How to create UDF images and burn them to DVD or CDROM?

Question

Writing CDs with cdrecord and making images with genisoimage is no problem.

I want to write DVDs in a similar manner, first creating an image, then burning it to disk. This is quite beneficial, since I can inspect the image before burning it to disk.

Now, all I've seen, is how to use the growisofs command to burn something to DVD, but all how-to's were using ISO9660 for DVDs. But I want to burn UDF images. Before I can burn them, I need to make them, but how do I create UDF images?

Also, If you could explain, or link on how to burn BluRay, that would be great, too.

All tools must be command line, as I need to work with it, where GUI is no option.

Answer 1

For video data

You can use the -dvd-video option to genisoimage/mkisofs to enable the creation of UDF structures required for video playback. Normally this is done in one operation with growisofs (which calls genisoimage itself), e.g.

$ growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd -dvd-video /path/to/dir

however you could use genisoimage by itself to create an image locally, e.g.

$ genisoimage -o test.iso -dvd-video /path/to/dir

Note that in both cases it is up to you to ensure that the directory structure under /path/to/dir is correct for a DVD filesystem, i.e. it includes the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directories. Using a DVD authoring tool such as dvdauthor will create the required content.

For general data

In the case of writing arbitrary data to a UDF filesystem, the -dvd-video option of genisoimage is not useful. In this case, the mkudffs tool from the udftools package can be used, along with a loopback device to generate a local image.

First, you need to generate a blank file to contain the image. Here the size is given as 650 MB to match a standard CD, this will obviously need to be larger for a DVD/Blu-Ray. See this wikipedia article for the exact sizes of DVD media.

$ truncate -s 650M /tmp/cdimage.udf

Now invoke mkudffs to generate a UDF filesystem in this blank image:

$ mkudffs --media-type=dvd /tmp/cdimage.udf

See mkudffs(1) for other possible media types. Both truncate and mkudffs will create sparse files if your filesystem supports them; so the image won't occupy the full size unless you fill it.

Then you can mount your image locally to copy data to it

$ sudo mkdir /media/udfimage
$ sudo mount -t udf -o loop,rw /tmp/cdimage.udf /media/udfimage

After the data has been copied to the image, the process is followed in reverse to unmount the image and detach the loopback device:

$ sudo umount /dev/loop0