The libcdio package contains a library which encapsulates CD-ROM
reading and control. Applications wishing to be oblivious of the OS-
and device-dependent properties of a CD-ROM can use this library.

Also included is a library for working with ISO-9660 filesystems as is
also the CD-DA error/jitter correction library from cdparanoia
(http://www.xiph.org/paranoia).

Some support for disk image types like CDRWin's BIN/CUE format,
cdrdao's TOC format, and Nero's NRG format are available. Therefore,
applications that use this library also have the ability to read disc
images as though they were CD's.

Projects using libcdio are the Video CD authoring and ripping tools
VCDImager (http://vcdimager.org), a navigation-capable Video CD plugin
and CD-DA plugins for the media players xine (http://xinehq.de),
videolan's vlc (http://videolan.org), media players mplayerxp
(http://mplayerxp.sourceforge.net/) and gmerlin
(http://gmerlin.sourceforge.net), kiso, a KDE GUI for creating,
extracting and editing ISO-9600 images (http://kiso.sourceforge.net),
and a Samba vfs module that allows exporting a CD without mounting
it (http://ontologistics.net/OpenSource/Samba/index.php).

Also included in the libcdio package is a utility program cd-info which
displays CD information: number of tracks, CD-format and if possible
basic information about the format.  If libcddb
(http://libcddb.sourceforge.net) is available, the cd-info program
will display CDDB matches on CD-DA discs. And if a new enough version
of libvcdinfo is available (from the vcdimager project), then cd-info
shows basic VCD information. 

Other utility programs in the libcdio package are cd-read, for
performing low-level block reading of a CD or CD image, iso-info for
displaying ISO-9660 information from an ISO-9660 image, iso-read for
extracting files from an ISO-9660 image, a version of the CD-DA
extraction tool cdparanoia which corrects for CD-ROM jitter, and a
simple curses-based CD player, cdda-player using the analog CD-ROM
output.

At present, there is no support for writing CD's, reading UDF format;
nor is there any support for reading or writing DVDs. For some of
these, there are other libraries (e.g. libdi, libscg, or libdvdread)
may be helpful.

I'm not theoretically opposed to putting support such as UDF into
libcdio. (Any volunteers?) However at present there are already many
gaps in this library so narrowing its scope in order to focus on these
things I think is a good idea.

$Id: README,v 1.9 2005/07/10 14:13:03 rocky Exp $