Projects/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”. Though pre-release versions 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 uses legacy libraries the application takes advantage of the platform and integrates better with it. Solid, KDE hardware layer, is now used for hardware detection,

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

With a few exceptions K3b keeps feature-parity with 1.0.x series. It also has a couple of new features. Among them the biggest one is support for Blu-ray drives. Additionally a lot of work have been put into improving user experience. Some workflows have been merged abstracting it for all kinds of media.

K3b team has worked hard to achieve maximum stability of the application. During pre-release period over 250 bugs has been closed. 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 layouting 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 "prefere 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)
* Support 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