Bluray Burner in Java - Where to start?

Question

Like the subject of this post suggests, I am looking at developing a suite like nero which helps burn bluray discs. I am kind of clueless as to where to start. Is there anything in Java API that lets you do this? If I were to start from scratch, would I need to start with the bluray disc spec? Are there any open source tools which are already doing this? I tried searching at sourceforge.net and found nothing useful. Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

To start with the obvious: Know your requirements and tools. I try guessing here, maybe.

Requirements:

1. Should burn BluRay discs
2. Graphical user interface

Preferred tool:

• Java

Now, Java, being perhaps the prime example of a VM language from the 90es, achieves its relatively good platform-agnosticism by virtue of its VM. It's a language designed to run on a virtual hardware to ease portability to real hardware.

Now, what comes with this fact is that you abstract away many things you would have to care about, like memory-management details and architecture or platform-specifics. Among those things you can't reliably get access to is hardware. After all, you abstracted most of that away.

Now, to burn a BluRay disc you have to access hardware, in particular the BluRay writer. Not that it's impossible but Java is, in my humble opinion, not the right tool for this. You can go out of your way by implementing a library in C or C++ and using JNI/JNA to access that but looking at that, what do you really gain?

Java is usually a choice when you need a fairly modern high-level language with a large standard library and you also need your programs to run on more than one platform. Those are the primary use cases. It's not impossible with other technologies, but perhaps harder to achieve, depending on what exactly you need.

If you implement a native library to talk to the BluRay writer and talk to that from Java, then you necessarily need to re-implement it for other platforms as well (assuming that's what you want—if not, then again: Why Java?).

TL/DR version: My point is that it's not too surprising that you can't find much on exactly that topic. For one, Java wasn't really designed to do that sort of things. Most of the Java/native interop lies in the JVM and that's already an awful lot of code. Don't expect Java to natively support very rare usage scenarios such as CD/DVD/BluRay burning. Secondly, BluRay is a relatively new technology with writers not yet common hardware in computers such as CD/DVD writers, so the lack of libraries and tools may also be a mirror of the current demands of the market.

Answer 2

Low-level hardware access is simply not possible in pure Java unless it's in the standard API, which Bluray isn't.

Therefore, you will have to use non-Java code to access the hardware; at that point you lose the platform-independance of Java, and necessarily have a multi-language system, which is always more painful to program than using just a single language.

However, if you can find (or, I guess, develop) a multi-platform Bluray writing API or command line tool in (most likely) C, then it might still make sense to write the rest of the app in Java as a GUI wrapper with added functionality.