The state of blu-ray burning in linux is terrible

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

Richard Shaw wrote:
> When I use dvd+rw-mediainfo I see
> several different capacaities. Obviously if you use the formatting
> with defect management then you're going to loose some capacity, but
> the output is not clear which one is the correct.

You probably mean something like this:

 Mounted Media:         41h, BD-R SRM
 Media ID:              CMCMAG/BA5
 ...
READ FORMAT CAPACITIES:
 unformatted:           12219392*2048=25025314816
 00h(3000):             11826176*2048=24220008448
 32h(0):                11826176*2048=24220008448
 32h(0):                5796864*2048=11871977472
 32h(0):                12088320*2048=24756879360

It is an overview of sizes from which you could choose.
00h and 32h are the Format Codes for the SCSI command FORMAT UNIT.
(3000) is the size of the Spare Area in hexadecimal numbers
counting clusters of 64 KiB. (Cough.)
For some reason my burners report (0) with the format code 32h by
which i could choose a particular payload size. I read different
prescriptions in MMC-5 specs. Shrug.

12219392*2048=25025314816 tells the number of payload blocks,
the block size 2048, and the number of payload bytes.

The command
  dvd+rw-format -ssa=256m /dev/sr0

would choose 256 MiB Spare Area and 24756879360 payload bytes.
("256m" computed from  (25025314816 - 24756879360) / 1024 /1024 )

You may issue own size wishes with a granularity of 16 MiB.
I am not sure whether very small Spare Area sizes below 256 MiB
are supported.

xorriso would report by
  xorriso -outdev /dev/sr0 -list_formats

a similar list
  Format idx 0 : 00h , 11826176s , 23098.0 MiB
  Format idx 1 : 32h , 11826176s , 23098.0 MiB
  Format idx 2 : 32h , 5796864s , 11322.0 MiB
  Format idx 3 : 32h , 12088320s , 23610.0 MiB

and allow choosing by
  xorriso -outdev /dev/sr0 -format by_index_3

or
  xorriso -outdev /dev/sr0 -format by_size_23610m

Other size wishes may be submitted.


> It seems that brasero can use libburn but I have had no luck in
> getting brasero to actually burn. It recognizes the disc, tells me if
> I'm over capacity or not, but just will not burn. Should I try
> bumping up the priority for the plugin for libburn ?

I cannot tell much about Brasero. My problem as user is that i
do not have the Gnome stuff that is needed for recent versions.
My problem as backend developer is that i cannot get in contact
with Brasero developers who would know about its usage of the
backends.


> blu-ray
> video working (at least as well as it can without UDF 2.5 write
> support). Can your tools help me there?

I am not aware of tools to produce UDF 2.50. mkisofs/genisoimage
create UDF 1.02, afaik.

Maybe you get lucky with the Linux kernel capability to mount
UDF read-write. It will be at least more modern than 1.02.
I.e. create large file (by truncate -s, qemu-img, ...),
format by mkudffs, mount -o loop -t udf, then cp into it what
you need, umount, burn file to BD-R.

DVD video and BD video would be an interesting topic for me
to explore (UDF specs are public and free, but sooo awful to read).
I roughly know what mkisofs writes into its ISO 9660/UDF hybrid
filesystems.
I lack of testers resp. test equipment, though.
A BD player and a bunch of factory made DVDs and Blu-rays would
be a good start. But which player and whose Blu-rays are
sufficiently standards compliant to serve as reference ?
The risk is to buy some overly tolerant embedded Linux which
would play any kind of video file from any kind of filesystem.


Have a nice day :)

Thomas