Patent ID: 8687476

Claim:
An optical medium comprising: a data zone in a written region or a writable region for user data; an inner zone having a lead-in area, the inner zone being a region separating a physical beginning of a written region or a writable region from a beginning of the data zone; an outer zone being a region separating an end of the data zone from a physical end of the written region or the writable region; and an embedded virtual medium included within the data zone for storing embedded user data, wherein either: the embedded virtual medium includes at least portions of a plurality of layers of the optical medium; or the embedded virtual medium is completely included within a single layer of the optical medium, and the optical medium includes a first session outside of the embedded virtual medium and within the data zone on the single layer, and a second session within the data zone on the single layer, the second session including the embedded virtual medium and metadata having information describing the embedded virtual medium.