[Nautilus-list] CD Burning or "in case you get overwhelmed with copious free time"

[Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert ximian com>]

So. We discussed this a bit on IRC the other day.

MacOSX has this utterly cool way of making CD writing so easy. Whoever
designed that thing, whoa! :-)

        * You toss in a blank CD-R(W) media in the cd-r(w) drive and you
          get a "Blank CD Media" icon on the desktop that looks and acts
          just like an empty CD that has 650MB free space.
        * You can open it in Finder, and drag files to it. It looks just
          like a normal folder or harddisk, so fill it with up to 650MB
          of stuff. Organize it the way you want, edit things inside
          etc..
        * Once you are done, you want to eject it. So the normal way,
          you drag it to the trashcan which, on macosX normally turns
          into an Eject symbol if you drag a CD-Rom there. In this case
          though, it changes to a "BURN CD!" icon.
        * So you do that, and it burns the CD for you probably showing a
          nice progressbar (dont have a supported cd-writer to check)
          and once it is done, it ejects the CD. Your Stuff Done.

This is just insanely easy and simple. And all the things needed we
already have, in the form of mkisofs, cdrecord and friends.

Note that it does not need to use packet writing to actually *write* the
stuff when you drag the files. It can just master the CD when you eject
it. I think OSX does it by keeping a catalog of the files you "copied"
to the CD, and some kind of "these files were edited while inside the
CD" -updated files repository. Once you are ready to burn, it just
constructs the final file list from these, pipes it to their equivalent
of mkisofs and pipes the ISO image to their cd-writing thing. Most
computers with cd-burners today can do it on the fly.

So this would be very neat. And I dont think it would be *insanely* hard
to do. It would be trivial to do a "Burn to CD" nautilus script, but the
harder part is to have the "cd-to-be-burned" view. It would probably
need to be something like the Trash, a some sort of a virtual folder
that just has a fixed size of the CD media.

Thoughts?

Tuomas

-- 
:: :: Tuomas Kuosmanen  :: Art Director, Ximian :: ::
:: :: tigert ximian com :: www.ximian.com       :: ::