some kind of compressed images support

[Underheaven]

...

Did you see post #61 of this thread?

[BobbyJoe]

Power ISO

Yeah, the Power ISO thing is somewhat helpful, but the compression ratio pales in comparison to things like 7zip. My biggest interest is in playing PlayStation ISOs without having to decompress them first and nothing compresses a PlayStation ISO like 7zip.

[Top Qat]

UltraISO now supports a compressed ISO format that has the ISZ extention.

Any one know much about this?

[maciozo]

ISZ (ISO Zipped format) is live

Hello all, just wanted to report that a new image format is available. It can be useful for games/apps using dummy files or uncompressed data.
Here's a description from EZB forum:

One of the most advanced archive formats like RAR and ZIP, it is:
- a secure ISO format, as AES256 encryption is supported, you can use a password with up to 32 characters length
- a small size ISO format, you can compress an ISO image to smaller size. What is 'Heavy Compress' feature? you can give it a try.
- spanned CD/DVD format. If your ISO image is a large file, you can split it to segmented ISZ files(I01, I02, ...). So you can burn a DVD ISO to multiple CD-R discs, as well as burn a 200GB large file to a couple of DVD-R/+R discs. In addition, it is possible to store DVD images on FAT16/FAT32 volume under Windows 98 systems now.

http://forum.ezbsystems.net/cgi-bin/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=2;t=1412

[Underheaven]

Re: ISZ (ISO Zipped format) is live

fyi: Image spanning has been available for years in Alcohol 120%

[maciozo]

Spanning is nothing exciting to me, what I meant exactly was that no image format (except Norton Ghost) offers compression. I think that everyone would agree that it would be great if DT would support such standard... (too many 'woulds' lol)
Greetz

[forkart]

MagicISO also supports compressed iso format. the new compressed iso format can be mounted by MagicDisc.

Universal Image Format(UIF) is a powerful compression image file format for backuping CD/DVD. It is fast, reliable, and has rich set of features which include password-protected, data encryption, MD5 checksum support and much more. UIF can not only contain the complete data of CD/DVD just like ISO image, But UIF also supports backuping multi-session CD/DVD, Audio-CD, VCD, SVCD and DVD-Video.

http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-whatuif.htm

[Underheaven]

Re: MagicDisc Universal Image Format(UIF)

Universal Image Format(UIF)

This format does not seem capable of Data Position Measurement. It is important to keep in mind how many games require this nowadays.

[maciozo]

MagicISO has a very bad virtual drive; i.e. StarForce protected games don't even detect mounted ISO as a disc

[cRzcCs]

Some tests and info on compressed formats.

Hi, I just tested some ISO formats to compare filesizes...

I used a CD from ABBYY FineReader Pro 8.0 from work for these tests, and here are the results:

standard .iso file: 278 MB (291.602.432 Bytes)
NTFS compression: 206 MB (216.100.864 Bytes)
PowerISO .daa file: 150 MB (158.073.385 Bytes)
UltraISO .isz file: 150 MB (157.738.395 Bytes)
(all files were "optimized" to remove double files)

P.S.: NTFS-compressed, the .daa went down 200kb, the .isz lost another 100kb.

Side note 1: PowerISO Computing (makers of PowerISO) have a built-in virtual drive to mount .daa-files directly, perhaps they can be convinced to open the specifications of the .daa-file to Daemon Tools.

Side note 2: EZBsystems (makers of UltraISO) look like they are creating a ".ISZ CD/DVD emulator" to support their .isz-format, and even daemon tools is mentioned in their forum to be supported eventually. This format looks most promising for me, as the forum post says Daemon Tools and Alcohol will be supported later.

Just my 2 cents...
cRzcCs

edit by Admin: Please do not post your messages multiple times. The forums are moderated which is why your posts don't show up immediately.

[Cuddles]

.daa and .isz image formats are useless because they don't have information required to emulate CD protections. What we need is a support for compressed .mdf files.

[cRzcCs]

.daa and .isz image formats are useless because they don't have information required to emulate CD protections. What we need is a support for compressed .mdf files.

Well, just because you think they are useless means not that they are

For CDs/DVDs with a lot of html-files and stuff, they are absolutely sufficient, and those are compressible as well. I vote for compressible image-files in general, not just for mdf/mds files.
And I vote for support of .daa and .isz-files as well, because these are already established formats which would be good enough to use for those CD/DVD images I just mentioned. Indeed it would be useless to make a mdf-file of some documentation cd, because there is no copy protection on it. Nevertheless, of course it would be wonderful to be able to use compressed image files with protection, and I strongly vote for that, too.

So long,
cRzcCs

[Archeron]

I think ISO images are like a RAR file... But if you setup WinRAR to just "Store" the files, then the RAR and the ISO have the same properties in size matters. I think it would be better if we create ISO and MDF/MDS based on 7-Zip compactation mode... (7-Zip is a tool like WinRAR, and we can setup everything for the best compactation, not just "Store" or "Compact", and, trust me, 7z makes miracles). Maybe we use 7ISO, 7MDF, and other image types. So, what we could have here is: DT Support for compressed images, and a Image Compression Tool based on 7z.

[Elandril]

@Archeron:
The problem with 7-zip is that it takes insanely much memory to decompress as well as a good bunch of processor power. Okay, with Dual processors getting the standard nowadays, the lags can be brought down, but the transparent decompression engine needs to utilize that.

The main problem with compressing images is that they require random read acces, meaning that the CD/DVD image is not being decompressed from start to end (like WinRAR), but needs to be separated into small chunks that can be decompressed swiftly and independeptly from each other. Usual chunk sizes are between 16 and 64 physical clusters or between 64 and 256 kBytes for any compression algorithms that offer fast und lightweight (called "transparent") decompression.

Unfortunately this also means that the compression rate is somewhat limited and less than optimal. The error correction parts of the CD/DVD data segments for example is highly entropic (i.e. random) by design, so that compressing those parts yields nearly no size reduction and in general only costs cpu power and memory. We might consider a image format where the error correction zones are exempt from the compression so that only the data parts get clustered together and compressed.

[Archeron]

Well, WinRAR, 7-Zip, WinISO or everything else, anyway is OK for me. What really matter for me is I will can then wait less time to Download, Upload, and more things related with Images...