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PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition
book

PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

by Robert Bruce Thompson, Barbara Fritchman Thompson
July 2003
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
874 pages
38h 13m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Universal Disc Format (UDF)

ISO-9660 and its variants were designed for duplicating or premastering discs, but were never intended to allow incrementally adding small amounts of data to a disc. Although ISO-9660 allows adding data to a disc (until that disc has been closed), the only way to do so is by opening a new session on that disc. That means that writing even one new file incurs the overhead required for a new session, which ranges from 13 MB to 22 MB.

In part to address these ISO-9660 limitations, OSTA defined a new logical format for optical discs. The official designation of this format is ISO 13346 but the common name is Universal Disc Format (UDF). UDF is an operating system-independent logical formatting standard that defines how data is written to various types of optical discs, including CD-R, CD-(M)RW, DVD-ROM, DVD-Video, and DVD-Audio. UDF uses a redesigned directory structure that allows small amounts of data (called packets) to be written incrementally and individually to disc without incurring the large overhead associated with writing a new session under ISO-9660.

In effect, with UDF each packet is written as a subsession within a standard session, incurring the standard session overhead only when that standard session is closed. Packet-writing software typically closes the session automatically when the disc is ejected using the eject feature of the software. As with ISO-9660, an open session on a UDF-formatted disc can be read only by a CD recorder. Closing ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 059600513XErrata Page