CD-R's Multiple Personalities

June 1996 / State of the Art / CD It for Yourself / CD-R's Multiple Personalities

There are many schemes for extending CD Recordable (CD-R). Sony CDRFS treats CD-R like a floppy disk for formatting and operations; thus, it allows fast access, addition and update, multitasking, and fixed-packet recording. The packet size is smalle r than the buffer capacity of the CD-R drive, so there is no chance of a buffer underrun error that produces a ruined disc.
Incat Systems' FlexCD supports variable-packet recording, compatibility with ISO-9660, and efficient access and recording. HP/Philips supports Universal Data Format (UDF), a subset of ISO-13346: a volume and file structure of write-once and rewritable media using nonsequential recording for infor mation interchange. Kodak Photo CD supports only multisession and basically requires writing multiple ISO-9660 structures, where the last-written structure contains the updated file system for all sessions on the disc.
The industry is working through the Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA) to come up with a single standard from the competing specifications. The goal is a single standard that supports features of information interchange from ISO-13490 and easy migration to CD Erasable (CD-E) by the end of the year. That standard will provide increased performance through packet recording and an indexed directory tree, and reducing buffer underrun. Users may wish to avoid vendor-specific implementations of multisession and packet-recording solutions, or face nonsupported disc formats in coming years.

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Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it is theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.

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