213 lines
9.3 KiB
Plaintext
213 lines
9.3 KiB
Plaintext
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cdrskin Wiki - plain text copy
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cdrskin is the cdrecord compatibility middleware of libburn.
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Its paragon, cdrecord, is a powerful GPL'ed burn program included in Joerg
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Schilling's cdrtools. cdrskin strives to be a second source for the services
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traditionally provided by cdrecord. Currently it does CD-R and CD-RW.
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Its future ability to burn DVD media depends on the development of libburn.
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cdrskin does not contain any bytes copied from cdrecord's sources.
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Many bytes have been copied from the message output of cdrecord
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runs, though. The most comprehensive technical overview of cdrskin
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can be found in cdrskin/README .
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cdrskin with CD media fails to match its paragon cdrecord on three major
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fields: convenient TAO burn mode, multi session, audio features.
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Audio features are the only topic where cdrskin did not yet exploit current
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libburn to the maximum. This is due to my own lack of audiophile motivation
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and due to the lack of sincere users who provide me with cdrecord use cases,
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help me to explore the original cdrecord behavior and serve as dedicated
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testers for eventual newly introduced cdrskin audio features.
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cdrskin does not provide DVD burning yet. See advise to use dvd+rw-tools
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at the end of this text.
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About the command line options of cdrskin:
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There are two families of options: cdrecord-compatible ones and options
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which are specific to cdrskin. The latter are mostly used to configure
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cdrskin for its task to emulate cdrecord. There are some, nevertheless,
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which provide rather exotic unique features of cdrskin.
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The cdrecord-compatible options are listed in the output of
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cdrskin -help
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where the option "help" has *one* dash.
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For these options you may expect program behavior that is roughly the
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same as described in original man 1 cdrecord .
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Online: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/man/cdrecord-2.0.html
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The cdrskin-specific options are listed by
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cdrskin --help
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where the option "help" has *two* dashes.
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Those have no man page yet. Some are very experimental and should only be
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used in coordination with the libburn developer team.
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Some are of general user interest, though:
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--devices allows the sysadmin to scan the system for possible drives
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and displays their detected properties.
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The drives are listed one per line, with fields:
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libburn-drive-number sysadmin-device-file permissions : vendor type
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0 dev='/dev/sg0' rwrw-- : 'HL-DT-ST' 'DVDRAM GSA-4082B'
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This feature is valuable since cdrskin -scanbus will not give you
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the device file name and its current permissions.
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cdrskin will accept of course the proposed dev= option as address
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for any usage of the drive.
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Different from cdrecord, cdrskin is intended to be run without special
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privileges, i.e. no superuser setuid. It is intended that the sysadmin
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controls drive accessability by rw-permissions of the drive rather than
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by x-permission of the burn binary. To be usable with cdrskin, the drive
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has to offer both, r- and w-permission.
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eject_device=<path> is needed to work around yet broken tray ejection of
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drives. cdrskin makes a bold shell call to program "eject" and regrettably
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this program does not like our addresses for SCSI devices.
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/dev/hdX work fine and /dev/sg0 is quite safely guess-translated to
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/dev/sr0 . /dev/sg1 et.al. need the user's help. <path> must work with eject.
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dev_translation=<sep><from><sep><to> is needed to foist cdrskin to frontend
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programs of cdrecord which do *not* ask cdrecord -scanbus but which make
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own assumptions and guesses about cdrecord's device addresses.
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cdrskin project - at least for now - refuses to try to provide a similar
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guesswork but uses own cdrecord style addresses which have a mere
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semi-automatic text mapping to real libburn addresses. See cdrskin/README,
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"Pseudo-SCSI Adresses".
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If you need to foist cdrskin under a frontend then you may be lucky and
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both ideas of an address coincide. Especially if the frontend has the
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decency to ask its "cdrecord" via option -scanbus for a list of drives.
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If not, look into the error protocol of the frontend, look at the output
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of a run of cdrskin --devices and give cdrskin the necessary hint.
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If your frontend insists in using "0,0,0" and --devices reported
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dev='/dev/sg0' resp. cdrskin -scanbus reported "1,0,0" then this
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would be the appropriate translation
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dev_translation=+0,0,0+/dev/sg0
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The "+" character is a separator to be choosen by you.
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Currently i am not aware of the need to choose any other than "+"
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unless you get playful with custom translations like
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dev_translation=-"cd+dvd"-1,0,0
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See http://scdbackup.sourceforge.net/k3b_on_cdrskin.html
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for an illustrated example with K3b 0.10 .
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--fifo_start_empty is a throughput enhancer for unsteady data streams
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like they are produced by a compressing archiver program when piping to
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CD on-the-fly. It makes better use of the general property of a FIFO
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buffer to transport surplus bandwidth into the future. Yep. A time machine.
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One-way, i fear.
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FIFO originally was introduced by cdrecord's author Joerg Schilling in order
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to protect mediocre burner hardware from suffering buffer underruns
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and thus producing misburns (at 1x speed on CD-R media at the price of a
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DVD-RAM nowadays). This purpose would not justify a fifo any more -
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given the limited life time of burners and the seamless underrun protection
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of contemporary consumer drives.
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With an unsteady data stream the task of the buffer is to soak up peak
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performance and to release it steadily at the drive's maximum speed.
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The larger the buffer the more reserves can be built up and the longer
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input drought can be compensated.
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Original cdrecord has the historical property, though, to first wait until
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the buffer is completely filled. Best practice for fighting drive
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underruns, of course.
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With a very fat fs=# buffer (128 MB for 12x CD is not unrealistic) this
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can cause a big delay until burning finally starts and takes its due time.
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--fifo_start_empty makes cdrskin start burning without waiting for the
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FIFO to be full resp. the data stream to end. It can make use of the
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seconds spend with drive preparation and lead-in, it risks a few drive
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buffer underruns at the beginning of burn - but modern drives stand this.
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Note: no FIFO can give you better average throughput than the average
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throughput of the data source and the throughput of the burner.
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It can be used, though, to bring the effective throughput very close
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to the theoretical limit. Especially with high speed media.
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--no_rc allows you to surely ban influence from systemwide or user specific
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default settings of cdrskin. Possible locations for such settings:
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/etc/default/cdrskin
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/etc/opt/cdrskin/rc
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$HOME/.cdrskinrc
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tao_to_sao_tsize=<num> allows the - actually unsupported - cdrecord option
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-tao and defines a default track size to be used if - as custom with -tao -
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no option tsize=# is given.
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As in general with cdrskin tsize=# the data source does not have to provide
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the full annouced amount of data. Missing data will be padded up by 0-bytes.
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Surplus data is supposed to cause an error, though. The burn will then
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be a failure in any way.
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DVD advise:
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For burning of DVD media the cdrskin project currently advises to use
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Andy Polyakov's dvd+rw-tools which despite their historic name burn
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for me on above burner: DVD+RW, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD-R .
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http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/tools
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They are not compatible or related to cdrecord resp. cdrecord-ProDVD
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(now obsoleted by original source cdrtools cdrecord with identical
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capabilities besides the license key).
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If there is sincere and well motivated interest, the cdrskin project could try
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to employ growisofs as DVD burning engine. The cdrskin project would prefer to
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wait for DVD support being included in libburn, though.
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A very limited and specialized cdrecord-compatibility wrapper for growisofs
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serves in my project scdbackup. It is not overly hard to make one that serves
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some very few fixed use cases.
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To my knowledge, Linux kernels 2.6 do write to DVD+RW via block devices as
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they would write to a traditional tape device. Try old tape archiver
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commands with addresses like /dev/sr0 or /dev/hdc rather than /dev/mt0 .
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I have heard rumors that DVD-RW in mode "restricted overwrite" would be
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block device ready, too. My burner is not a real friend of DVD-RW and
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in an experiment the burn worked fine - but the result was not identical
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to the stream sent to the device. I had similar failure with DVD-RAM, too.
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Beware of the impact of a slow block device on overall system i/o buffering.
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It is wise to curb its input to a speed which it is able to deliver to media.
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Else your i/o dedicated RAM might buffer a big amount of stream data.
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