Programmatically test for a DVD drive

[John-Mark Gurney]

Joe Marcus Clarke wrote this message on Fri, Dec 19, 2003 at 15:08 -0500:
> > Take a look at cdrecord and see what that does...  But that might
> > require you to use atapi-cam instead of the "normal" atapi-cd device.
> 
> Thanks for the pointer.  Using atapi-cam is not a problem since the
> application I'm porting is basically a front-end to cdrecord which
> requires atapi-cam.  However, I didn't know cdrecord detected the
> difference on its own, or just did what it was told via command line
> arguments.

cdrecord on macosx (I don't have a FreeBSD box w/ atapi-cam on it handy),
has the -prcap in:
Cdrecord 2.01a14 (powerpc-apple-macosx6.8) Copyright (C) 1995-2003 Jörg Schilling

and returns this:
Drive capabilities, per MMC-2 page 2A:

  Does read CD-R media
  Does write CD-R media
  Does read CD-RW media
  Does write CD-RW media
  Does read DVD-ROM media
  Does read DVD-R media
  Does not write DVD-R media
  Does not read DVD-RAM media
  Does not write DVD-RAM media
  Does support test writing

which is probably what you're interested in..

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."