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It’s amazing to see optical media dying out to such a high degree. I was so excited when we got a CD-ROM drive in our home computer, when I was a kid. It opened up a lot of options for new games. Now, I have a collection of games on CD/DVD in a box, in the basement, which hasn’t been opened in a decade, maybe two.
Note that this is not all writing of optical media, much less reading of optical media, but specifically packet writing, a comparatively rarely-used set of functionality to provide the appearance of limited modifiability on write-once media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_writing
Packet writing allows users to create, modify, and delete files and directories on demand without the need to burn a whole disc. Packet writing technology achieves this by writing data in incremental blocks rather than in a single block.
Deleting files and directories of a CD-R using packet writing technology does not recover the space occupied by these objects but, rather, they are simply marked as being deleted (making them effectively hidden). Similarly, changes to files cause new instances to be created instead of replacing the original files. Because of this, the available space on a non-rewritable medium using packet writing technology will decrease every time its content is modified.
I’ve burned many optical media discs, but never made use of packet writing.
EDIT: I think that
wodimis probably the most-commonly-used optical media burning software for data discs on Linux, and looking at its man page, it apparently never got packet writing support out of being flagged experimental, for perspective:-packet Set Packet writing mode. This is an experimental interface. pktsize=# Set the packet size to #, forces fixed packet mode. This is an experimental interface. -noclose Do not close the current track, useful only when in packet writing mode. This is an experimental interface.I’ve burned many optical media discs, but never made use of packet writing.
Its old magic. Back when CD-R media was expensive ($20 USD per disc) “closing the disc” meant never writing to the disc again. If you only put a few megabytes on the disc might mean wasting a lot of money. Instead you could “close the session” which would cost you some capacity on the disc but let you write more to it in the future. Sometimes you would want to write the same filename (but a revised file) to the disc later, but because the file was already there, you’d need to “delete” the original before writing the new version. I think this is where this packet writing mode would come into play.
Within a few years Re-writable CD-R (CDR-W) came out and most of this wasn’t needed anymore. You could wipe the whole disc and start fresh.
Thanks for the clarification!
I was under the impression this was all optical disc writing.
When the family got a computer with a CD-RW drive in 1999, I used a CD-RW disc as a sort of portable USB, I guessing that was the last time when I used packet writing. :)
I used packet writing for a while when I got my first DVD-RW drive. A few years later, multi gigabyte flash drives became affordable and there was no need to mess with DVD-RWs anymore.
Yes, when CD and later DVD came out, they were truly groundbreaking. A huge step forward compared to anything that went before.
Both in music/video and as a computer storage media. That kind of exciting progress is rare in any field. I think the only equivalent with broad impact since then is the smartphone.I just found my box of old games on cd / dvd. I threw them all out because they’re unplayable on modern OSes. If I want to play Red Alert 2, I’ll just pirate it or buy it on steam - someone already did the hard work of either rebuilding it or making a translation layer.
Retro gamers might have paid good money for some of those games.
I retrogame so I don’t have to pay good money for games. Bring on the steam sales where I can get several months worth of games for $20 that will run on my old hardware.
Ya that’s probably what I need to do with my box. I have already re-bought a couple of the games on Steam, as they were cheap and it was easier than digging the box out.
This is more software news, but still a (nerdy) historical milestone of sorts.
I do hope it will be easy to enable CD/DVD/BD writing support if needed.
EDIT: I was mistaken, optical disc writing is not being removed, just one specific (and somewhat niche?) technology/approach.
It doesn’t affect normal disc burning…
“To make matters worse, it’s actively breaking setups where it’s not even required or useful.” This alone should be reason enough to drop it in the trash.
