Does anyone know how to detect the type and capacity of an arbitrary burnable disc inserted into a disc writing drive? I have used cdrecord -atip to no avail. Essentially, what I need is a program that will simply output the type and capacity of the disc in the drive. The capacity can be in any format so long as I can use the information provided to establish an approximate number of bytes.

I am writing a program which uses a bash script to perform a backup of a large file. The end user may have various types of writable media to use and my software needs to be able to correctly establish how big the media is and whether to use wodim/cdrecord or growisofs.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Cheers!

What your looking for a libcdio which has to prog cdinfo and a few other helpful tools

Hi! Thanks for the reply.

Can you elaborate on cdinfo? I found a program named "cdinfo" in relationship to "cdtool", but it seems to be intended to collect information about audio CDs; it doesn't produce any useful information for me regarding data size of writable media. Is there a specific program or command you have in mind?

Thanks again.

I think I may have found something of interest... the Debian package libcdio6 (as well as libcdio3) does not contain the program "cd-info" (which is apparently different from cdinfo; go fig). I have no idea why it doesn't but there you go. As a matter of fact, I can't find any Debian packages in either the AMD64 or IA32 repositories that contains cd-info. I suppose I can compile it myself, but it seems a little strange.

Well, here goes.

Update: I have been unable to get "cd-info" or any of the other test programs that come with libcdio to produce any meaningful information about the media. "cd-info" particularly is quite good and describing the drive, the media's track information, and so forth, but it has not specified anything about the medium's capacity.

I know that this is possible because K3b has a dialog which provides disc information; among other things, it lists the capacity of the medium. However, I am not sure I have the proficiency necessary to read K3b's source with any kind of speed. Hence, I post here.

I managed to get satisfactory results out of a combination of the programs "dvd+rw-mediainfo" and "cdrdao" (using the "disk-info" parameter). Through observing the output and failure of executing these programs, I can determine the media type and size to a reasonable degree of certainty.

Cheers, all!