First Experience of Burning a DVD

Yay! I burned a DVD for the first time. At last I can make my one month old NEC ND-3500AG to good use, creating a coaster in the process due to bad media (I hope). It took me about 8 minutes to burn 3.2 GB of data to an el-cheapo 4X DVD+R disc. All went well except for the bad media and some problem with [K3B](http://k3b.sourceforge.net) and [growisofs](http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/tools/?M=D).

Because of a change in Linux 2.6.9, a normal user can no longer burn a CD. At least using the current userspace tools. So, whenever I need to burn a CD, I used to run ‘sudo k3b’. But when invoked that way, K3B wouldn’t be able to detect growisofs. When I ran k3b using normal user, it could detect growisofs successfully but burning would fail. After several minutes fiddling and googling, it turned out that growisofs refuses to run under sudo. From growisofs man page:

> If executed under sudo(8) growisofs refuses to start. This is done for the following reason. Naturally growisofs has to access the data set to be recorded to DVD media, either indirectly by letting mkisofs generate ISO9660 layout on-the-fly or directly if a pre-mastered image is to be recorded. Being executed under sudo(8), growisofs effectively grants sudoers read access to any file in the file system.

After knowing that, running K3B after a ‘su’ worked flawlessly.

5 comments

  1. DVD burners are more sensitive to bad media compared to CD burners. At least mine (LG GSA-4120B) is. Avoid el-cheapo stuff and get the ones with jewel cases if possible. Still haven’t tried burning dual-layer discs though, media too bloody expensive (around AUD 12 per disc a few months ago).

  2. Actually I had worse experience with Rp 12000 a piece brand name blank CDs bought from reputable stores (Gramedia). And I hate jewel cases, it really wastes space! Besides, I’m only experimenting, I had actually bought blank DVDs from several brands.

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