CD-ROM Standards

In the beginning there was only one standard for writing CD-Rs, the ISO9660 standard. This is a universal standard that can be read by all CD-ROM drives and with all major operating systems in use today.

New technologies have emerged and the most promising is the ISO13346 standard, known as the Universal Disc Format, or UDF. The UDF structure offers many advantages over the ISO9660 standard. However, one of the disadvantages is that UDF discs are not suitable for replication! Also, not all CD-ROM drives and/or operating systems will read a UDF disc.

Any CD-R you submit for replication must be created as a single session disc, closed after writing, using the ISO9660 standard.

There is no difference in the data itself between the 2 standards, the difference is in the way the data is arranged on the disc.

UDF discs are typically created with products such as Roxio's DirectCD. All products capable of creating UDF discs, can also be configured to create ISO9660 discs suitable for replication.

For more information on the UDF format see the either the Roxio or Hewlett Packard web sites.