K3b

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K3b is a CD and DVD burning application for Linux systems optimized for KDE. It provides a GUI to perform most CD/DVD burning tasks like creating an Audio CD from a set of audio files or copying a CD. While the experienced user can take influence in all steps of the burning process the beginner may find comfort in the automatic settings and the reasonable K3b defaults which allow a quick start. The actual burning in K3b is done by the command line utilities cdrecord, cdrdao, and growisofs. Many newbies experience problems with warning about that K3B requires root privileges to work stably. In older versions it was easily solved via K3BSetup utility. But recent version of K3B (1.0.1) does not have that utility, so here is the solution: Switch to root (via command "su") and enter:

 groupadd burning
 chown root:burning /usr/bin/wodim
 chmod 4755 /usr/bin/wodim

("wodim" is a replacement program for "cdrecord" in the new version of K3B)


Limitations

Multisessioning

Since K3b makes use of the "growisofs" utility for generating the file system that is burned to disc, it is unable to multisession the UDF file system. Only the ISO9660 file system can be multisessioned. This is a limitation of the "growisofs" tool.

Multisessioning is necessary for adding new files to a disc with existing files. Without multisessioning, the entire disc has to be filled in one burn or any unused space is wasted. (There is also "packet writing" which uses an ordinary file manager to write to disc, but that is out of scope here.) If UDF support is necessary, the entire space on the disc should be used at once.

UDF support is necessary to make file names with over 64 characters readable on Windows because the Joliet extension for ISO9660 has a 64-character limit, and the Rock Ridge extension for ISO9660 is unsupported on Windows. UDF is also necessary to store files with over 4 GiB of size.

"growisofs" has not been developed since 2008, so it is unlikely that UDF multisessioning support will be added anytime soon.

For reference, the UDF file system was created for DVDs whereas ISO9660 was created for CD-ROM, so UDF is a more modern file system. While DVD and Blu-ray discs can contain ISO9660 file systems, ISO9660 was not designed to handle discs of those sizes. UDF and ISO9660 can co-exist on the same disc and reference the same files for compatibility, so any device that does not support UDF can fall back on the ISO9660 file tree.

Cleanup after interruption

K3b lacks the ability to remove files from a file tree imported from a previous session.<ref>k3b remove old multisession files - narkive</ref>

After a burn is interrupted by a power outage or wobbly USB contact, the table of contents of the file system lists files that do not exist on the disc. Additionally, it lists one file that is incomplete if it was being written at the time of the interruption.

Therefore, creating a new table of content in a new session with the non-existent files removed becomes necessary after a failed burn.

If cleaning up the table of content becomes necessary, you need to use a Windows tool like ImgBurn or CDBurnerXP.

See also

External links

References

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