K3b approaching 1.0 release
March 10th, 2007 by jamesMy favorite CD/DVD burning application in Linux is K3b and it is nearing its 1.0 release. Since I prefer KDE as my Linux desktop choice, K3b has been my go-to burning application for awhile now. I can’t remember when I first started using it, but even in its early days it was always the simplest GUI CD burning application that I had used. Prior to that, there weren’t that many GUI-based burning programs and the ones that were available had a pretty bad interface. Now there are a few different ones with fairly good interfaces. K3b, however, is still the best I have ever used.
K3b’s features have been greatly expanded since the project first began. Far beyond a simple CD/DVD burning utility, it can also rip and encode DVD videos to Xvid files, and includes extensive audio ripping and burning capabilities. One feature which they wanted to get into 1.0, but were unable to, is DVD shrinking. That is, re-encoding a video on a dual-layer DVD, so it can be burned onto a single-layer DVD. That feature will make it to a post-1.0 release. As dual-layer DVD burners get more prevalent and the blank media gets cheaper, that feature will become less necessary anyway. I have a DVD player than can play Xvid files burned directly to a CD or DVD which makes the DVD ripping features of K3b much more useful to me than it having DVD shrinking.
Linux.com discusses the features of 1.0 and the overall progress the project has made since its inception and includes some screen shots of the latest release.
