here - OSTA - Optical Storage Technology Association

1. Introduction
The OSTA Universal Disk Format (UDF ® ) specification defines a subset of the standard
ECMA 167 3 rd edition. The primary goal of the OSTA UDF is to maximize data
interchange and minimize the cost and complexity of implementing ECMA 167.
To accomplish this task this document defines a Domain. A domain defines rules and
restrictions on the use of ECMA 167. The domain defined in this specification is known
as the “OSTA UDF Compliant” domain.
This document attempts to answer the following questions for the structures of ECMA
167 on a per operating system basis:
Given some ECMA 167 structure X, for each field in structure X answer the
following questions for a given operating system:
1) When reading this field: If the operating system supports the data in
this field then what should it map to in the operating system?
2) When reading this field: If the operating system supports the data in
this field with certain limitations then how should the field be interpreted
under this operating system?
3) When reading this field: If the operating system does NOT support the
data in this field then how should the field be interpreted under this
operating system?
4) When writing this field: If the operating system supports the data for
this field then what should it map from in the operating system?
5) When writing this field: If the operating system does NOT support the
data for this field then to what value should the field be set?
For some structures of ECMA 167 the answers to the above questions were selfexplanatory
and therefore those structures are not included in this document.
In some cases additional information is provided for each structure to help clarify the
standard.
This document should help make the task of implementing the ECMA 167 standard
easier.
To be informed of changes to this document please fill out and return the OSTA UDF
Developers Registration Form located in appendix 6.16.
UDF 2.01
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