SERVICES

Authoring

Optical disc authoring

Optical disc authoring, including DVD and Blu-ray Disc authoring (often referred to colloquially, but improperly, as burning), is the process of assembling source material—video, audio or other data—into the proper logical volume format to then be recorded ("burned") onto an optical disc (typically acompact disc or DVD).

Process
To burn an optical disc, one usually first creates an optical disc image with a full file system designed for the optical disc, and then burns the image to the disc. The disc image is a single file, built and stored on the hard drive, which contains the entire information to be contained on the disc.
Many optical disc authoring software applications create the disc image and burn in one bundled operation, so that end-users often do not know the distinction. However, a useful motivation for learning this distinction is that creating the disc image is an "expensive" (time-consuming) process. Most disc writing applications will silently delete this image from the "temporary directory" in which it was built unless users instruct the disc burning application to preserve the image, which can then be used for creating further copies of the same image without the need to rebuild the image each time.
There are also packet-writing applications that do not require writing the entire disc at once, but allow writing parts at a time, allowing the disc to be used in the same way as rewritable media such as afloppy disk.
There exist many optical disc authoring technologies for optimizing the authoring process and preventing errors. Discs writeable only once whose burn failed are colloquially termed coasters.
Some operating systems are aware of disc images as a filesystem type, and can mount these images so that they appear as actual mounted discs. This feature can be useful for testing a disc image after authoring but before writing to the disc media.

Blu-ray Disc

Blu-ray Disc (also known as Blu-ray or BD) is an optical disc storage medium designed by Sony to supersede the standard DVD format. Its main uses are for running Playstation 3 games, high-definition video and data storage with 50GB per disc. The disc has the same physical dimensions as standard DVDs and CDs.
The name Blu-ray Disc derives from the blue-violet laser used to read the disc. While a standard DVDuses a 650 nanometre red laser, Blu-ray uses a shorter wavelength, a 405 nm blue-violet laser, and allows for almost six times more data storage than on a DVD.
During the format war over high-definition optical discs, Blu-ray competed with the HD DVD format.Toshiba, the main company supporting HD DVD, ceded in February 2008 and the format warended.

Technical specifications

Type	Physical size	Single layer capacity	Dual layer capacity
Standard disc size	12 cm, single sided	25 GB (23.28 GiB)	50 GB (46.57 GiB)
Mini disc size	8 cm, single sided	7.8 GB (7.26 GiB)	15.6 GB (14.53 GiB)

Blu-ray Disc
As of April 2008 when authoring Blu-ray Disc special attention should be given to ensure that following elements are compatible with each other, even for the simplest file structures.

• the used blu ray codecs
• optical disc authoring software for blu ray (included in some DVD authoring software)
• intended playing device which can be either
• the Sony Playstation 3
• a blu ray standalone player or
• a computer that must have compatible blu ray disc player software that is sometimes included in DVD player software. The GPU of the computer i.e. ATI versus NVIDIA must be compatible with the player software. (Some software does not support ATI and some software does not or hardly supports some codecs in combination with NVIDIA.)