Alternatives to cdrecord [LWN.net]

August 18, 2004

This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier.

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.

In all, we were only able to find three suitable candidates for users looking to find a replacement for cdrecord. Projects that were obviously abandoned or with no new releases in more than one year were not considered.

Cdrdao

For users with no interest in recording DVDs, Cdrdao is available under the GPL and is a good alternative to cdrecord. This utility will perform disk-at-once recording for audio and data CD-R/CD-RWs. The primary focus of the Cdrdao project seems to be audio or mixed-mode CDs. In fact, documentation on burning ISO images with cdrdao seems to be non-existent.

However, it is possible to burn ISOs with cdrdao with a little extra effort. Burning CDs with cdrdao requires a description file (either a native toc-file or a cue file from a Windows burning utility) in addition to the actual data to be burned to CD. In the case of ISO images, users must create the toc-file by hand to provide cdrdao with the necessary information to burn a disk from an ISO. The cdrdao utility is also used to make an image of a disk, and to create a toc-file to burn the image back to disk.

Aside from the extra bit of effort required to create a toc-file, cdrdao works well and is probably preferable to cdrecord for users who primarily burn audio CDs. One note of caution, users should specify an appropriate writing speed for their device. This writer neglected to specify a writing speed the first time out of the gate, and cdrdao elected to shoot for a rather optimistic 40x writing speed -- which produced a coaster rather than a bootable KNOPPIX disk on the Sony DRU-530A DVD+RW/-RW, CD-RW drive. Theoretically, this drive is rated for 40x burns with CD-R media, but much better success has been had with lower burn rates.

The supported drives page gives a list of drives that are known to work with cdrdao, though it is not exhaustive. Version 1.1.9 of cdrdao was released on June 7, 2004.

OSS DVD Extensions

Though not a standalone program, the OSS DVD extensions are worth mentioning. This project provides extensions to cdrecord for users who would like to be able to burn DVDs as well as CDs. There is little difference between using cdrecord and cdrecord with the OSS DVD extensions, with the exception that the OSS DVD extensions enable DVD burning from DVD-R(W) drives.

The OSS DVD website includes patches for several releases of cdrecord, as well as RPMs for several versions of Fedora Core, Mandrake, Red Hat, and SUSE Linux. The last patch for cdrtools was released in May. The OSS DVD Extensions should work with any drive supported by cdrecord.

DVD+RW-Tools

Another project for DVD-burning is the DVD+RW-Tools project. Despite the name, the DVD+RW-Tools project actually supports DVD+RW and DVD-RW drives.

This writer has been happily using DVD+RW-Tools since investing in a DVD burner back in February. The DVD+RW-Tools project includes a utility called growisofs, which is used to master images and burn them to disk. Growisofs can also be used "on the fly" to burn directly to DVD without the intermediate step of creating a image file. The project also includes a utility called dvd+rw-format to, not surprisingly, format DVD+RW media before use.

The DVD+RW-Tools are used only for burning DVDs. Users who want to burn CDs and DVDs must depend on cdrecord or cdrdao for CD burning. The project seems to be a fairly healthy one, with the latest release being a little more than a month old at the time of this writing. According to the DVD+RW-Tools website, any MMC-compliant drive should be supported.

Conclusions

While it's not unusual for people to complain that there are too many programs that handle a given task (e-mail clients, for example), the Linux community could do with a choice of CD and DVD recording programs. The existing programs are suitable enough, but users are left with a disappointing number of options when they need to utilize CD and DVD burners.

(Log in to post comments)

Alternatives to cdrecord

Posted Aug 19, 2004 8:57 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

the official cdrecord won't burn DVD's (without patching it first, which is one of the options listed)

Alternatives to cdrecord

Posted Aug 19, 2004 9:21 UTC (Thu) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link]

The question is, who will pick up these patches and actually maintain it?

Alternatives to cdrecord

Posted Aug 19, 2004 11:40 UTC (Thu) by duck (guest, #4444) [Link]

Hey, even if you do not agree with the author, there is no reason to
insult him - I do not agree with him either, but he _did_ release cdrecord
under the GPL. So you even have a well working reference implementation,
or a starting point if you want to fork.

I really think that it is the authors freedom to stop development of a
project or to change the license if he is not happy with the direction of
the development. Not only should users be free to use and modify software,
but they should also respect the work that somebody donated to them. Even
if the author has a rather big ego that clashes with other big egos.

So let us hope that somebody picks up the existing work and and continues
the development of a great piece of software.

Cheers

Alternatives to cdrecord

Posted Aug 19, 2004 15:40 UTC (Thu) by jre (guest, #2807) [Link]

There's no need to insult Jörg Schilling, or even to resent him.
He released cdrecord under the GPL, and the result is a healthy flowering of perfectly legitimate extensions.

Jörg Schilling has now released a DVD-recording extension under a proprietary license. He views a number of patches to cdrecord as technically ill-advised, and has attempted to limit their use. He may even regret that he released cdrecord under the GPL under the first place.

All this makes no difference, because the genie is out of the bottle.
Everyone's freedom to study, modify, improve and redistribute Jörg Schilling's original work is guaranteed by the GPL, just as it should be.
Instead of pointing to this fact in a spiteful way (which only gives comfort to GPL opponents), we should celebrate the stable basis for progress that the GPL creates, even when a software author changes his mind.

In other words, let's try to make Jörg Schilling glad he did the right thing!

Alternatives to cdrecord

Posted Aug 19, 2004 20:21 UTC (Thu) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

I use dvdrtools, a fork of the GPL version of cdrecord

I used to use that, but it wasn't able to burn at 4x on my TDK burner, or at all on my 8x Liteon burner. I've switched to dvd+rw-tools and have been very happy with it.

The article points out that dvd+rw-tools supports DVD+RW and DVD-RW, but did not mention that it supports DVD+R and DVD-R as well.

For data CDs I still use cdrecord, and for audio CDs I use cdrdao.

Alternatives to cdrecord

Posted Aug 19, 2004 21:39 UTC (Thu) by zonker (subscriber, #7867) [Link]

Sorry, I thought that was a given, that if DVD+RW is supported, DVD+R would be as well, etc.

Alternatives to cdrecord

Posted Aug 19, 2004 23:48 UTC (Thu) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

If I understand correctly, the software requirements for writing to DVD+R are somewhat different from those to write to DVD+RW. So I thought it was worthwhile to note that the read-only formats are also supported.

Alternatives to cdrecord

Posted Aug 19, 2004 20:28 UTC (Thu) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

someone on the kernel mailing list was considering adding CDROM and DVD burning support to dd

Ugh! I'd rather have specific tools for CD and DVD burning; they require a lot of processes and user options that are not relevant to normal use of dd, and most of dd's options are not relevant to burning discs. For instance, I'm never going to want to convert ASCII to EBCDIC as I'm burning an ISO image, and even if I did, I could pipe the output of dd into the disc burning program. Similarly, I'm never going to tell dd to show me ATIP information when I'm dd'ing from a pipe to a tape drive.

Have people forgotten the Unix philosophy of having simple tools that do one thing well, and combining them with pipelines and/or scripts for more complex tasks? Making dd able to burn discs directly does not provide any new capability, nor does it make anything easier. Naive users are going to use a GUI front end to the process anyhow, so the exact mechanism is unimportant to them.

Alternatives to cdrecord

Posted Aug 19, 2004 23:01 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

It should be possible to burn an ISO to a CD-R with dd, because that's the normal program for writing an image file to a block device. It's how you make boot floppies from disk images; optical media shouldn't need a different program.

Audio CDs are generally written with a lot of options and details, and that does make a special program worthwhile. But the common case where you just write the thing shouldn't require anything dd doesn't already do.

Alternatives to cdrecord

Posted Aug 20, 2004 0:37 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

It should be possible to burn an ISO to a CD-R with dd, because that's the normal program for writing an image file to a block device.

If the CD-ROM driver presented a writable block device interface, then dd should be able to write to it.

Perhaps I misinterpreted the original statement; I thought it was a request to enhance dd to know how to write CDs. If it's really a request to make the CD-ROM driver present a writable block device interface, and to leave dd unchanaged, then I have no fundamental opposition to it.

Alternatives to cdrecord

Posted Aug 20, 2004 1:05 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

That was actually the intent; have the kernel deal with all the complicated stuff and have userspace just write to the device; additionally, the kernel ought to have ioctls that deal with the weird stuff (which would be called by cd/dvd-specific tools instead of having them know SCSI). The thread was "cd burning: kernel / userspace?"