busTRACE Technologies has developed a simple utility that allows you to view additional information about the CD/DVD devices on your computer. For example, we report if the device is a CD Burner, DVD Recorder, what types of discs it can read, and much more. You can download this utility for free.
How do you obtain the additional CD/DVD information?
In order to retrieve the additional information about the device, we need to issue what's called a "Mode Sense" command to the drive. This command allows us to retrieve various information about a device. In our case, we retrieve page 2Ah, which is the "CD/DVD Capabilities & Mechanical Status" page. We are only displaying a subset of what is available from this page.
The vast majority of CD/DVD drives out there support this mode page. If the device does not, our applet will display information letting you know that we aren't able to retrieve the information.
For software developers looking to retrieve even more information, look at the Get Configuration operation code as defined by the various CD/DVD command specifications.
How do you access the device?
If you're a software developer, wondering how we communicate with the device, it differs depending on what operating system you are running. When run under Windows 2000/XP/Vista, we use the "SCSI Pass Through" interface. When run under Windows 98/98SE/Me, we use the "ASPI" interface. Both of these APIs are available in the core operating system, which explains why there are no additional files shipped with this utility. Only a single executable file is needed.
