[Debburn-devel] unknown dye, burning BD RE

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

> Trying to burn a BD RE I get the following message by cdrecord and wodim:
>   "unknown dye"
>   Is this a software error or does it mean that my BD-drive has a
> problem with the blank media? What can I do?

At least wodim is not prepared for BD burning and will probably never
become prepared for this media type.

Looking at its source, i find the message only in wodim/diskid.c.
The code obviously tries to identify CD manufacturers by the address of
the media lead-in. This does not apply to DVD or BD. Further, i cannot
spot manufacturer lists for DVD or BD.
So the message seems irrelevant. It indicates a certain lack of clue.


growisofs can handle BD. My tools cdrskin and xorriso can.
cdrskin understands many of the options of cdrecord resp. wodim.

But particularly for BD-RE you might only need a modern Linux kernel.
The device file of the Blu-ray burner (e.g. /dev/sr0) is supposed to
have similar properties as a floppy (e.g. /dev/fd0) or an USB stick
(e.g. /dev/sdb).
If you have w-permission, then you can write data blocks onto them.
E.g. by:
  dd if=my_image.iso bs=64K of=/dev/sr0

This will not work with BD-R. For them you need a real burn program.

Theoretically, BD-RE are suitable for a normal read-write filesystem.
But in practice, the write speed is low, random-access has long latency,
heavy overwriting of always the same blocks causes early media errors,
and the counter measures against media errors are often worse than the
errors themselves.
Besides that, BD are great backup media. One just has to write them
in large portions.

My burn tools allow to disable the checkreading in favor of full
nominal write speed. (E.g. cdrskin stream_recording=on)
It depends on the quality of drive and media, whether this is advisable.


Have a nice day :)

Thomas