Writing in the context of libburnia means the transfer of a byte stream
onto optical media or into disk filesystem objects which are handled
much like optical media.
The various types of optical media show quite different capabilities
and behavior. CD media can carry raw audio streams as well as data
blocks which are protected by checksums and error correction. DVD
and BD media can only carry data blocks. Eventual audio or video
information is encoded in these blocks and not in raw streams.
There is the class of multi-session media:
CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, BD-R, which have a table of
content describing their session history. They may only be written
sequentially and in large sessions.
The other class is the one of overwriteable media:
formatted DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM, BD-RE, which
offers no session history but can perform random access
writing with a certain granularity.
libburnia performs its writing via libburn which
demands a certain respect towards the peculiarities of the media
type. Under the special assumption that only ISO 9660 filesystems
with Rock Ridge extensions get written, libisoburn
offers writing capabilities which are nearly independent of the media
libburnia has two programs which perform writing under command
line control: cdrecord-emulator cdrskin, and
ISO 9660 multi-session tool xorriso.
Formatted CD-RW are not yet supported by libburn.
Regular disk files and block devices may be used like overwriteable
media. Other disk filesystem objects may be used as empty