K3b/2.0 announcement

K3b 2.0 released with Platform 4 and Blu-ray goodness

28 June, 2010. Today the reformed K3b team within the KDE Community is proud to release the final 2.0 of the premier disk recording application, codenamed “Komeback”. Although pre-release versions have already enjoyed widespread adoption, we'd like to recap some of the highlights of this release.

K3b 2.0 marks the last milestone in the effort to port one of the most popular disk recording applications to KDE's current Platform 4. Although some parts still use legacy libraries, the application takes advantage of the new platform and integrates better with it. Solid, the KDE hardware layer, is now used for hardware detection.

On the interface front K3b 2.0 is a direct port of its KDE3 predecessor. The overall look remains the same but it now uses modern widgets. For example, file browser shows a list of KDE's global Places and takes advantage of the breadcrumb bar. The icons have also been updated to match the rest of the Oxygen theme.

With a few exceptions, K3b keeps feature-parity with 1.0.x series, but it also introduces a number of new features. Perhaps the biggest among these is support for Blu-ray drives. Additionally a lot of work have been put into improving the overall user experience. Some work-flows have been merged abstracting it for all kinds of media.

K3b team has worked hard to achieve maximum stability of the application, with over 250 bugs being closed during the pre-release period. This process will continue as bug-fixing versions will be released during development of K3b 2.1.

Changelog (since 1.0.5)

Port to KDE Platform 4
Always allow manual writing speed selection
Use proper toolbars instead of the toolboxes -> nicer laying out with different styles
Merged CD and DVD copy dialogs
Merged CD and DVD image burning dialogs
Merged CD-RW erasing and DVD formatting dialogs
Merged Data CD and Data DVD projects into one plain data project with Blu-ray support
Merged eMovix CD and eMovix DVD projects
Removed CD copy option "prefer CD-Text". K3b will now ask individually (there is no need to do this if no mounting is involved)
Allow importing of arbitrary sessions into a data project, thus continuing other than the last session
"Clear project" now only clears the added data but leaves the settings as they were (bug 147838)
Added support for files bigger than 4GB via mkisofs 2.01.01a32 and above
Do only reload the medium for verification if necessary (depends on the writer)
Support for Blu-ray writing
Support for DVD and Blu-ray writing via cdrecord
New audio ripping pattern %e which is replaced by the file extension
Better support for RTL languages