Package CedarBackup2 :: Package writers :: Module dvdwriter :: Class DvdWriter

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Type DvdWriter

object --+
         |
        DvdWriter

Class representing a device that knows how to write some kinds of DVD media.

Summary

This is a class representing a device that knows how to write some kinds of DVD media. It provides common operations for the device, such as ejecting the media and writing data to the media.

This class is implemented in terms of the eject, growisofs and dvd+rw-mediainfo utilities, all of which should be available on most UN*X platforms.

Image Writer Interface

The following methods make up the "image writer" interface shared with other kinds of writers:

  __init__
  initializeImage()
  addImageEntry()
  writeImage()

Only these methods will be used by other Cedar Backup functionality that expects a compatible image writer.

Unlike the CdWriter, the DvdWriter can only operate in terms of filesystem devices, not SCSI devices. So, although the constructor interface accepts a SCSI device parameter for the sake of compatibility, it's not used.

Media Types

This class knows how to write to DVD+R and DVD+RW media, represented by the following constants:

MEDIA_DVDPLUSR: DVD+R media (4.4 GB capacity)
MEDIA_DVDPLUSRW: DVD+RW media (4.4 GB capacity)

The difference is that DVD+RW media can be rewritten, while DVD+R media cannot be (although at present, DvdWriter does not really differentiate between rewritable and non-rewritable media).

The capacities are 4.4 GB because Cedar Backup deals in "true" gigabytes of 1024*1024*1024 bytes per gigabyte.

The underlying growisofs utility does support other kinds of media (including DVD-R, DVD-RW and BlueRay) which work somewhat differently than standard DVD+R and DVD+RW media. I don't support these other kinds of media because I haven't had any opportunity to work with them. The same goes for dual-layer media of any type.

Device Attributes vs. Media Attributes

As with the cdwriter functionality, a given dvdwriter instance has two different kinds of attributes associated with it. I call these device attributes and media attributes.

Device attributes are things which can be determined without looking at the media. Media attributes are attributes which vary depending on the state of the media. In general, device attributes are available via instance variables and are constant over the life of an object, while media attributes can be retrieved through method calls.

Compared to cdwriters, dvdwriters have very few attributes. This is due to differences between the way growisofs works relative to cdrecord.

Media Capacity

One major difference between the cdrecord/mkisofs utilities used by the cdwriter class and the growisofs utility used here is that the process of estimating remaining capacity and image size is more straightforward with cdrecord/mkisofs than with growisofs.

In this class, remaining capacity is calculated by asking dvd+rw-mediainfo for the "READ CAPACITY" of the disc (which seems to be more-or-less the size of the data written previously to the disc), and subtracting that from the capacity on the MediaDefinition. Image size is estimated by asking the IsoImage class for an estimate and then adding on a "fudge factor" determined through experimentation.

Device Tray

It does not seem to be possible to get growisofs to indicate whether a given writer device has a tray. I am not quite sure what to do about this. I haven't actually seen a DVD writer without a tray, so for the time being I am going to assume a tray open/close operation is generally safe; the deviceHasTray and deviceCanEject attributes are always defaulted to True.

Testing

It's rather difficult to test this code in an automated fashion, even if you have access to a physical DVD writer drive. It's even more difficult to test it if you are running on some build daemon (think of a Debian autobuilder) which can't be expected to have any hardware or any media that you could write to.

Because of this, some of the implementation below is in terms of static methods that are supposed to take defined actions based on their arguments. Public methods are then implemented in terms of a series of calls to simplistic static methods. This way, we can test as much as possible of the "difficult" functionality via testing the static methods, while hoping that if the static methods are called appropriately, things will work properly. It's not perfect, but it's much better than no testing at all.

Method Summary
	`__init__(self, device, scsiId, driveSpeed, mediaType, unittest)` Initializes a DVD writer object.
	`isRewritable(self)` Indicates whether the media is rewritable per configuration.
	`retrieveCapacity(self, entireDisc)` Retrieves capacity for the current media in terms of a `MediaCapacity` object.
	`openTray(self)` Opens the device's tray and leaves it open.
	`closeTray(self)` Closes the device's tray.
	`refreshMedia(self)` Opens and then immediately closes the device's tray, to refresh the device's idea of the media.
	`initializeImage(self, newDisc, tmpdir)` Initializes the writer's associated ISO image.
	`addImageEntry(self, path, graftPoint)` Adds a filepath entry to the writer's associated ISO image.
	`writeImage(self, imagePath, newDisc, writeMulti)` Writes an ISO image to the media in the device.
Inherited from object
	`__delattr__(...)` x.__delattr__('name') <==> del x.name
	`__getattribute__(...)` x.__getattribute__('name') <==> x.name
	`__hash__(x)` x.__hash__() <==> hash(x)
	`__new__(T, S, ...)` T.__new__(S, ...) -> a new object with type S, a subtype of T
	`__reduce__(...)` helper for pickle
	`__reduce_ex__(...)` helper for pickle
	`__repr__(x)` x.__repr__() <==> repr(x)
	`__setattr__(...)` x.__setattr__('name', value) <==> x.name = value
	`__str__(x)` x.__str__() <==> str(x)

Property Summary
	`device`: Filesystem device name for this writer.
	`scsiId`: SCSI id for the device (saved for reference only).
	`hardwareId`: Hardware id for this writer (always the device path).
	`driveSpeed`: Speed at which the drive writes.
	`media`: Definition of media that is expected to be in the device.
	`deviceHasTray`: Indicates whether the device has a media tray.
	`deviceCanEject`: Indicates whether the device supports ejecting its media.

Instance Method Details

init(self, device, scsiId=None, driveSpeed=None, mediaType=2, unittest=False)
(Constructor)

Initializes a DVD writer object.

Since growisofs can only address devices using the device path (i.e. /dev/dvd), the hardware id will always be set based on the device. If passed in, it will be saved for reference purposes only.

Parameters:: device - Filesystem device associated with this writer.
(type=Absolute path to a filesystem device, i.e. /dev/dvd); scsiId - SCSI id for the device (optional, for reference only).
(type=If provided, SCSI id in the form [<method>:]scsibus,target,lun); driveSpeed - Speed at which the drive writes.
(type=Use 2 for 2x device, etc. or None to use device default.); mediaType - Type of the media that is assumed to be in the drive.
(type=One of the valid media type as discussed above.); unittest - Turns off certain validations, for use in unit testing.
(type=Boolean true/false)

Raises:: ValueError - If the device is not valid for some reason.; ValueError - If the SCSI id is not in a valid form.; ValueError - If the drive speed is not an integer >= 1.

Overrides:: __builtin__.object.__init__

Note: The unittest parameter should never be set to True outside of Cedar Backup code. It is intended for use in unit testing Cedar Backup internals and has no other sensible purpose.

isRewritable(self)

Indicates whether the media is rewritable per configuration.

retrieveCapacity(self, entireDisc=False)

Retrieves capacity for the current media in terms of a MediaCapacity object.

If entireDisc is passed in as True, the capacity will be for the entire disc, as if it were to be rewritten from scratch. Otherwise, the capacity will be calculated by subtracting the "READ CAPACITY" (reported by dvd+rw-mediainfo) from the total capacity of the disc.

Parameters:: entireDisc - Indicates whether to return capacity for entire disc.
(type=Boolean true/false)

Returns:: MediaCapacity object describing the capacity of the media.

Raises:: IOError - If the media could not be read for some reason.

Note: This is only an estimate, because growisofs does not provide a good way to calculate the capacity precisely. In practice, you might expect slightly less data to fit on the media than indicated by this method.

openTray(self)

Opens the device's tray and leaves it open.

This only works if the device has a tray and supports ejecting its media. We have no way to know if the tray is currently open or closed, so we just send the appropriate command and hope for the best. If the device does not have a tray or does not support ejecting its media, then we do nothing.

Raises:: IOError - If there is an error talking to the device.

closeTray(self)

Closes the device's tray.

Raises:: IOError - If there is an error talking to the device.

refreshMedia(self)

Opens and then immediately closes the device's tray, to refresh the device's idea of the media.

Sometimes, a device gets confused about the state of its media. Often, all it takes to solve the problem is to eject the media and then immediately reload it.

Raises:: IOError - If there is an error talking to the device.

initializeImage(self, newDisc, tmpdir)

Initializes the writer's associated ISO image.

This method initializes the image instance variable so that the caller can use the addImageEntry method. Once entries have been added, the writeImage method can be called with no arguments.

Parameters:: newDisc - Indicates whether the disc should be re-initialized
(type=Boolean true/false); tmpdir - Temporary directory to use if needed
(type=String representing a directory path on disk)

addImageEntry(self, path, graftPoint)

Adds a filepath entry to the writer's associated ISO image.

The contents of the filepath -- but not the path itself -- will be added to the image at the indicated graft point. If you don't want to use a graft point, just pass None.

Parameters:: path - File or directory to be added to the image
(type=String representing a path on disk); graftPoint - Graft point to be used when adding this entry
(type=String representing a graft point path, as described above)

Raises:: ValueError - If initializeImage() was not previously called; ValueError - If the path is not a valid file or directory

Note: Before calling this method, you must call initializeImage.

writeImage(self, imagePath=None, newDisc=False, writeMulti=True)

Writes an ISO image to the media in the device.

If newDisc is passed in as True, we assume that the entire disc will be re-created from scratch. Note that unlike CdWriter, DvdWriter does not blank rewritable media before reusing it; however, growisofs is called such that the media will be re-initialized as needed.

If imagePath is passed in as None, then the existing image configured with initializeImage() will be used. Under these circumstances, the passed-in newDisc flag will be ignored and the value passed in to initializeImage() will apply instead.

The writeMulti argument is ignored. It exists for compatibility with the Cedar Backup image writer interface.

Parameters:: imagePath - Path to an ISO image on disk, or None to use writer's image
(type=String representing a path on disk); newDisc - Indicates whether the disc should be re-initialized
(type=Boolean true/false.); writeMulti - Unused
(type=Boolean true/false)

Raises:: ValueError - If the image path is not absolute.; ValueError - If some path cannot be encoded properly.; IOError - If the media could not be written to for some reason.; ValueError - If no image is passed in and initializeImage() was not previously called

Note: The image size indicated in the log ("Image size will be...") is only an estimate. If growisofs fails with a a capacity problem, the image size indicated in that error message might differ from the image size that was initially logged.

Property Details

device

Filesystem device name for this writer.

scsiId

SCSI id for the device (saved for reference only).

hardwareId

Hardware id for this writer (always the device path).

driveSpeed

Speed at which the drive writes.

media

Definition of media that is expected to be in the device.

deviceHasTray

Indicates whether the device has a media tray.

deviceCanEject

Indicates whether the device supports ejecting its media.

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