CD PUBLISHING

CD Publishing is a term used to describe the use of CD duplication systems to create a large number of unique discs. For instance, storing a unique serial number on each copy of a software application disc would be considered CD publishing.

The term CD publishing is believed to have been coined by the Rimage Corporation as part of a marketing program which referred to CD-R discs as "digital paper". Automated disc production and printing systems, such as those made by Rimage, can be shared on a computer network much like an office printer to facilitate the creation of unique discs. This is the root of both the digital paper and CD publishing terms.

The extension into CD publishing is a distinct advantage of CD duplication systems over traditional CD replication - where large quantities of identical discs must be made.

Optical disc authoring, including DVD and Blu-ray Disc authoring (often referred to colloquially, but improperly, as burning), is the process of assembling source material—video, audio or other data—into the proper logical volume format to then be recorded ("burned") onto an optical disc (typically a compact disc or DVD).

Process :- To burn an optical disc, one usually first creates an optical disc image with a full file system designed for the optical disc, and then burns the image to the disc. The disc image is a single file, built and stored on the hard drive, which contains the entire information to be contained on the disc.

Many optical disc authoring software applications create the disc image and burn in one bundled operation, so that end-users often do not know the distinction. However, a useful motivation for learning this distinction is that creating the disc image is an "expensive" (time-consuming) process. Most disc writing applications will silently delete this image from the "temporary directory" in which it was built unless users instruct the disc burning application to preserve the image, which can then be used for creating further copies of the same image without the need to rebuild the image each time.

There are also packet-writing applications that do not require writing the entire disc at once, but allow writing parts at a time, allowing the disc to be used in the same way as rewritable media such as a floppy disk.

There exist many optical disc authoring technologies for optimizing the authoring process and preventing errors. Discs writeable only once whose burn failed are colloquially termed coasters.

Some operating systems are aware of disc images as a filesystem type, and can mount these images so that they appear as actual mounted discs. This feature can be useful for testing a disc image after authoring but before writing to the disc media.