Re: writing to CDR or DVDR from code

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

"Alessandro Angeli [MVP::DS/MF]" wrote in message
bill wrote:

Yes I just noticed that. But it is, after all, for sale.
It's a commercial license. I submitted an inquiry to get
their price but I imagine it's competitive with others
like Binary Magic, et al. If they get back to me before end of week, I'll
post the info here.

I was really talking about free, open source projects &
libraries or at least something that's affordable. There is none I
know of in Windows.
If you have to pay $300-400 or more for a license just to
add a DVD support feature, you can't price your product
so it's competitive.

Well, it depends on how many copies of your product you are entitled to
ship with such a license: if a $300 license gives you the right to
distribute 10'000 copies of your product, that makes only $.03 per copy.

However, I see your point. But free open source libraries are usually
GPL'ed, which means that, even if they existed, they would not be
compatible with a closed source commercial product.

If instead your product is compatible with the GPL, then you can port one
of the Linux-based libraries. After all, the biggest part is the
implementation of the SCSI/ATAPI command set and the ISO/UDF filesystems,
which are platform-independent, while the platform-specific code is just a
thin layer to enumerate the devices and send the commands to them and to
read/write files, which are replaced easily enough by ASPI or SPTI and by
Win32 file I/O calls (if the source code doesn't already use portable
stdlibc functions). At least, that's my experience with ASPI and the
SCSI/MMC command set.

I haven't heard back yet from Ahead about the Nero API license & costs.
I think the licenses for most of the others are on their websites.

I mentioned the open source programs for purposes of learning by
example only. Reading the T10/scsi-mmc & Mt.Fuji docs alone won't get
you there. There is no reliable Windows DVD program or library
code available (except at a high price) that you can learn from.

Obviously you don't cut & paste or slightly modify code from these
programs and insert them in your app or try to run them in a process
from within. What you can learn is how to implement the scsi-mmc
commands for each specific recording type on the various disc types.
And with nearly a dozen or more variations there is a lot to learn.

I learned from cdrecord & growisofs and now have DVD/CD support in
my app (except for packet/UDF ... yet to be done). Even with these
examples, I worked long and hard to get it to work and I'm not done yet.
I'm not a professional programmer with lots of experience. Maybe
someone else could do it easily although I doubt it.

In my opinion, with something this technical, most of us would find it
impossible to figure out how to do it without good working examples.
Cdrecord & growisofs are the only two whose code I came to trust
and learn from. CDRDAO deserves a mention for an example of sending
a cue *** and other music CD related tasks.

DVD has arrived. It can't remain the "Black Art" you have to pay big the
bucks to have access to as it has been over the past decade. Most Windows
machines have DVD burners. They're faster and hold more data.
Windows programmers need a reasonable way to add this support for their
customers. In the absence of an API/SDK, at least some working
examples.

I don't see why MS, for example, can't make cdburn, cdimage & dvdburn
(from Windows Res Kit) open source.

How many Windows programmers like the original poster, Kamil and
myself are there out there needing to add a simple DVD feature to their
app only to hit the wall and find little support and no examples
(for Windows) to learn from like there are in nearly every other area of
programming ?

Regards,
..
Bill Mudd





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