legacy/libburn/trunk/doc/comments

/**
   @author Mario Danic, Thomas Schmitt

   @mainpage Libburn Documentation Index

   @section intro Introduction

Libburnia is an open-source project for reading, mastering and writing
optical discs. This page is about its capability to handle optical media.
For now this means CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-RAM, DVD+RW, DVD+R, DVD+R/DL, DVD-RW,
DVD-R, DVD-R/DL, BD-R, BD-RE.

Our scope is currently Linux 2.4 and 2.6, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, or NetBSD.
For ports to other systems we would need : login on a development machine or
an OS that is installable on an AMD 64-bit PC, advise from a system person
about the equivalent of Linux sg or FreeBSD CAM, volunteers for testing of
realistic use cases.

libburn is the library by which preformatted data get onto optical media.
Its code is independent of cdrecord. Its DVD capabilities are learned from
studying the code of dvd+rw-tools and MMC-5 specs. No code but only the pure
SCSI knowledge has been taken from dvd+rw-tools, though.

cdrskin is a limited cdrecord compatibility wrapper for libburn.
cdrecord is a powerful GPL'ed burn program included in Joerg Schilling's
cdrtools. cdrskin strives to be a second source for the services traditionally
provided by cdrecord. Additionally it provides libburn's DVD/BD capabilities,
where only -sao is compatible with cdrecord.
cdrskin does not contain any bytes copied from cdrecord's sources.
Many bytes have been copied from the message output of cdrecord runs, though.
See cdrskin/README for more.

The burn API example of libburn is named test/libburner.c . The API for media
information inquiry is demonstrated in test/telltoc.c .
Explore these examples if you look for inspiration.

SONAME:
libburn.so.4 (since 0.3.4, March 2007),


   @section using Using libburn

Our build system is based on autotools.
User experience tells us that you will need at least autotools version 1.7.

To build libburn and its companion applications go into its toplevel directory
and execute

-  ./bootstrap  (needed if you downloaded from SVN)

-  ./configure

-  make

To make the libraries accessible for running and developing applications 

-  make install


@section libburner Libburner

libburner is a minimal demo application for the library libburn 
(see: libburn/libburn.h) as provided on  http://libburnia-project.org .
It can list the available devices, can burn to recordable CD, DVD, or BD,
can blank a CD-RW or DVD-RW, and can format unformatted DVD-RW, BD-R, or BD-RE. 

It's main purpose, nevertheless, is to show you how to use libburn and also
to serve the libburnia team as reference application. libburner does indeed
define the standard way how above gestures can be implemented and stay upward
compatible for a good while.

   @subsection libburner-help Libburner --help
<pre>
Usage: test/libburner
       [--drive address|driveno|"-"]  [--audio]
       [--blank_fast|--blank_full|--format]  [--try_to_simulate]
       [--multi]  [one or more imagefiles|"-"]
Examples
A bus scan (needs rw-permissions to see a drive):
  test/libburner --drive -
Burn a file to drive chosen by number, leave appendable:
  test/libburner --drive 0 --multi my_image_file
Burn a file to drive chosen by persistent address, close:
  test/libburner --drive /dev/hdc my_image_file
Blank a used CD-RW (is combinable with burning in one run):
  test/libburner --drive /dev/hdc --blank_fast
Blank a used DVD-RW (is combinable with burning in one run):
  test/libburner --drive /dev/hdc --blank_full
Format a DVD-RW, BD-RE or BD-R:
  test/libburner --drive /dev/hdc --format
Burn two audio tracks (to CD only):
  lame --decode -t /path/to/track1.mp3 track1.cd
  test/dewav /path/to/track2.wav -o track2.cd
  test/libburner --drive /dev/hdc --audio track1.cd track2.cd
Burn a compressed afio archive on-the-fly:
  ( cd my_directory ; find . -print | afio -oZ - ) | \
  test/libburner --drive /dev/hdc -
To be read from *not mounted* media via: afio -tvZ /dev/hdc
</pre>
libburner has two companions, telltoc and dewav, which help to perform some
peripheral tasks of burning.

telltoc prints a table of content (sessions, tracks and leadouts), it tells
about type and state of media, and also is able to provide the necessary
multi-session information for program mkisofs option -C. Especially helpful
are its predictions with "Write multi" and "Write modes" where availability
of "TAO" indicates that tracks of unpredicted length can be written.
See: test/telltoc --help.

dewav extracts raw byte-swapped audio data from files of format .wav (MS WAVE)
or .au (SUN Audio). See example in libburner --help.

   @subsection libburner-source Sourceode of libburner

Click on blue names of functions, structures, variables, etc in oder to
get to the according specs of libburn API or libburner sourcecode.
 
@include libburner.c
*/