Re: ide/atapi cdrom driver: dvd support ?

Erik Andersen (andersen@inconnect.com)
Fri, 14 Aug 1998 08:39:58 -0600 (MDT)


On Fri, 14 Aug 1998, Andreas Jellinghaus wrote:

> hi. do you know, wther dvd drives are supported ? or do they at least behave
> compatibile enought so we can buy a dvd drive now, and use it as dvd till
> the support exists ? the one in question is in a toshiba notebook
> "tecra 780 dvd" ...
>
> thanks for your help.
>
> andreas
>

An ATAPI DVD drive will behave just like an ATAPI cdrom drive. While
I don't own one myself (donations are always welcome), I'm told they
work just fine. Keep in mind that Linux currently doesn't support the
UDF filesystem, so you won't be able to read native UDF discs, and Linux
doesn't support the various MPEG decoder cards that you would need to watch
movies with it. Basically, right now it is a glorified CDROM drive. A
project to work on the UDF filesystem was started, but has apparently
stalled out. I do not know of any effort to make the MPEG decoder cards
work, and I don't know of any company that has made specs for these beasts
available, so it may be a while...

I hope you don't mind my CC'ing linux-kernel. I think this question
is of fairly general interest.

-Erik

--
Erik B. Andersen   Web:    http://www.inconnect.com/~andersen/ 
                   email:  andersee@debian.org
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