dvdrtools and dvd+rw-tools problems and suggestions
I just finished spending several hours getting to the point where I could
burn DVDs under Debian, and figured I should pass along the points I had
trouble with and some changes in documentation and such that would have
saved me a lot of time (and could still be useful for other people).
Note that I actually had it working already, which is why I was
particularly annoyed to find out that it had broken...
I recently upgraded the kernel of my Debian installation from 2.4.18 to
2.6.6. Didn't run into as many problems as I expected to, and I figured
I had pretty much gotten everything working properly...until I tried
burning a DVD. Since ide-scsi is no longer used in 2.6.x kernels,
dvdrecord (installed from dvdrtools 0.1.2) quit with an error. I
installed the latest version (0.1.5) from the official Debian package
hoping that it had been updated to a newer version of cdrecord that
supported writing to IDE devices directly...no such luck.
After spending some time with Google, I decided my best bet was to try
growisofs from the dvd+rw-tools package. Unfortunately, this quit with
a "Not an MMC unit" error...which baffled me since my DVR-A04 is among
the drives listed as MMC compliant on the dvd+rw-tools homepage. Google
didn't help on this one, as the growisofs source code was the only result
when searching on this error message. Ultimately I decided that a
firmware upgrade might fix whatever growisofs was unhappy about, and
flashed my drive from the pre-installed firmware to the latest version.
This worked, and I can now happily burn DVDs again.
Suggestions for easy changes that could help out future people trying
to figure out how to burn DVDs under Debian (and other distributions,
for the second suggestion):
1) The dvdrtools package description really should end with a note like the
following:
"NOTE: dvdrtools does not yet work with 2.6.x kernels. Users of such
kernels should try the dvd+rw-tools package instead."
This would have saved me the effort of installing the latest version
only to find out it still didn't work, and would help new users pick
an appropriate package (last I heard sarge is supposed to include a
2.6 kernel installation option, so this could affect quite a few
people). I imagine the package will eventually be dropped as
obsolete if it never gets updated upstream, but for now it's probably
useful enough to have a DVD recording program with cdrecord syntax
that works on pre-2.6 kernels to keep it around for a while.
2) The dvd+rw-tools homepage should mention the "Not an MMC unit" error
text somewhere and suggest a firmware upgrade as a possible resolution.
I imagine most people have newer drives and won't run into this problem,
but it really should be mentioned somewhere for the benefit of people
like me who actually do run afoul of it.
Hope this proves useful,
Jeremy
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