dvdisaster Version 0.79.5 | Deutsch English

Developer site

This site provides the latest source code release of dvdisaster for the FreeBSD, GNU/Linux and NetBSD operating systems. It is mostly aimed at maintainers of binary packages for the beforementioned platforms. End users might find it more convenient to install dvdisaster from the package system of their operating system bundle or distribution. But if you prefer to download and compile the source package on your own, you're welcome, too.
This site does not provide information on the purpose and usage of dvdisaster. This is better described at other places, e.g. in the user manual and numerous online forums.

Download the source code

dvdisaster is available for the FreeBSD, GNU/Linux und NetBSD operating systems. It is provided as free software under the GNU General Public License v3. |

Current version: | dvdisaster-0.79.5.tar.bz2 | (digital signature, MD5 checksum: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Previous (older) version: | dvdisaster-0.72.6.tar.bz2 | (digital signature, MD5 checksum: f4213af05fe5c36e93bdf8a1732a66d1)

A digital signature is provided for verification that the packages are in their original state. The archives contain a file `INSTALL` with further instructions for building dvdisaster.

Windows and Mac OS are no longer supported. A native Windows fork of dvdisaster will be started soon by another developer, but there is nothing to announce yet. In the mean time, please continue using the last published version for Windows (0.72.3).

What happened to the old dvdisaster site?

To quote from the preface of the user manual:

Since the release of dvdisaster 0.79.3 (version 0.79.4 was never finished and released), nearly five years have passed. This was partly due to changed circumstances in its primary developer's life, but there was also a lot of coding going on behind the scenes. In comparison with its predecessor, dvdisaster 0.79.5 comes with lots of its internals being significantly reworked.

The most visible improvement of dvdisaster 0.79.5 is, of course, its multithreaded RS03 codec. While it takes about 62 minutes for protecting a 36 GiB image with RS02 on a mid range PC, the same task is done with RS03 in less than 7 minutes using 6 processor cores on the same machine. On a high end server with at least 16 cores and very good I/O, this can be done in under a minute. That's quite an improvement.
RS03 is ready for production use in the current release. Some non-essential features, especially reworking the adaptive reading for use with RS03 and multi-threaded RS03 decoding (media fixing) will be delivered with the following dvdisaster releases.

Other parts of the project had to be changed or even discontinued. A software project lives on development and continuous releases; else the project will eventually die. In this respect, dvdisaster was very endangered in the last few years. To prevent this from happening again, most effort is now directed into source code development; everything else is delegated or discontinued. Source code development basically means making the GNU/Linux version, which provides the code base for all other versions, and the FreeBSD and NetBSD ports, which are very easily derived from the GNU/Linux code. This is not the case for the Mac OS and Windows ports, which are, unfortunately, discontinued as of now.
Another feature which has to go are the separate stable and development releases. Starting with this version, all dvdisaster releases are considered production quality, so there is no need for different branches anymore.

Maintaining the multi-lingual online documentation, which also served as the project home page, did also prove to be too time consuming. The project home page has been changed into a simple download platform for the project sources. It is now directed at package maintainers who will create and pass on binaries for the GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD distributions.
The program documentation, which you are reading right now, is provided in PDF format which is much easier to author than the HTML version. The only language available is English. Most parts of this manual have been adapted from the old online documentation, so it still feels more like a website than a book. While hyperlinks are not as usable in PDF as in HTML, they have been kept in this document to stress that it is intended to be used as an online reference. So please do our environment a favour and do not print this manual. It is not meant to be read from front cover to back cover, anyways.

Okay, enough ranting already. May dvdisaster be helpful in protecting and recovering your valuable data, and thanks for using it!

-- cg, August 2015

Copyright 2004-2015 Carsten Gnörlich. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.