UDF Tools

Introduction

This document gives hints and tips for dealing with the UDF file system (DVD-RAM etc).

Packet writing may improve performance. See https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/cdrom/packet-writing.html for more information.

Installation

For Debian 3.1 (Sarge) -> Debian 10 (Buster)

    # apt-get install udftools

Alternatively get it from http://linux-udf.sourceforge.net

Information

$ udfinfo /dev/pktcdvd/dvd-ram

Format

In Debian 7.x (Wheezy) read /usr/share/doc/udftools/README.Debian.gz

To format a DVD-RAM disk (assuming device is /dev/pktcdvd/dvd-ram) that should be readable in Windows 2000, Mac OS 9 and Linux 2.4:

    # mkudffs --utf8 --media-type=dvdram --udfrev=0x0150 /dev/pktcdvd/dvd-ram

See the man page for mkudffs re the options for --udfrev and also the section on OPERATING SYSTEMS SUPPORT to choose the most appropriate UDF revision for your expected usage.

-- Frank Dean - 05 Oct 2014

Mounting

Make sure you mount with the noatime option to avoid repeated writes to inodes.

# mount -t udf -o rw,noatime /dev/pktcdvd/dvd-ram /media/cdrom0

-- Frank Dean - 05 Oct 2014

Linux Kernel 2.6 Bug

From Wikipedia Entry: Before 2.6.17, there's a bug in writing files bigger than 1GB; between 2.6.17 and 2.6.21 (inclusive), this is disabled, as a workaround; and in 2.6.22 this bug is fixed.

macOS

I gave up trying to get a third-party external DVD-RAM drive to work acceptably on macOS 11 (Big Sur). Instead I used the drive with a Raspberry Pi Model B+ which did the job superbly.

See man diskutil.

$ diskutil list
$ diskutil list external
$ diskutil info /dev/diskN
$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN
$ diskutil eject /dev/diskN
$ diskutil mount readOnly /dev/diskN

Resources

-- Frank Dean - 13 Mar 2007