Does The Newer UDF Format Take Up More Disc Space?

[Arby]

I haven't done anything with video for a while and I wasn't expert when I did do stuff. Recently acquired Nero Plat and love the simplicity of burning avi files for friends. But the default is udf, rather than iso, which I see is still available. I read around to learn the difference and I think I get the gist of it. Use ISO if there's an issue with playing the burned disc on an older player. Otherwise, the udf is just a bit better. But it seemed to me that I'm able to get about half the movies on a disc that I used to using ISO / data. Is it just me? What's up? Thanks in advance.

[Cornucopia]

It's just you. On the scale of dvd or greater, the various filesystems might use .0001%, so even if one filesystem DOES use double the overhead (which isn't likely), it isn't anything to worry over.

You trouble stems from some other (procedural?) error.

Scott

[teodz1984]

Arby got dazed with nero's smoke and mirrors...

a 4.3 GB DVD will propabaly hold the same amount of files if the file system was UDF over JOLIET...

The only t hing I see is that UDF is more flexible about file path lengths....

ISO9660: This is the oldest format, used for discs and has many limitations. First and most of all it only supports Roman characters (ASCII). There are three different variations for ISO9660: Level 1 (8+3), Level 2 (31) and ISO9660::1999 (Unrestricted). The numbers within the parentheses, are the maximum characters allowed for each file's name. A more detailed explanation:

Level 1: File names are limited to eight characters with a three-character extension, using upper case letters, numbers and underscore only. The maximum depth of directories is eight.

Level 2: File names are not limited to 11 characters (the 8.3 format) but may be up to the maximum allowed by the 1 byte counter in the dir entry and the filename length byte counter. Typically, this is close to 180 characters, depending on how many extended attributes are present.

Level 3 (ISO9660::1999): Unrestricted.

Restrictions for all these levels are:

All levels restrict filenames to upper case letters, digits, underscores (“_”), and a dot.

File names shall not include spaces, start or end with the dot character, have more than one dot.

Directory names shall not use dots at all.

4 (or 2) GB limit for file size.

Joliet: A file system, specified and endorsed by Microsoft, which bypasses most of restrictions above and accomplishes this by supplying an additional set of filenames, up to 64 Unicode characters in length. This means that you can use any language, for file names.

UDF (Universal Disk Format): The newest file system format available which continues to be updated. While DVD-Video media use UDF version 1.02, Blu-ray media use UDF 2.50 or UDF 2.60. CDBurnerXP will use version 1.02 for CDs as well. Notable features:

supports media and files up to 2TB size

file names may be as long as 255 bytes (that is, 254 8-bit or 127 16-bit Unicode characters)

That was qouted from CDBurnerXP FAQ....

Also I abandoned NERO a long time ago and am using CDBurnerXP.... which is a complete CD Burning package at 1/ 200 the size of the current NERO install, does not hang as often as NERO. is FREE.

As we stated above the most secure and all-around option is to use ISO9660/Joliet/UDF and Level 2 or ISO9660::1999 specifying ISO9660. Why? Your disc will have 3 file systems, each naming your files and each device will choose which one to use.

Most (and new) DVD players “ignore” the ISO9660 altogether and read the UDF.
Most portable players, including car systems, use ISO9660 Level 2, while some of them can read Joliet.
If you want to use the disc you will burn in such a system, to be certain Read The Manual of the device. The devices shouldn't be confused by the use of other file systems, in addition to the one they can read.

In general terms using two or more file systems together, assures compatibility with older systems, and non-PC systems, like portable audio-disc players.

On the other hand all computer systems can read all the above formats, with exception the older ones (really old though). So anything you use will be recognized, but you should always use Joliet, in order to have freedom in file names and languages and probably UDF too.

[Arby]

Thanks guys. CDBurnerXP eh? I'll look into it. I am using windows 7, 64 bit, if it matters. I know it's a crap shoot. I've had no choice but to use 32 bit progs and most of the time I'm good. Later...

[Cornucopia]

I use and recommend ImgBurn for nearly everything disc-related.

Scott

[Arby]

It turns out that discs I've burned (udf) are, with one exception, not playing on a friend's dvd player. The dvd player? I gave it to him. I don't know what qualifies as ancient, but I wouldn't have thought 'ancient'. It's a Philips and I forget the exact version. It plays divx. I'm going to try burning with the solo ISO setting. The discs (3 in total/ Philips 4.7, dvd-r, 1-16x discs) didn't play on his computer (a Mac) either. Now I'm wondering whether it's my Nero. I will just keep experimenting here. I've downloaded the recommended CDBurnerXP above. I've also got something else (Red Hot CDDVD burner) I recently used and found to work good. These discs were okay when I checked them on my own pc (Toshiba Satellite C650) they were fine -?

[bendixG15]

I use and recommend ImgBurn for nearly everything disc-related.

Scott

yep

[gll99]

It turns out that discs I've burned (udf) are, with one exception, not playing on a friend's dvd player. The dvd player? I gave it to him. I don't know what qualifies as ancient, but I wouldn't have thought 'ancient'. It's a Philips and I forget the exact version. It plays divx. I'm going to try burning with the solo ISO setting. The discs (3 in total/ Philips 4.7, dvd-r, 1-16x discs) didn't play on his computer (a Mac) either. Now I'm wondering whether it's my Nero. I will just keep experimenting here. I've downloaded the recommended CDBurnerXP above. I've also got something else (Red Hot CDDVD burner) I recently used and found to work good. These discs were okay when I checked them on my own pc (Toshiba Satellite C650) they were fine -?

Make sure you use udf 1.02 for disks that will play in a regular standalone dvd player whether you burn divx on a compatible player or standard DVD format discs.

When you get into HD material such as an AVCHD on a dvd sl or dl disk to play on a standalone blu-ray player or a ps3 then use udf 2.50

Edit:
btw) While there may a be a bit of overhead using one format over the other, unless you are inadvertently converting the video there is no reason that it would only fit half of the original movie.

[Arby]

Thanks people.

*I was under the impression image burn was intended for making image files only. Checking now...

*Just looked. Language is a bit of a challenge for me, but I'm guessing that I can burn a bunch of ISO files or create ISO files but I cannot burn other types of files. Correct?

[teodz1984]

*Just looked. Language is a bit of a challenge for me, but I'm guessing that I can burn a bunch of ISO files or create ISO files but I cannot burn other types of files. Correct?

It can burn Files too
Click on Write Folders and Files to Disk on the main menu
Then drag and drop 'files and folders' you want o burn to the big white box under SOURCE

[Arby]

Ok. Thanks.

[Arby]

This is hard. I can receive info from people here about settings needed to successfully burn avi files as data, for example. But programs I try rarely let me change settings. Or they hide areas for such quite well. I think I'm also having the additional problem of dealing with others who are even less tech savvy than I am. I'm wondering, when they report back to me that my discs don't play, whether they have a clue. One woman, my landlord, brags about how she does absolutely nothing with her computer except look at email. That's great, but if she's lacking codecs, I have a feeling she's always going to have codecs. She doesn't know what divx is. I don't know what kind of dvd player she has. The other person I'm dealing with may be only slightly more computer savvy. He's a Mac user. His dvd player is the one I gave him. I'm not sure what to tell him about hacks and firmware updates. I am aware of such things, but not expert. I can often help myself, but barely.

I've tried the ImgBurn (seemingly most useful, seeing how it actually tells you, to some extent, what's going on), CDBurnerXP, where I couldn't find settings to play with at all, Red Hot and Nero. I haven't played around with Nero's settings much. That's next. I will report back here with info about which programs I got results with. I now will hand out some burned discs. They all play on my pc. Then again, I took the trouble when I first bought my laptop of downloading and installing a codec pack.

[Cornucopia]

Arby,

You're making this both easier and harder than it has to be.

Go back to square-one and make ALL your videos "DVD-Video" spec compliant. This requires both convert/encoding to strict DVD-Video standards (MPEG2 video, AC3/PCM/MP2 audio) and AUTHORING to DVD-Video disc format. Then you can burn with a good burner app, such as ImgBurn (which, if given a valid DVD-Video disc image or folder, will create a valid DVD-Video disc).

The whole/main point of using CE devices has to do with compatibility for simplicity's sake. If you make it DVD-Video compliant, that means it is compliant with MILLIONS of hardware and software DVD-Video players around the world, and assuming you burned it as NTSC video (which you should have, living in Canada) and burned using GOOD quality media, your discs should play (nearly) flawlessly in just about all of them.

I don't particularly recommend Nero anymore for authoring OR burning, but you should be able to get by using that, as long as you have more than the "Essentials" package, to convert (aka transcode) your AVIs -> MPEG2 and directly author to DVD video (MPEG2 -> VOB/IFO).

Scott