Writing to a CD or DVD

Writing to a CD or DVD can be done using any of the following writing strategies:

• Track-at-once The most common form of CD recording for user-created data discs.

• Disc-at-once The most common way to create audio discs and DVDs. Nearly all manufactured data discs are created this way.

• Incremental Recording or Packet Writing Used with drag-and-drop writing software. This is also the most common way for non-movie DVDs to be recorded.

These writing strategies are actual selections made in the writing software and sent to the writer to control it. It is important to understand that this is not connected with any particular file system that is a different selection in the writing software that does not directly affect the writer. The writing strategy selection does impact the structure of the disc.

Incremental recording (or packet writing) is often confused with the Universal Disk Format (UDF) file system. UDF can be written using any of the writing methods listed above, and incremental recording can be used with any file system.

Track-at-once refers to writing a track and then turning off the laser, which forces a break in the sector encoding, thereby resulting in two unreadable sectors on the disc. A gap (usually 150 sectors in length) is then written,...