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Blu-ray disc burn breakthrough Published: 14th Apr 2008, 19:45:20 | Permalink | PrintableUp to 25GB storage on one DVD-sized disc [Updated]  Programmer Steffen Huber says he has managed to burn a Blu-ray disc using his Iyonix and RISC OS 5. Steffen, who develops the popular CD and DVD-writing package CDVDBurn, announced his breakthrough during the early hours of today.
Blu-ray discs are the same physical size as normal CDs and DVDs but can cram on far more data - as much as 25GB for single-layer and 50GB on dual-layer discs - by using blue-violet lasers. This impressive storage capacity makes the discs useful for backing up large amounts of data. The Blu-ray design also successfully saw off HD DVD in the recent high-definition optical disc format war.
Today, Steffen said he has been able to write data onto a re-writable Blu-ray disc (BD-RE) and successfully pull the information back off intact using an in-development version of his CDVDBurn software. He admitted he hasn't tried using a write-once Blu-ray disc (BD-R), pictured here.
Steffen said: "I am happy to report the first milestone on my way to implementing Blu-ray support on RISC OS.
"I have just finished formatting and writing the very first BD-RE (Blu-ray Rewritable Medium) with an extended version of CDVDBurn using an Iyonix and an LG GGW-H20L drive. And what is probably most important, the CDVDBurn extractor was able to read the data back without failure."
He added: "The code needs a bit of tidying up, but it seems to work fine so far. It is similar to DVD-RAM writing, but the error correction options especially are much more numerous and I have not decided yet which parameters should be user-adjustable and which should not.
"I also have no experience with BD-R yet and also not with the double-layer variants. Having experience with more than one device wouldn't be a bad idea, too."
 Steffen said he used an AD0006 IDE ATAPI-to-SATA interface adapter to hook his LG drive up to his Iyonix. He also hopes to add DVD+R double-layer support for the next version of CDVDBurn and is currently working out why the DVD+R writing support "sometimes seems to fail".
CDFS work
He added that he is also beavering away to address and fix issues within the CDFSSoftATAPI soft-loadable CDFS driver, the source code of which was released under the RISC OS Open shared-source scheme. He said the driver "has some well-known shortcomings that makes it unsuitable to successfully drive, for example, the LG DVD writers when trying to read DVDs".
Steffen said: "This driver work is a stop-gap measure because my full-blown universal supports-every-drive-under-the-sun driver will take a bit longer to finish. I intend to release the fixed work as free-for-everyone, and the completely new driver under a donate-if-you-like-it scheme."
It's understood Steffen is now throughly testing his new Blu-ray support code in CDVDBurn.
Update at 23:09 15/4/2008
We threw a few queries at Steffen and here's how he answered them:
Drobe: When do you plan to release the new Blu-ray supporting CDVDBurn?
Steffen: "No idea - it depends on how much free time I get and how quick the necessary fixes for the pending bugs are. I am aiming for a Wakefield release. Unfortunately, I can't be there but I'll still try to meet the deadline."
Are you going to call it CDVDBlurn?
"How about CDVDBurn Blue Edition?"
So, can RISC OS users burn, say, a full 25GB of data onto a Blu-ray single-layer disc?
"Yes. Just like they now can use the full 4.7GB on a DVD+R/+RW/-RAM with CDVDBurn."
There's no issues with regard to RISC OS's inability to handle disc image files greater than 2GB in size?
"No problem, since there is no image file system implemented. For disc images bigger than 2GB, CDVDBurn creates a set of 2GB files in a directory and handles it transparently as a big file."
The disc when written to and when read back isn't treated like a fairly modest-sized hard disc, then?
"No, the disc is treated like a large CD-R(W). The operation is unchanged from the classic CD mastering work flow: put the layout together, create the disc image, write the disc image. The writing process is strictly sequential.
"In other words, it is not treated as a hard disc-like thing because CDVDBurn does not implement a filing system.
"To sensibly implement a true filing system, it would really need UDF. I am currently talking to another developer who wants to have a go at implementing a Filecore file system for DVD-RAM (and consequently for other random access media like DVD+RW and BD-RE). We'll see how this will work out."
Links
Hubersn Software
What is Blu-ray?
BD-R and BD-RE explained
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