Skyse said:
Hi!
I'm looking for a DVD recorder, one for my XP/2003 server box and the other
for my multi-boot 98SE/W2k, Fedora, Suse and Ubuntu box, or shouldn't that
matter?
You can either get an internal DVD recorder or an external USB based
DVD recorder.
Both work fine with all of systems mentioned above. You will need to
install a usb-2 driver for Windows 98SE.
The drivers for XP and 2003 will be detected and configured during
installation. If you add it later, it should realized that you have
the DVD installed and configure itself to add the new software.
The Linux systems will all use modprobe during the boot-up cycle to
determine what devices are present and how they should be configured.
Last I checked - about a year ago - the USB-2 drivers for Linux were
still not "Hot Pluggable" - that is, you could not plug in and unplug
USB-2 drives without properly unmounting them first.
Windows reccomends that you use the "Remove Device" option (in your
system tray) before removing USB drives.
Typically, DVD "drives" are imaged, usually on some area of the hard
drive, then the image or preparation is copied to the media - either
"all at once" or "track-at-a-time".
Linux does not include tools that might be used for Piracy. Getting
the drivers for the DVD-CSS encryption scheme require that the software
be downloaded AFTER accepting a license agreement in which the user
agrees not to alter or modify the decoder and agrees not to use the
decoder to publish decrypted versions of the content stored on
commercial DVDs. Essentially, the DVD-CSS has provisions for only
permitting decryption in certain countries. A DVD recorded for the US
cannot be used in a DVD player in Japan, and vice versa. When the
DVD-Decoder is downloaded, some attempts are made to validate the
country and to make sure that the coder is configured for that country.
The decoder is available in several downloaded players, including the
downloadable version of RealPlayer for Linux.
Will I need to buy two different DVD's or more?
Actually, the DVD complies with a standard which has been published,
along with the player's compliance to ATAPI. These standards have been
published. In fact, many of them were first established and
implemented in Linux and Open Source.
The only thing that might be a bit confusing is that Microsoft has
tried to blurr the lines between driver, format, protocol, and
application. They provide a DVD-Writer with XP but you need to
purchase burner software for 2K, and 95SE. Their XP Writer function
has been integrated into applications like Windows Explorer - but lacks
a number of important features. The third party software has features
which may be less standard.
In Linux the "driver" for DVDs is broken out into it's component parts,
and those components are interfaced in standard ways. For example:
- the ATA driver - this converts IDE signals into the appropriate
signals for the device.
- the ATA-SCSI driver - this makes the ATA driver look like a
standard device.
- the SCSI to bdevswitch device - this makes the SCSI device look
like a generic
Linux "block mode" device. These devices include read, write, and
seek capabilities,
as well as, "flush", "mount", and "unmount".to make sure that
the operating
system doesn't try to write data to your DVD as you are
trying to eject it.
- the ISOfs formatter - this is a separate application which makes
sure that the
formatting of the media is appropriate to the device. There
are formatters for
DVDs, CDs, hard drives, even Windows drives. The only
restriction is NTFS,
which is appearantly very vulnerable to race conditions and
can be easily
corrupted. Some vendors offer both read/write support but
say "use at your
own risk" other only offer "read-only" access to make sure
that data is not
corrupted by Linux. In this case, any corrutpion is
Microsoft's.
- the Buffering engine - when writing CDs and DVDs, timing is
critical. Data cannot
be delayed at all. When you start the "burn", the system
must burn
an entire track at a time. Many recorders have the
buffering built into the
hard drive, but it's still critical that the entire track be
written to the
drive as quickly as possible - with not significant delays.
- the MPEG4 compression engine - If you want to record Video, you
probably want
to convert it to either MPEG or MPEG4. The standard for
DVDs is MPEG4.
The software to compress this video can also be used to set
the resolution
of both the input and output, Better compression tools
include dithering to
convert NTSC resolution into HD, and vice-versa. This is
very important if you
are converting handy-cam content into a DVD.
- the DVD-CSS encryption engine - This is the piece you actually
have to download.
DVD-CSS provides encryption for specific country codes.
Different countries
have different laws regarding censorship, ratings, and
other "filtering" of content.
Normally, you can get encryption for your own country.
Getting international
versions which support multiple countries may require
different codes. Some
DVD drives include their own DVD-CSS chip, but Linux will
probably not use that.
- the DES encryption engine - The DVD-CSS encryption engine uses the
DES
encryption engine usually in 48 bit mode. Most United
States DES
engines support up to 64 bit encryption and triple DES
(which is actually
just breaking the 128 bit key into two keys and then using
a pipline like -
"cat file | descrypt key1 | descrept key2 > cryptfile"
- the DVD "directory" - DVDs usually have some presentation or menu
options,
these are provided using a directory builder. It's
similar to building a Web site.
- Packaging - Linux provides all of these components within their
libraries
(DVD-CSS is more like a "plug-in"). Each of the core
features listed above
is available as command line executables, but they can also
be compiled
into different packages. In addition, Java-2 also
provides these core functions
from the block mode interface on up. You can combine
these into a single
command line application, or into a fully loaded
commercial application such
as RealPlayer as done..
And will I need to make sure
they have the appropriate dirvers?
As described above, all of the drivers and components are either "in
there" or
can quickly be added. The DVD-CSS portion can also be installed very
easily,
but you need to accept the terms set out by the organization that
licenses DVD
technology.
If all you want to do is save a "Data" DVD, there is nothing extra
required.
If you want to Publish "Video" DVDs, there are contracts to sign and
MPAA agreements to accept and/or sign, there may also be some money
involved, depending on what you are distributing, and to whom. Keep in
mind that Piracy of Videos or Film carries much more severe fines and
prison terms than piracy of audio or text. The fines can be as high as
$250,000 per offense, and as high as 15 years in prison. One of the
reasons for requiring that you download the DVD-CSS software, is
because it makes it easier to identify and prosecute Video pirates.
I have done searches on Google for the
DVD and medium but I would like opinions on favourites any of you have.
I just know this is going to be a ruddy nightmare.
Actually, it's not really that bad. All you need to do is plug in your
DVD-Burner and boot up Linux. The system will find it and make the
appropriate configurations.
Unless you really want to create your own special applications or
videos, you probably only need to download a DVD-Player such as
RealAudio for Linux (there are others available as well) - most include
some form of video service as well.
In fact, I had to download a special DVD player for my XP system, to
get the right
country code on my DVD-CSS decoder. Once it was installed, the other
players worked as well.
