Most OS vendors are prepared to invest in basic media recording support. Advanced applications is the space where 3rd parties like Roxio and Nero compete. These companies let burner vendors to include dumbed down versions of their software in hopes that users will buy a full version. That's how things are.
We also need to distinguish two parts of a media recording solution: the engine and the user interface. Most well-designed applications, regardless of the OS, have the engine separated and "abstracted out". That includes Nero (it is perfectly usable from command line in Windows). The engine defines core features, such as supported media types, drive types, write modes, etc. The user interface provides easy access to the core features, but also provides supplemental features such as file management.
Then there's the third, the fun and creative part: authoring, making home movies on DVD, making mix tapes^H^H^H^H^H CDs, designing labels, etc. That, IMO, is the only thing that should differentiate 3rd party solutions and is worth paying money for. It's a real shame that evolution of optical media has been such a mess that simply putting bits on a disc requires a know-how.
With respect to OpenSolaris, cdrtools/cdrecord is the engine we prefer to invest in. Missing features (Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, LightScribe, Thingmabob...) should be added to cdrtools, hopefully with the help from the community. The basic GUI we currently ship is Nautilus CD burner, which appears to provide similar experience to Windows explorer (not that it's ideal, but an example of "basic") - again, it is open to improvements, patches are always welcome. It can be tempting to "just rewrite everything", but it is more expensive than incremental improvements and does not guarantee better results.
That said, it is always great to see new commercial applications for Solaris. If Nero see a business opportunity, as they apparently see with Linux, they will no doubt pursue it.
-Artem. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
