Grafburn cd burner - new version 0.10.1

Stuff that has yet to be sorted into a category.
Message
Author
User avatar
Nathan F
Posts: 1764
Joined: Wed 08 Jun 2005, 14:45
Location: Wadsworth, OH (occasionally home)
Contact:

#121 Post by Nathan F »

I have written a basic function to append data to a multisession disk, at least for cd media right now, and after testing it all seems to work quite reliably. I appended four sessions in a row to the same disk anyway, without any problems. Adding this support for dvd should actually be easier using growisofs than it is using cdrecord.

Next will be supporting burning on the fly, by piping directly from mkisofs into cdrecord. I think I can make it so the only time the temp directory needs a lot of space is when burning audio cd's. where the tracks must be encoded first.

Nathan
Bring on the locusts ...

User avatar
Nathan F
Posts: 1764
Joined: Wed 08 Jun 2005, 14:45
Location: Wadsworth, OH (occasionally home)
Contact:

#122 Post by Nathan F »

Another new version here, which contains a bit of a rewrite of the audio cd creation stage. Mainly it slims down the interface and eliminates some extra dialog boxes, but it also fixes a couple of bugs that had crept in.

This version also contains the code which can append tracks to a multisession disk. I have tested this with cd media but not yet with dvd, so I can't gaurantee perfect function yet.

At this point most of the interface has been rewritten in gtkdialog, leaving only a handful of dialog boxes in Xdialog and gxmessage and eliminating a ton of extra steps.

Once again you must delete the preferences file before installing this version. It is located at /root/.config/grafburnrc. I plan to write a bit of code to scan the preferences file and add in the newer variables if they are not defined yet, but haven't decided how best to do it yet. Once that is done I think it will essentially be ready for the next "stable" release.

Nathan
Bring on the locusts ...

User avatar
Nathan F
Posts: 1764
Joined: Wed 08 Jun 2005, 14:45
Location: Wadsworth, OH (occasionally home)
Contact:

#123 Post by Nathan F »

I just uploaded version 0.10 to the top of the thread. This is intended to be the next "stable" release of Grafburn and I do encourage anyone who uses the program to update to this version. The main things which have changed since 0.9.6 are a new splash screen, integrating version numbers into several scripts, and an automatic forced updating of the preferences when installing a new version. If you have installed any previous "snapshot" please uninstall it before installing this package. Other than that installation should be seamless and automatic.

Since this is such a radical departure from how everything used to look I also updated the screenshot at the top of the thread.

Nathan
Bring on the locusts ...

pdrito
Posts: 50
Joined: Thu 18 Jan 2007, 14:13

new version 0.10

#124 Post by pdrito »

Nathan F,
First of all, many thanks for your dedication and efforts.

I try your last version, 0.10, of Grafburn.

On DVD disc I have problem with the multisession / no-multisession, issue:
All the process went OK till it reach the moment to burn the iso file.
The messages when I try to burn are:
1.- If multisession is ON, then burniso2cd give me the message "growisofs: previous "session" device is not specified, do use -M or _Z option"
and the program stopped and nothing is burn on dvd disc.

2.- If multisession is OFF, then burniso2cd give the message "no mkisofs options specified, aborting..."
again , program stopped and no burn on dvd disc.

Sorry for this bad news. I really cannot deal with those messages and I am lost without help here.

Thanks again for your pacience.

User avatar
Nathan F
Posts: 1764
Joined: Wed 08 Jun 2005, 14:45
Location: Wadsworth, OH (occasionally home)
Contact:

#125 Post by Nathan F »

OK I looked at the code and saw an error with a wrong variable being used during dvd burning. I just uploaded a minor fixed version to the first post in this thread. Thanks for pointing it out, I've not had near enough feedback in the last couple weeks since I started back to work on this.

Let me know if it now works for you, and if there is anything else you would like to see implemented or changed.

Nathan
Bring on the locusts ...

pdrito
Posts: 50
Joined: Thu 18 Jan 2007, 14:13

#126 Post by pdrito »

Nathan,

The 0.10.1 version it is better, but no perfect.

I can make and burn the first iso in a DVD-RW,
Then make the second iso and when I try to burn to the multisession the burniso2cd pop up a message that can't read because it is a very fast windows.
And finaly a second pop up windows says that "If all went well , etc."
Of course , NO multisession war burn. Sorry for that.

User avatar
Nathan F
Posts: 1764
Joined: Wed 08 Jun 2005, 14:45
Location: Wadsworth, OH (occasionally home)
Contact:

#127 Post by Nathan F »

Well I do intend to get it running, but this is not a huge surprise considering this is the first release with any functions to append tracks. I burned a couple dvd's "open" earlier so I'll walk through the code and do some debugging a little later.

Nathan
Bring on the locusts ...

User avatar
Nathan F
Posts: 1764
Joined: Wed 08 Jun 2005, 14:45
Location: Wadsworth, OH (occasionally home)
Contact:

#128 Post by Nathan F »

OK I just tried it and had no problems. But your post gave me a clue as to what wrong for you. I think you probably tried to burn the second session using the "New data cd/dvd" button on the main interface, which is only for creating the initial session on the disk. To append data you need to go into the "tools" menu on the main window and choose "append multisession". In this case it will use growisofs to write the data straight to the dvd without even creating an iso file. Actually one of my next steps is to do this for the first session as well, but I digress.

Anyway, if it went through the steps to create another iso image then it was not done according to how Grafburn works (with the "append multisession" function). If this is not intuitive enough I can always make some changes, but the idea was to remove all the less used functions from the main window to make things less cluttered.

In any event I'm sure the documentation could be better. I will probably spend some time improving that before I bother with adding more features.

Nathan
Bring on the locusts ...

pdrito
Posts: 50
Joined: Thu 18 Jan 2007, 14:13

Grafburn v. 0.10.1

#129 Post by pdrito »

Nathan,

I try the Grafburn v.0.10.1 with the 2 format disc, CD and DVD, and with "append multisession" function for the second iso.
:
1.- On CD-RW all the function went OK. The result was a multisession CD. perfect. !!! :D :D :D
2.- On DVD-RW the first iso was burn normaly. The second iso (started with "append multisession" function, was no burned. The same fault open pop up window, and the second open pop up windows telling " If all went Ok..."

Sorry , but the DVD multisession still with problem for me.

User avatar
Nathan F
Posts: 1764
Joined: Wed 08 Jun 2005, 14:45
Location: Wadsworth, OH (occasionally home)
Contact:

#130 Post by Nathan F »

OK, I'll post a debug version sometime soon so you can test, if you don't mind, and capture the output for me.

Nathan
Bring on the locusts ...

User avatar
Nathan F
Posts: 1764
Joined: Wed 08 Jun 2005, 14:45
Location: Wadsworth, OH (occasionally home)
Contact:

#131 Post by Nathan F »

OK I've done a bit more work on this and made some good improvements. The cd copy dialog is largely rewritten and now can use cdrdao (if it's installed) to copy audio cd's even if you only have one drive (by making a toc file and .bin file). This relies on another small utility I found called cdstatus which I'm going to make a case for to Barry. It can, among other things, determine the disk type in your optical drives, including audio cd's (which file and disktype cannot do) and can also retrieve audio track information from a cddb server, which is very useful in ripping audio. Best of all it's only 45K and has no extra deps. In addition the copy dialog now uses the system drive defaults, so you don't have to choose them each time you run the program.

I converted the help file to html and added some navigation to it. I plan to flesh it out quite a bit more, so the navigation will be handy when that's done.

In the works I'm experimenting with burning disks on the fly, rather than creating an iso first. Growisofs has this ability built in, but it's only for dvd media. For cdrecord it is neccessar to pipe mkisofs through cdrecord, and this has a tricky syntax. The code is partway written and when that is done I will release a testing version.

Speaking of growisofs and cdrecord, I also plan to make a case to Barry for some upgrades here. The version of growisofs in Puppy is rather old now, and newer versions of dvd+rwtools are much more stable and better capable with multisession writing.

As pertains to cdrtools and cdrecord, I've been evaluating cdrkit (the Debian sponsored fork of cdrtools) and found that underneeth the surface changes there are some very useful improvements in the software now as well. For instance, the wodim bionary can be run with the --devices option to get a much more readable output of what drives are on your system than the -scanbus option to cdrecord (which is still supported with wodim). In addition, wodim can be used by non-root users provided the device file is world writable. On Barry's news blog there was mention that he tried to upgrade cdrtools but the -scanbus option was now returning a different syntax than before, which breaks things like the cdburner-wizard. Well, with cdrkit I already have the basis of a much simpler cdburner-wizard, which should hopefully be more reliable as well. Both wodim and genisoimage seem to work fine when invoked as symlinks to cdrecord and mkisofs, so I think that we should be able to just drop them in place as such without breaking existing programs like gcombust.

Anyway, enough status report. I give it hopefully just another day or two before I have the code in place to burn disks on the fly, and then I'll post the results here.

Nathan
Bring on the locusts ...

pdrito
Posts: 50
Joined: Thu 18 Jan 2007, 14:13

#132 Post by pdrito »

Thanks Nathan,

I was sure you were cooking something all this time. :wink: :D

User avatar
Nathan F
Posts: 1764
Joined: Wed 08 Jun 2005, 14:45
Location: Wadsworth, OH (occasionally home)
Contact:

Development version 0.10.90

#133 Post by Nathan F »

Development snapshot with extended features. There are two hugely important capabilities added in to this version.

The first and most important new feature is the ability to burn both cd and dvd "on the fly" rather than creating an iso image first. This is vitally important for those short on hard drive space, but it also is just plain more efficient in some cases. Note that this is only for data cd's, not audio. Also, when burning a new session to a multisession cd you must still create the iso first (at least for now). To use the new feature just check the "Burn on the fly" checkbox in the dialog which appears after you arrange your files in the temp directory, and then choose either cd or dvd.

This combined with the fact that you can symlink your files into the temp directory means that the old problems of not enough space to copy the files and create an iso image should be a thing of the past. I hope that other can appreciate what a huge step forward this is for Grafburn. However, I should note that the other method of creating an iso image first is bound to be more reliable and should make buffer underruns virtually impossible.

The second important new function is the ability to copy an audio cd even if you only have one optical drive. This requires cdrdao to be installed, otherwise you will not be given the option at all. It works by creating an image of the cd (cdimage.bin) along with a toc file, at which point you insert a blank disk and it again uses cdrdao to burn the disk based on the information in the toc file.

This version of Grafburn, and probably all future versions, requires the program cdstatus which I just discovered. The program is only 46K complete with manual page and has a lot of nice features, which I described somewhat in my last post. Grafburn uses it to determine whether the disk in your cd drive is an audio cd or not. I'm attaching the program to this thread along with the new Grafburn package (for the time being).

I should note that I think some of the issues people have been experiencing with multisession dvd are due to the somewhat old version of dvd+rwtools, in particular the growisofs binary. I will be posting an updated dvd+rwtools package sometime soon, or if you are impatient you can grab the one out of the Grafpup repo and it should run fine in Puppy.

This development version is for testing and evaluation but seems to be fairly "stable" in my tests so far. A couple things are still incomplete but they should not be noticable to the casual user. Please test for me and give some feedback.

Nathan
Attachments
Grafburn-0.10.90.pet
(61.37 KiB) Downloaded 554 times
Bring on the locusts ...

plinej
Posts: 1742
Joined: Mon 14 Aug 2006, 02:21

#134 Post by plinej »

Nice work Nathan. I've burned a few audio cds today using this latest release successfully.

pdrito
Posts: 50
Joined: Thu 18 Jan 2007, 14:13

#135 Post by pdrito »

Nathan,

I delete the current graftburnrc
I install both pet.
I configure the new temp and iso folders.
I try to do the DVD multisession but no luck for me.

The first iso went ok, created and burned without problem.
The second iso:
- If I select Tools, +Append multisession, the program try to burn inmediately and because there are NO iso created, nothing is burned.
- If I select New data CD/DVD, then the new iso is created and then in the next box , selecting DVD media and multisession feature, the burning box opens but fail to burn, and the open box closes. Resulting in a NO burning iso.

Sorry for that. I don't know if I do something wrong or I am forgetting something.
Please, be patient.

User avatar
Nathan F
Posts: 1764
Joined: Wed 08 Jun 2005, 14:45
Location: Wadsworth, OH (occasionally home)
Contact:

#136 Post by Nathan F »

The changes I am working on will make the terminal window stay open if there is an error, which should help in debugging purposes. I should have this out soon, and then we can tackle the multisession issues properly.

Nathan
Bring on the locusts ...

User avatar
Nathan F
Posts: 1764
Joined: Wed 08 Jun 2005, 14:45
Location: Wadsworth, OH (occasionally home)
Contact:

#137 Post by Nathan F »

OK, here is a little evolution with the changes I mentioned, at least pertaining to a couple of the actions. The rxvt window should stay open now if there are any errors when creating an iso or burning, at which point you should be able to read the messages out and get a better idea what is going on.

Attachment removed in favor of newer version

Nathan
Last edited by Nathan F on Thu 24 May 2007, 07:19, edited 1 time in total.
Bring on the locusts ...

User avatar
Nathan F
Posts: 1764
Joined: Wed 08 Jun 2005, 14:45
Location: Wadsworth, OH (occasionally home)
Contact:

#138 Post by Nathan F »

As promised I have posted a newer version of dvd+rwtools here. If you are having problems with burning dvd's, particularly multisession errors, then I reccomend you try this newer package because the version of growisofs in Puppy is unreliable and often the culprit.

In addition I have posted cdrkit-1.1.6 for those who feel adventurous. This is the Debian sponsored fork of cdrtools, and after some extensive testing by myself I feel that it is better software for our purposes. The package also includes a new cdburner-wizard written in gtkdialog, which should be both more reliable at guessing the correct drives and much nicer looking. Future releases of Grafburn will integrate a little more with the new wizard, but right now it will be somewhat ignored because I moved the settings from three separate files into one in /etc. I'm putting this into the next release of Grafpup as well, slightly modified to make the device node of the burner world writable (if the user can write to the device node then wodim can write to cd as a non-root user, without having to install the binary suid root like cdrecord must be).

Nathan
Bring on the locusts ...

User avatar
Nathan F
Posts: 1764
Joined: Wed 08 Jun 2005, 14:45
Location: Wadsworth, OH (occasionally home)
Contact:

Development release 0.10.92

#139 Post by Nathan F »

I've been wanting to see how far I could take things with gtkdialog lately. After some experimentation today I came up with a new file browser for Grafburn, which free you from having to use ROX-Filer to lay out the files in the iso. This is still a bit primitive but seems to be functioning just fine. Basically you select a file at the top and click the Add button to add it, or select a file at the bottom and click the Remove button to remove it from the project. This is very much like most bigger cdburning packages work, including Gnomebaker and K3b, but without some of the more advanced features like drag and drop or the ability to create subdirectories in the project. For those things I've left in the ability to use ROX-Filer to just symlink files into the temp directory, and this behavior is configurable via the preferences dialog.

The screenshot of course shows the new filebrowser in action. To upgrade just uninstall any old versions and then install this package. The next time you launch Grafburn it will force an upgrade of the grafburnrc file, and launch the prefs dialog so you can reconfigure a bit.

Nathan
Attachments
grafburn_filebrowse.png
(67.07 KiB) Downloaded 867 times
Grafburn-0.10.92.pet
(62.66 KiB) Downloaded 748 times
Bring on the locusts ...

User avatar
Dougal
Posts: 2502
Joined: Wed 19 Oct 2005, 13:06
Location: Hell more grotesque than any medieval woodcut

#140 Post by Dougal »

Nathan, how does early Alice Cooper go down with the people at the Temple? :wink:

(I actually heard that one of the NY Dolls guys is now a devout Mormon)
What's the ugliest part of your body?
Some say your nose
Some say your toes
But I think it's your mind

Post Reply