I finally decided that the current state of development of CDVDBurn 3 is “good enough” for the first release. The hubersn Software website https://www.hubersn-software.com/ has been updated accordingly, you can look at the new CDVDBurn 3 product page, or alternatively the press release.

It is always difficult to decide when such a state is reached. The very nature of software is that it is never perfect. You can always improve the UI/UX further. You can always improve the documentation. And the website. And add yet more drives to the compatibility list. And test some more drive/OS/machine combination. And optimize the performance further. Anyone who tells you that a piece of software is “perfect” is probably lying.

Now that the release is out of the way, I will continue to improve CDVDBurn 3, and provide free upgrades to users for the foreseeable future.

Things that are not really in a state where I’d like them to be include the new manual (long-time users might remember that CDVDBurn never had a “proper” manual, it came with the CDBurn manual and a DVD addendum). The Upgrader application that will be needed to provide the downloadable upgrades is not ready yet. And I am currently analysing why the Samsung SH-224 drive (widely used in ARMX6 and Titanium systems) will not write Audio CDs, ending with a “SCSI Timeout” error. This was a finding of two of my beta testers, so I bought a drive off eBay (they are no longer available as new) and received it today.

At least, I have already written some text for support pages for CDVDBurn 3 users: the ever-important list of currently supported writers, and the start of the hopefully ever-improving FAQ.

One of the most important things to get right before the release of CDVDBurn 3 is drive compatibility. In an ideal world, CDVDBurn 3 would “just work” with all drives available past, present and future. Unfortunately, experience tells us that this will not happen, unless I get very very lucky.

So to make the best of the limited resources I have (both financially in buying drives and enough time to test them extensively), I somehow had to make compromises. So I identified three groups of potential CDVDBurn 3 users that have to be catered for.

Group 1: users who already have a drive, e.g. because they already own a USB drive for their PC or because they bought a complete system like the ARMiniX, the ARMX6 or the TiMachine that are usually delivered with a CD/DVD writer.

Group 2: users who are prepared to buy a new drive and want to know which they should go for. So CDVDBurn 3 needs good compatibility with drives available to buy now.

Group 3: CDVDBurn customers who want to keep using the drive they have always used with previous versions of CDBurn or CDVDBurn.

To be honest, for the first release of CDVDBurn 3, group 3 will not be the focus group. CDVDBurn 3 will (at least initially) not come with compatibility for RiscPC-age stuff like IDE writers connected to a Simtec IDE podule, or SCSI writers connected to a Castle SCSI podule. However, IYONIX IDE support is thought to be still intact and working. I think this is not a major loss, because the old version of CDVDBurn will keep on working, and you can still enjoy some of the new features of CDVDBurn 3 like the Extractor.

After many tests and a lot of work on the driver code to get a reasonable amount of drives working, the current “CDVDBurn 3 drive compatibility matrix” looks like that:

As you can see, nearly every type of medium is listed separately – this is because the code to write those different media is also different. One exception is CD-R and CD-RW, which is identical, so you only see “CD” in the table row headers.

So, if you are a user in my group 2, which drive should you buy? It depends on a lot of things. Should it be an external drive (style “Slimline” and “External” would match here), i.e. connected to USB, or an internal drive (native S-ATA on the Titanium, or via the inbuilt S-ATA-USB adapter on the ARMX6)? Should it be a drive capable or reading and writing BD media (more expensive), or is a DVD writer sufficient (cheaper)? At the end of the day, it also matters which drive is actually available from the dealer of your choice. My gut feeling is that the drives labelled “External” are less problematic than their “Slimline” cousins, because they are not powered via USB, but with their own PSU. But they are a lot more spacey. My recommendation for “Slimline”-type drives is to always connect them via a powered USB hub. An USB3 hub will (currently, because of lacking RISC OS support) not make your drive faster, but their power supply is usually a lot stronger, so if you can afford one go for it.

If you are a user in my group 1, just connect the drive you already have to your RISC OS machine and first of all check if it works fine as a CD and DVD reader via CDFS. Then, you would check the exact drive name in a taskwindow with the command

*devices

if it is connected via USB or with the command

*satadevices

if it is connected via S-ATA on your Titanium. Keep in mind that what is sold as “Samsung” calls itself “TSSTcorp” (“Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology”), and “LG” drives identify themselves as “HL-DT-ST” (“Hitachi-LG DaTa STorage”).

If you find that drive (or a slight variation of it – sometimes, different case colours result in different names, like with the LG GP57ES40 from the table above which is the silver colour, the same drive is also available in black as GP57EB40 and in white as GP57EW40 – you should be safe and CDVDBurn 3 will work finde with your drive. If you have a drive that is not listed above, please contact me and we will work out a way to analyze your drive before you actually buy a licence. From my current knowledge, I would expect that nearly every LG and Asus drive should work flawlessly with CDVDBurn 3.

Currently, there are known problems with a range of Samsung (TSSTcorp) drives, especially with Audio Disc-at-once writing mode. I will try to get that fixed, but no promises. When I get the time, the table above will also show drives that I know don’t work perfectly, with indications where they fail.

Below is a rundown of the major new features in CDVDBurn 3 compared to the original CDVDBurn.

Ready for the new RISC OS machines

CDVDBurn 3 is compatible with all the new RISC OS 5 machines including but probably not limited to

• Raspberry Pi Zero/1/2/3/4
• ARMX6/mini.m/Wandboard
• TiMachine/Titan/RapidO Ti/Titanium
• RapidO Ig/IGEPv5
• ARMini/BIK/BeagleBoard
• ARMiniX/PIK/PandaRo/PandaBoard

This especially means that CDVDBurn 3 will run just fine on the latest ARMv8 platforms like the Raspberry Pi 4.

Much of the testing was done on RISC OS 5.24 and – on the RPi 4 – on a late development version of RISC OS 5.27, so chances are good that the recently released 5.28 won’t create any unforseen problems.

Ready for USB

While USB for optical drives like CD/DVD/BD writers works on RISC OS via the SCSI route, it took quite a few changes in CDVDBurn 3 to achieve acceptable compatibility with various drives. Thanks to the various performance enhancements over the years on the RISC OS side, CDVDBurn 3 can now operate via USB 2.0 in a much better way than it was previously possible e.g. with IDE on a Risc PC.

Ready for new media types

When CDVDBurn was first released, the various DVD formats were king, typically providing 4.7 GiB of capacity. Nowadays, many modern drives support writing the new BD-R (writable) and BD-RE (re-writable) media, starting with as much as 25 GiB capacity on a single disc. As an extra bonus, DVD-RAM is now officially supported.

Ready for modern drives

When CDBurn appeared, there was no uniform standard available that governed the command set to drive CD writers. A bit later, the MMC standard was invented – more than 20 years ago. However, with the appearance of ever more advanced technology like the various DVD media types and of course BD, new MMC standards appeared on a regular fashion, with MMC6 being the latest and greatest standard. Those standards are not 100% backwards compatible, and modern drives implement something in between MMC2 and MMC6. CDVDBurn 3 has been extensively tested on various devices to ensure good compatibility across the board. There are still drives that work in a not-exactly-optimal fashion, information on preferred drives will be published as soon as possible.

Problems with CDFS? CDVDBurn 3 might be the solution!

For a long time, choosing the right drive for RISC OS was difficult because the typical CDFSSoftXXX drivers had not very good compatibility across the board. While this has significantly improved both on the USB and the ATAPI side of things, the new CDVDBurn 3 comes with a new feature named the “Disc Extractor”. This feature leverages existing CDVDBurn code like the ISO filer and multisession import capability to provide a filer-like view on Disc data – ISO9660, Joliet, Rockridge Naming Extensions, all supported. Drives are accessed directly, circumventing all problems caused by incompatible CDFS drivers. Data can be extracted with the usual drag&drop from the filer-like view directly onto your harddisc.

As an extra bonus, the “Disc Extractor” can directly use the “large” image format CDVDBurn had to introduce to work around the RISC OS filesize limit. You no longer need CDFaker to access any disc images, just use CDVDBurn 3.

I am currently working on a major update for CDVDBurn, which I cunningly named “CDVDBurn 3” – the original CDBurn was “1”, its successor CDVDBurn was “2”, and so the new version is now “3”.

Version numbering issues aside, here are the important points.

CDVDBurn 3 will run on all modern RISC OS 5 platforms, from the Raspberry Pi (all models!) to the ARMX6 and the Titanium. This means compatibility up to and including ARMv8 (e.g. Raspberry Pi 4). While support for USB-connected drives was the focus of development and testing – mainly because all new platforms have USB capabilities – there is also preliminary support for S-ATA on Titanium.

CDVDBurn 3 supports many modern drives, compatibility got a lot better than with previous versions. Writing Audio CDs in Disc-at-once mode is now also much more compatible than ever before. Additionally to the well-known CD and DVD features, CDVDBurn 3 adds support for BD-R and BD-RE media, currently allowing for 25 GiB on one disc. Hopefully, the even larger media like BD-R DL and BD-R XL will also get supported soon.

An interesting new feature is the “Disc Extractor” which provides users with a CDFS alternative to access ISO9660-formatted CDs, DVDs and BDs. Joliet extensions as well as Rockridge Naming Extensions are also supported. ISO images can be read directly, even the “large” CDVDBurn image format. So if CDFS and its drivers does not like your drive, there’s now a new hope!

CDVDBurn 3 will be a chargeable upgrade, the price is currently intended to be 25 UKP for an upgrade from the old CDVDBurn. New licences for the full version will be available for around 50 UKP, a significant reduction on the last CDVDBurn price of 65 UKP.

Hopefully, CDVDBurn 3 will be available soon. Soon as in “a few weeks”, not in “a few years”.