Burning DVDs in Linux

It was interesting to see Uraeus experiencing the same problems with burning DVDs that I did originally when I got my (now dead) laptop. The surprising point indeed is that cdrecord (as shipped with Fedora) cannot burn DVD+R's (not sure about other types) but growisofs does that flawlessly.

Personally I've put the following aliases in my ~/.bashrc:

function burndvdfunc() {
f=${1--}
[ "x$f" = "x-" ] && f=/dev/stdin
growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd=$f
eject
}
alias burn='sudo cdrecord -overburn -eject dev=/dev/hdc driveropts=burnfree'
alias burndvd='burndvdfunc'
alias mkisofs='mkisofs -rJ -joliet-long'
alias mkdvdfs='mkisofs -rJ -dvd-video'

And now burning all kind of things has become a pleasure:

• To burn a data CD: mkisofs -V 'title' dir | burn -
• To burn a data DVD: mkisofs -V 'title' dir | burndvd -
• To cook and burn a video DVD: mkdvdfs dir | burndvd -

For mkdvdfs to work, all files should have all-capital filenames. That became a small issue last week when I was trying to burn a home-made DVD from files on a FAT32 partition on an external harddisk of a friend, as by default, vfat mounts tolower all the all-caps names. The shortname=win95 mount options does the trick, but it doesn't work with -o remount, so you have to umount and mount again.

¶ 7:29 PM