UDF (Universal Disk Format)
More info
- Creator
- OSTA
- Released
- 1995
- Type
- Filesystem
- Spec
- ECMA-167
OSTA filesystem that shed ISO 9660's cramped limits and became the standard on DVD, Blu-ray and rewritable CDs.
The Universal Disk Format was standardised in the mid-1990s by the Optical Storage Technology Association, on top of ECMA-167/ISO 13346. Where ISO 9660 assumed a finished, burned disc, UDF is built for packet writing — you drag and drop files onto a CD-RW as if it were a floppy. DVD-Video mandates UDF 1.02, Blu-ray UDF 2.50.
Poor backward compatibility between revisions has produced a healthy crop of unreadable discs, yet UDF is still the glue holding the optical-storage legacy together.