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Optical disc authoring, including DVD and Blu-ray Disc authoring is the process of assembling source material—video, audio or other data—into the proper logical volume format to then be recorded ("burned") onto an optical disc (typically a compact disc or DVD).

To burn an optical disc, one usually first creates an optical disc image with a full file system, of a type designed for the optical disc, in temporary storage such as a file in another file system on a disk drive. Then, one copies the image to the disc.

Most optical disc authoring utilities create a disc image and copy it to the disc in one bundled operation, so that end-users often do not know the distinction between creating and burning. However, it is useful to know because creating the disc image is a time-consuming process, while copying the image is much faster. Most disc burning applications silently delete the image from the Temporary folder after making one copy. If users override this default, telling the application to preserve the image, they can reuse the image to create more copies. Otherwise, they must rebuild the image each time they want a copy.

Some packet-writing applications do not require writing the entire disc at once, but allow writing of different parts at different times. This allows a user to construct a disc incrementally, as it could be on a rewritable medium like a floppy disk or rewritable CD. However, if the disc is non-rewritable, a given bit can be written only once. Due to this limitation, a non-rewritable disc whose burn failed for any reason cannot be repaired. (Such a disc is colloquially termed a "coaster", a reference to a beverage coaster.)

There are many optical disc authoring technologies for optimizing the authoring process and preventing errors. Some programs can mount a disc image as a file system type, so these images appear as mounted discs. The disc image can then be tested after it is assembled but before writing to a physical disc.

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