation of "cdrecord -fix" works, 
> > some reported that it doesn't work.  Fixating disk under Windows works 
> > every time (for example, in Nero go to disk info, it will show that disk 
> > is not closed and will offer you option of "closing" it, another name 
> > for fixation).

Can someone give me a pointer to a description of what is happening when
a CD/DVD is being "fixated"? Or in general for the whole process of
"burning".
-- 
Graham Campbell <gc1111 at optonline.net>