K3b 0.10: DVD Burning for KDE

Well, the basic news is quite short: K3b is now able to burn DVDs. But this would be a little too short. ;) So for all of you who do not know what K3b is (the name does not really mean anything): K3b is (was) a CD burning application for KDE (screenshots). It uses cdrecord and cdrdao for actually burning the CDs but implements its own methods for all CD information retrieval functionality.

Now that this has been clarified I present the list of DVD related features in the new K3b version 0.10:

  • DVD-R(W) and DVD+R(W) support through the dvd+rw-tools by Andy Polyakov which is released under the GPL (yes, no strange security keys or patched cdrecord version for DVD burning anymore).
  • Support for all DVD-R(W) writing modes: DAO, Incremental Sequential (used for multisession), and
    Restricted overwrite (use a DVD-RW just like a DVD+RW)
  • Automatic burning speed selection based on the media's capabilities.
  • DVD-R and DVD+R multisession burning (be aware that most DVD-ROM drives are not able to read multiple sessions)
  • DVD copy. No VideoDVD shrinking yet. That means you may not copy a DVD-9 (most VideoDVDs) to a DVD-4 (4,3 GB DVD
    media). But this is planned and will be implemented in one of the next versions unless some legal stuff stops us.
    Perhaps someone with a better legal background could help me here.... ;)
  • DVD-RW and DVD+RW formatting which can also be done automatically before burning.

Before I get too many mails about this: There is no VideoDVD project yet but it is planned. I am just not
sure yet how to realize it from the users point of view.

So if you own a DVD burner please check out the new K3b Homepage and get the latest
version (as of this writing it's 0.10).

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Comments

by budgee (not verified)

Any tips on how you did this?

by Zaita (not verified)

Hello.
I'm begining to learn about KDE and Linux in general. I've just install SuSE 9.0 in my home machine and I have some problems whith the modem (Intel Data Fax Voice), audio (integrated) and the cd-rw unit (internal Polaroid BurnMax52) configuration. Particulary, when I start K3b 0.10 an error window appears warning me that my cd-rw is an ATAPI device, and that this K3b does not have a cdrdao version that supports this interface. I understand that I can run an SCSI emulator (because that is what the error window sugests me to do), but I don't know haw to do this. Can you please tell me what to do?

by MandrakeUser (not verified)

First of all, THANK YOU for k3b. It became my cdburn app of choice too. An let me also say thanks to the author of XCDRoast, which did a good job until k3b matured.

Anyways, a humble suggestions: is it possible to achieve a smoother integration of k3bsetup and k3b ?. It gets confusing at times. May be borrow the ideas from kcontrol, where you can enter "administrator mode" by providing root password, whithin the MAIN application (k3b in this case). Also, the error messages could be worked out a bit. I once had a user in my machine not able to read. The error message was: "could not find cdrecord or cdrao" or something similar. There was a suggestion to run k3bsetup. The problem in the end was that the user was not included in the list of users able to use k3b. This was really confusing.

Well, as I said, great work. Keep it going please !. Cheers :-)

by Anon (not verified)

Please excuse my ignorance, but is there a typo? How can we go from version 0.9 to version 0.1? (This is not intended to be flamebait.)

by anon (not verified)

from 0.9->0.10

decimal system: 9 to 10

maybe he should have just called it 1.0, but perhaps not time for that yet =)_

by Julio (not verified)

So it should be called 0.10, because 0.1 is confusing.

by Anonymous (not verified)

If you could tell us where it's called "0.1" then we could fix it.

by MandrakeUser (not verified)

I guess the point is, in decimal notation, the numbers 0.10 , 0.1 and 0.100 are all the same, equal to 1/10. Of course, software versioning is a different thing, but still to the eye, 0.10 looks like 0.1 and gets confusing. I also prefer 0.8 -> 0.9 -> 0.91 -> 0.92 ... until 1.0 , with minor releases (such as 0.92.1) if needed inbetween.

by Sendo (not verified)

0.9->0.10? I always thought it was 0.09 to 0.10.

Perhaps 0.91 would be better.

bye!

by anon (not verified)

I am the author of the original question, although not of any of the other posts in the thread. I'm apologize for the hard feelings it seems to have caused. I use K3B on my Gentoo box and absolute love it! Thanks very much to the developers!

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Sebastian, since K3b seems to be such a killer app, any word on what needs to be done before it becomes part of the official KDE release?

Any chance it could get into KDE 3.2?

by Daniel Molkentin (not verified)

It's not in the feature plan and thus it can't go into the official release before 3.3 even if the author wanted it to. It's in kdeextragear and that has it's reasons I guess. Why do all people want everything and the kitchensink in the base modules?

by anon (not verified)

a cd burner app is certainly more pertinant to being in a base module than much of the stuff is in modules like kdeutils

but kde 3.3 sounds great if seb. wants it =)

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Maybe 3.2.1 then...

It would be awesome to get it in the KDE distribution so that vendors pick it up. That way a killer app on KDE will get wide distribution on Linux/Unix and become a killer app on a wider scale.

Another widely-used killer app that uses the KDE framework would certainly be a good thing for KDE.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Btw, the reason I'm interested is that I'm tired of hearing that KDE doesn't have any good apps... If K3b is so good, then it deserves the chance to get enough exposure so that it can compete in such things as the Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards...

I'm not sure what kdeextragear is all about, but it doesn't seem to be working as well as GNOME Fifth Toe which has actual releases and announcements.

by Oliver Bausinger (not verified)

I think many distributions already picked it up. (SuSE and Debian for sure, probably more ...)

by Anonymous (not verified)

SuSE 9.0 has k3b 0.10, Mandrake 9.2 has 0.9 and RedHat has no k3b as it has no LyX and no Scribus.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Red Hat 9.0 accounts for about 83 computers in the McGill computer science lab, and FreeBSD with KDE 3.1 accounts for about another 83. Of course these both have KDE installed and most of the stuff from kdemultimedia as well... but K3b is certainly not there (all machines have CD burners).

by master alabaster (not verified)

I hate to say this, but Red Hat really can't be considered a "normal" Linux distro. They went out on some unusual Microsoft-like limb and decided to do things their own way and disregaurded some things that have been standard in the Linux community for some time. There is really no surprise that K3b is absent.

by Kevin Krammer (not verified)

kdeextragear cannot be "released", it is just a home for different packages, each following its own release cycle.

I think its exactly the place for applications like K3B.
It allows maintainers to access to KDE resources, e.g translators, while still allowing to have shorter release cycles than main KDE.

Being in KDE CVS makes them visible enough to distro packagers. I am sure they will package kdeextragear packages whenever there is a KDE release or a new release of their respective distro.

by Anonymous (not verified)

3.2.1 will not contain any new features and more than ever applications compared to 3.2.0 as it's a bugfix and no feature release.

by David (not verified)

K3B is better than any commercial piece of burning software, including the venerable Nero. I was quite shocked when I first used it.

by Alex (not verified)

While K3b is undoubtely the best on Linux it IS STILL NOT as good as Nero 6, but it is more intuitive.

by anon (not verified)

Hmm.. I like k3b better than nero now-days.. I wouldn't have said that even a few months ago BTW. k3b-cvs (i guess 0.10 is same) is amazing though.

by David (not verified)

Nero 6 is total pants. The previous versions of Nero were far better.

by janism (not verified)

I just burned my first DVD in Linux. I've been waiting this new version for a long time since I had to use Windows to burn DVDs until now. K3B is totally awesome!

by Flam (not verified)

I get this on my Debian sid with kernel 2.6.0-test6 !
Please solve this problem.

Thanks for your work !

In file included from /usr/include/linux/cdrom.h:14,
from ../../../../src/core/device/k3bscsicommand.h:20,
from ../../../../src/core/device/k3bdevice.cpp:23:
/usr/include/asm/byteorder.h:38: error: syntax error before `(' token
/usr/include/asm/byteorder.h:42: error: '__u64' is used as a type, but is not
defined as a type.
/usr/include/asm/byteorder.h:43: error: syntax error before `}' token
/usr/include/asm/byteorder.h:44: error: syntax error before `.' token
/usr/include/asm/byteorder.h:50: error: syntax error before `.' token
/usr/include/asm/byteorder.h:51: error: syntax error before `.' token
/usr/include/asm/byteorder.h:52: error: syntax error before `:' token
In file included from /usr/include/linux/byteorder/little_endian.h:11,
from /usr/include/asm/byteorder.h:65,
from /usr/include/linux/cdrom.h:14,
from ../../../../src/core/device/k3bscsicommand.h:20,
from ../../../../src/core/device/k3bdevice.cpp:23:
/usr/include/linux/byteorder/swab.h:199: error: syntax error before `(' token
/usr/include/linux/byteorder/swab.h:209: error: syntax error before `(' token
/usr/include/linux/byteorder/swab.h:213: error: `__u64' was not declared in
this scope
/usr/include/linux/byteorder/swab.h:213: error: `addr' was not declared in this
scope
/usr/include/linux/byteorder/swab.h:214: error: variable or field `__swab64s'
declared void
/usr/include/linux/byteorder/swab.h:214: error: `__swab64s' declared as an
`inline' variable
/usr/include/linux/byteorder/swab.h:214: error: syntax error before `{' token
make[5]: *** [k3bdevice.lo] Erreur 1

by Andrey V. Panov (not verified)

I have got the same compilation problem on Slackware 9.1 (Linux-2.4.22, gcc-3.2.3).

by Mrdengue (not verified)

Same problem compiling in Slackware 9.1

by nordle (not verified)

same on Slack9.1

by aprodigy (not verified)

Same her on SID

by Dirk S. (not verified)

fixed in HEAD now.

by Saad Malik (not verified)

HMMM... I just got the current HEAD of K3b... and it the problem looks very similar....

LFS 5.0 & BLFS (and ofcourse modified for latest stuff).

Kernel: 2.6.4
gcc 3.3.3
KDE (CVS ... about a week old)
K3B (newest HEAD)

Attached is the output...

by name773 (not verified)

doesn't do it on slack 9.1
byteorder/swab.h
asm/byteorder.h
linux/cdrom.h
linux/tcp.h
linux/if_ppp.h

are all messed up. anybody know of a patch?

by Smacker (not verified)

It would be nice if k3b could run freebsd, and use burncd as well as cdrecord to burn CDs (burncd is used to burn cds on ide burners, unlike linux you don't need scsi emulation on freebsd).

by Dieter Nützel (not verified)

Use a "current" Linux, then.
2.6.x do not need ide-scsi anylonger.

Try cdrecord on FreeBSD or maybe port the dvd+rw-tools.
http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/

Greetings,
Dieter

by Steinchen (not verified)

It might be a sourceforge problem, but the 0.10 source files are not avaible on any of there mirrors. Any other download locations?

Steinchen