This document explains the processes of burning CD's and DVD's on departmental machines that have been specially equipped with CD-R or DVD-R drives.
We recommend only Pioneer DVR series internal drives. These drives are capable of burning CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, and DVD+RW (and DVD+R dual layer in recent incarnations: DVR-107 and higher) discs. We currently do not have software installed to write DVD+R or DVD+RW discs, but if you have a valid need, please let us know and we will consider adding support. Please see the media section below for more information on disc types.
Other drives may work with the software described below, but will likely require OS configuration first. Please let us know if you have a machine with an optical writer and we will set it up for you to try burning. We explicitly do NOT offer support on drives which we have not pre-approved, but we would be happy to set things up and let you attempt to use suchdrives.
Testing was done on a 600Mhz machine with 128MB of memory, so any currently supported department machine should be fast enough to use a drive. Please note that all hardware purchases for which you expect support or which you intend to add to a departmentally-supported machine must be vetted with gripe@cs.utexas.edu beforehand, and installed by shop@cs.utexas.edu, preferably requested via the web based shopreq system.
Please, please, please buy quality DVD-R's (and you do want DVD-R, or possibly DVD-RW if you plan to re-use media and don't mind reduced compatibility and slower write speeds, but definitely not DVD+R, DVD+RW, or DVD-RAM), rated at 4x or greater speed capability. I highly suggest using Apple media, as they are very well quality-controlled and there are many types of unsuitable and plain junk media out there.
(You can find Apple media via the Apple store, search all accessories for 'dvd-r'). If Apple media seem too expensive, you can try meritline.com or another online vendor, and stick with brand names you've heard of: I recommend TDK, Maxell, and Ritek.
We cannot guarantee that you will never burn an unusable disk, but if you follow my brand recommendations and buy from a reputable vendor who does not create counterfeit DVD-R's (it happens more often than you'd think), you should get a success rate of over 95%. Typically the software will give you obvious feedback when a burn fails, but you should always check your newly written discs to be sure they are readable.
Something to be aware of is that not every (video) DVD player out there will read your DVD-R's, and a very few PC DVD-ROM drives won't. Fewer, but still a majority of, PC DVD-ROM drives will read DVD-RW's. We can provide test discs of recommended brands if you need to see whether other drives will read burned media before purchasing.
In case you wish to burn CD's, please get media suitable for the speed at which you wish to burn. We can advise you as to what speed discs you want, but in general any CD-R will work in any drive. CD-RW's are not always as compatible; check the specs for your drive to see what speed to get or ask us for advice.
You'll need to use the software dvdrecord(1) to burn CD's or DVD's. It has a copious man page; please read that documentation before starting. To burn data disks, you will first need to make an ISO image of your files. You can use other types of filesystems on your image, but that behavior has a much narrower range of compatibility and is outside the scope of this document; the images we describe will work on almost any computer in existence. The tool you will use to make ISO images is mkisofs(1), whose man page you are also encouraged to read.
In case you get errors such as:
mkisofs: Error: long_filename_1 and long_filename_2 have the same Joliet name
you might try skipping the -J flag to mkisofs, or creating a tar file holding the offending filenames, with a shorter path/filename itself.
Sample command lines:
# create an ISO image of two directories
# leaves it as /var/local/example.iso
mkisofs -J -R -o /var/local/example.iso /directory1 /path/to/directory2
# blank a DVD-RW or CD-RW, required before you can (re)use
# rewritable media. not needed for CD-R's or DVD-R's
dvdrecord -dao -v dev=0,0,0 blank=fast
# burn a CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R or DVD-RW
dvdrecord -dao -v dev=0,0,0 example.iso
Note: On our new ubuntu machines, the CD-R and DVD-R drives we specify are accessed as "/dev/hda" and similar, rather than "0,0,0" in the example above.
CD's hold typically up to 650MB or 700MB of data; consult the documentation that came with your disks for more information. DVD-R's hold exactly 4,521,323,220 bytes. Putting more than that in your image means the software will fail to write the image, so please choose your source material carefully with regards to space (I suggest using du(1) to determine directory sizes and leaving yourself 100MB for filesystem overhead space).
We also recommend creating your image on a local disk (/var/local or /tmp) rather than on a network mounted partition. While the fileserver has the ability to keep up with some write speeds (ie, 4x @ ~4MB/second), it is not guaranteed that it will be able to do so constantly for the duration of a burn operation, which would result in a wasted DVD or CD.
Although we doubt you need to be reminded, please respect copyrights when you are creating media, as always.