Hi, i noticed that the properties of DVD-RW are misrepresented in some of the posts.
DVD-RW can assume two states: sequential and overwritable. The sequential state behaves much like CD-R or DVD-R. The medium has an own table-of-content where it records the track boundaries of one or more burn sessions. DVD-RW in sequential state have to be blanked before they can be re-used from scratch. There are two blanking strategies: fast and full. Fast blanking of DVD-RW causes the medium to be unable of the "incremental" write type. Only a single track and session can be written in DAO mode. Full blanking lasts as long as writing full DVD of data. It has the benefit, though, to bring the medium into the same state as a virgin DVD-R, which can accept more than one burn session and does not necessarily need to know the size of the session in advance. In the overwritable state, a DVD-RW resembles DVD+RW or DVD-RAM. It has no own table-of-content, and only one track which can be read and written in random access mode with 32 KiB granularity. Overwritable DVD-RW do not need blanking for being re-used from scratch. One may write 64 KiB of zeros to their start in order to invalidate an existing ISO 9660 filesystem, which would cause programs like growisofs or xorriso to append the new data rather than to start writing a completely new ISO 9660 filesystem. DVD-RW are sold in blank sequential state. One may bring a sequential DVD-RW into overwritable state by e.g: dvd+rw-format -force /dev/... One may bring an overwritable DVD-RW or a non-blank sequential DVD-RW into blank sequential state by e.g.: dvd+rw-format -blank=full /dev/... Only capable of DAO writing is the result of dvd+rw-format -blank=fast /dev/... It depends on the state of the medium and on deliberate decisions of the burn frontend program or its user, whether a DVD-RW gets blanked or formatted. With DVD+RW (which have sneaked into this bug report too) there is no decision to be done by the frontend. The backend must know about the peculiarities of DVD+RW background formatting and issue the necessary FORMAT commands if needed. This is the reason why burn programs on DVD+RW sometimes report formatting for a few seconds before they start to write. Have a nice day :) Thomas -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Desktop Bugs, which is a bug assignee. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/53962 Title: Nautilus-cd-burner and Brasero are unable to blank DVD-RW To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus-cd-burner/+bug/53962/+subscriptions -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
