some kind of compressed images support

[Underheaven]

pointing to thread Encrepted CD Image

What I am wondering is if anyone at DT is currently working on a plugin like this?

No news on a compression plugin yet. However, you can see NetSoerfer's post concerning an encryption plugin here.

[puntloos]

May I humbly suggest..

(strange, it didnt post last time.. hope Im not double-posting..)

http://rzip.samba.org/

Rzip is specifically designed for compressing with very long block sizes. It is also open source (and you can choose to just open-source the plugin).

From what I read, I seriously expect rzip to shave off 10-20% of a CD image that only contains .cab files and a setup.exe.

Not to mention low-entropy files like text, clip art etc etc e

[Underheaven]

Re: rzip.samba.org and kernel mode plugin / addon

DAEMON Tools needs something written in C with no external library dependencies (you can't access user-mode .DLL's) and that can run in kernel mode.

Edit: seems I'm wrong, VeNoM386 mentioned allowing normal user-mode programs in this post (also made in this thread). But still keep in mind that if someone wants to make a plugin now they don't have to wait for the user-mode changes to be added to DAEMON Tools.

[HAANDI]

That feature would be very useful because the most recent games which have starforce protection have lots (~1-2GB) 0bytes. And 0bytes are really well compressable.

[BobbyJoe]

7zip seems best for ISOs

If I may add my humble 2 cents, I have tried compressing a PS1 game ISO (Threads of Fate) with several different formats. 7zip was head and shoulders above the rest. In addition, it's open source.

Original - 340 MB
GZip - 255 MB
BZip - 244 MB
BZip2 - 235 MB
WinRAR 2.0 - 232 MB
WinRAR 2.9 - 183 MB
WinRAR 3.5 - 116 MB
7Zip - 50 MB !!!!!

I've read elsewhere that 7zip really excells at compressing ISOs and my own testing seemed to back that up. It would really be nice to compress all my playstation ISOs to this small of a file size then simply mount the one I want to play with DT. The compression included with Mooby's plugin for ePSXe doesn't really compress them a lot (the GZip & BZip sizes above).

Just a thought.

[Jito463]

The problem with open source is that you're expected to release any project using open source code as open source. That's simply not going to work with a project like Daemon Tools. If they release the source code, that's like an open invitation to the copy protection companies to blacklist them. Would you really want that?

[Underheaven]

...

The idea is that compression plugins (or any plugin) for DAEMON Tools 4 will be able to be made by external authors. What this means for licensing or legal issues, I can't claim to fully understand (I stopped trying to understand the differences between the licenses on opensource.org a while ago) but I think it means that someone external to DT Soft can make a compression addon and that DAEMON Tools will not have to become open source as a result of that addon.

[Andareed]

Most plugin-type opensource software is released under LGPL, which means we could link to them and use them in their unmodified [binary] form.

GPL itself is somewhat loose. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is of the opinion that if you use GPL in any software, that new software becomes a derivitive product and is subject to the GPL (means source-code must be distributed with binaries). However, many closed-source vendors (e.g., NVIDIA and VMware) use GPL'd stuff, and simply state in their help/about that they use said software. These vendors believe that merely including GPL'd stuff does not create a derivitive product (this interpretation of the GPL seems more reasonable, imo).

[Underheaven]

...

Thanks for the explanation

[BobbyJoe]

compression plugin

So . . . . any word on when/if this is going to happen? It seems to be a very wanted feature.

[Underheaven]

...

In post #47 of this thread I said it will be available for DAEMON Tools version 4.0. No release dates though.

[duloque]

Another example for a good use of CD compression are Audio CDs. Like putting a CD as ONE piece on the HD, which makes mp3 impractical.

.. or wanting to play Quake1 with CD music without CD in drive. The single image is about 650MB, even a simple compression could save much spac because pure data only takes 35MB. =)

Can't wait to get news on this!

[HAANDI]

DAA Format

Hey guys, on the net I found an app called PowerISO (hxxp://www.poweriso.com). It has its own compressed image format which you can mount in PowerIso. So there is already a imageformat and only the plugin for it is missing.

[puntloos]

*poke* *nudge*

Any progress on this? Is anyone actually working on it?

(yea yea 'do it yourself'.. but Im sadly not a programmer )

[roysubs]

The DAA format solves most issues on this thread

Hi,

I have a 7.9 GB archive of html document files on my hard disk. This archive contains over 75,000 files, and of course will not fit on a singly-layer DVD with conventional ISO / NRG etc image formats. Then I found the PowerISO DAA format, and discovered it was a full DVD imaging format (including support for bootable discs etc) but with compression. With compression, my 7.9 GB archive of 75,000 files compressed to a single image file of exactly 4.36 GB and fits on a DVD. I can mount this with the PowerISO virtual mount tool and go through these html documents with ease (note, with RAR or ZIP I would have to decompress the whole thing first, with the DAA I have a mountable drive which means all internal html links work perfectly without having to decompress to temporary locations). The only thing is having to install the PowerISO image software, as I would like to be able to mount this via DaemonTools.

Every issue on this pinned thread would be solved I think by supporting the PowerISO DAA format, it's a good format and works well, and I hope that you can give serious consideration for including support for this in the next DaemonTools release ?

Thanks,

Roy.