On 2008-06-04, Ram <Ram@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Matt wrote:
[snip]
>> You are not familiar with all the miseries of XP. See
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_Letter_Access
>>
> Looks like I don't.
>
> I still can't see how it formats the media before burning. DVD -/+ R
> are write once read many. Unless the format relates to how it is written
> at burn time.

It does.

My understanding, at least, is that UDF DVDs written using DLA, or
more generally any "packet writing" utility, are written in a very
different way from conventionally mastered UDF discs. It's
practically a different format.

The type of UDF that's used on normal DVD-Video discs and is truly
almost "universal" is UDF 1.02 in the 'plain' flavor. Packet
writing was added in version 1.50, and is called 'VAT'. Many devices
and systems either don't support reading VAT even if they support
1.50, or don't support 1.50 at all.

Wikipedia explains it better than I can:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disc_Format#Revisions_of_UDF>

According to that Wiki page, Linux *should* be able to read UDF 1.5
discs as long as you have a recent 2.6 kernel, but I'm not sure about
VAT discs specifically. A quick Google seems to indicate that you're
not the only one having problems with it. The most common
recommendation seems to be "stop using VAT/DLA".

Personally, I tried using DLA once on an XP machine and swore off it
immediately after figuring out how incompatible the discs it produced
were. (Mac OS X won't touch them, at least not when I tried it.)

Although conceptually packet writing is a cool idea, in practice I
don't think there's much call for it anymore. It's a rare system that
doesn't have enough temp space to make a copy of all the data you want
to burn to a disc, and if you can do that you might as well master the
disc conventionally.

As for conventional DVD mastering under Windows, I've had good luck
with Roxio's product (it used to be Easy CD Creator but it's something
else now). Every Wintel machine I've used that's come with a CD/DVD-R
drive has had some package or another pre-installed; you might just
need to deinstall or disable the DLA components in order to get it to
work right. If all you're doing is taking a folder full of files and
burning them to disc, just about any utility ought to do the job.

-Kadin.

--
http://kadin.sdf-us.org