Conventional systems determine a disc type by reading the lead-in area in the disc (or by determining if a lead-in area is present or not), to select whether a DVD+R/RW, DVD-ROM or DVD-R/RW is being read. Such a process can be slow. Such a process finds the region containing the lead-in area, determines if data is present in the lead-in area and then reads and decodes data in the lead-in area to determine the disc type.
It would be desirable to provide a fast and reliable approach that would provide performance gains by making it easier to navigate through a disc towards the lead-in area. In particular, it would be desirable to implement an approach that would be location independent to work independently of where on the disc the head spins up.