Hi,
If you imagine the difference between
xorriso and older utilities, what do you think is the main difference that
can be reflected on the user experience? That is, what difference does it
make if a desktop DVD burning application make use of xorriso that it can
offer a unique feature or competition advantage over others?
The combination of mkisofs, cdrecord and growisofs still covers most
needs of the users. One needs to know the particular properties of the
various media types, though.
I consider xorriso to be more consistent in its unified view on all
kinds of storage media: CD, DVD, BD, block devices, disk files,
character devices, pipes.
This advantage is best visible if one uses its own commands rather than
the emulations of mkisofs and cdrecord. Nevertheless, the cdrecord
emulation extends the CD multi-session model for ISO 9660 images to
nearly all DVD types and to both BD types. (Use option
--grow_overwriteable_iso)
xorriso covers the whole life cycle of an ISO image:
Creation, expansion, manipulation, extraction of files.
It lists the existing sessions and helps with mounting any of
them on Linux and FreeBSD. (Solaris is incapable in some cases.)
It has strong extra features for data backup.
- MD5 checksums of each data file and of the whole session. It has
commands for verifying the checksums and for printing them.
- Incremental backups may be based either on inode+time, MD5, or
plain comparison of file contents.
- Transparent zisofs compression (readable on Linux only).
- Visible gzip compression.
- External filter programs for other compression or encryption.
(Quite slow due to forking the filter processes twice per
filtered data file.)
- Recording and restoring of Linux ACLs and Linux xattr.
- Fast mass extraction of files without rattling the DVD drive.
xorriso is prepared to serve as slave process under a frontend
program. Its options -dialog, -mark and -pkt_output allow the master
to send commands into xorriso's stdin and to receive their results
and messages from xorriso's stdout.
Last but not least, i try to offer user-friendly support. :))