Abstract: The present invention provides an integrated controller to process both optical reads and optical writes of multiple optical media. The integrated controller includes a host interface; a buffer manager coupled to the host interface; an embedded memory coupled to the buffer manager; an integrated encoding/decoding engine coupled to the buffer manager; a data channel interface coupled to the integrated encoding/decoding engine; and an integrated servo/recording processor coupled to the integrated encoding/decoding engine and the data channel interface, where the integrated servo/recording processor includes a set of write strategies. The present invention provides a controller which integrates the functionality of the conventional controllers into an integrated processor. With the controller in accordance with the present invention, a single drive may be provided which can read CD-based and DVD-based formats, read and write to Write Once Media, and read and write to Rewritable Media.