 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here. A very, very exciting day for me from a data perspective because I have, I can find it, burned my first ever M-disc. This is it. Video backup number one, 18th of the 5th, 2022. I also got this little, I think it's a 96, 96 disc case from Amazon alongside the main star of the show. The Blu-ray disc burner from LG. This is specifically, I'm just going to cover up the serial number just to be paranoid. It is the, but you can hopefully see the model number here, WP50NB40 Slim Portable Blu-ray DVD Rider from LG. Now, I want to talk about how I got this to work in Ubuntu Linux. Those who are really following this YouTube channel might have seen a video came up saying, hey, I got the M-disc to work in K3B. Unfortunately, I did say on the Amazon description that this, even though it wasn't officially supported, this guy would work in Ubuntu. Unfortunately, it appeared, the drive appeared in K3B. It recognized the M-disc Blu-ray media. This is what I'm using. I'm using the 25 gigabyte four-time speed M-discs from verbatim. It recognized that. It looked like it was riding, but it choked halfway through. So I put up the video a little bit prematurely because I thought the first one worked, but it didn't actually burn either. So I was not able to burn an M-disc. I'm using Ubuntu 20, I'm using 20, I think. I couldn't do it in Brazzero. I couldn't do it in K3B. All the disc burning programs, I spent about 15 minutes researching it on Ask Ubuntu. And I saw very quickly that Blu-ray support on Ubuntu is really, really problematic. So I decided to go down the route of using a virtual machine. So I'm just going to jump over to my screen here and show you guys what worked for me. So I just put into Google here M-disc burning software. And the first result that popped up was you can see this thing here called Burn Aware. Free burning software and it says specifically for DVD, Blu-ray and M-disc. So this is what I ended up using. Now the point of this video is to say that I was able to use this running on an Ubuntu host in a virtual machine by VMware. To my surprise, it worked really well. I tested this disc that I burned, if I can find it, my first M-disc. I burned this, took about 40 minutes to burn through. I filled up it to about 23 gigabytes. So it's definitely quite a slow process, but of course watch your sacrificing and speed you're gaining in the stability of the data in terms of being written into supposedly a very, very durable format. So it wasn't a quick process about 40 minutes for 20 gigs, but it did work even in running in a virtual machine. So I had it running in a virtual machine and I had to allow the virtual machine in VMware to see the Blu-ray drive, which requires two USB ports connected to the computer. And then as I said, I Googled M-disc burning software, found this Burn Aware stuff and saw that it specifically says that it has M-disc support. Download that. You'll get the Burn Aware free version. It's free for non-commercial use, for personal use. Therefore, if you're just using it to back up your personal photos or like I'm doing my personal YouTube videos, I think you should be good. I downloaded this and it worked pretty seamlessly. So that's pretty much all there is to it. So unfortunately, as I said, I wasn't able to get it working natively within Ubuntu. But nevertheless, I didn't even need to go into a bare metal Windows installation in order to burn. I was able to do it all through a virtual machine and I used again VMware for that process. So I was personally really, really delighted with this process. I only have about a bit more data in my archive, but the process really wasn't bad. You can have the VMware machine running and be doing other things while you're archiving your data. So that, I hope, answers a question for the few other people in the world who are Ubuntu users and they're wondering if you're going to be able to burn. It looked to me as if the actual support, native support is very buggy. I couldn't find a Blu-ray player specifically rated or saying officially supporting Ubuntu, but I did find this Blu-ray disc for about $90. This thing sent me back on Amazon and it did a fine job. It started spinning up and this guy can also do DVDs and CDs as well. So a whole bunch of different kinds of optical media. So yeah, it's definitely possible to do it through a workaround and I'm glad to be writing my data in stone. And also coming up on this YouTube channel tomorrow, I'm actually interviewing the guy who came up with this technology. The founder is a computer scientist based in the US and he has kindly agreed to do an interview with me. We're going to talk about optical storage, we're going to talk about bit rot and data rot and we're going to talk about this very intriguing M disc project and where it is really now. So thank you guys for watching, more videos and that video specifically coming soon onto this YouTube channel.