Universal Disk Format (UDF) is an open, vendor-neutral file system for computer data storage for a broad range of media. In practice, it has been most widely used for DVDs and newer optical disc formats, supplanting ISO 9660. Due to its design, it is very well suited to incremental updates on both write-once and re-writable optical media. UDF was developed and maintained by the Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA).
An optical disc image is a disk image that contains everything that would be written to an optical disc, disk sector by disc sector, including the optical disc file system. ISO images contain the binary image of an optical media file system, including the data in its files in binary format, copied exactly as they were stored on the disc. The data inside the ISO image will be structured according to the file system that was used on the optical disc from which it was created.
Optical disc authoring, including CD, 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. This act is sometimes done illegally, by pirating copyrighted material without permission from the original artists.
K3b is a CD, DVD and Blu-ray authoring application by KDE for Unix-like computer operating systems. It provides a graphical user interface to perform most CD/DVD burning tasks like creating an Audio CD from a set of audio files or copying a CD/DVD, as well as more advanced tasks such as burning eMoviX CD/DVDs. It can also perform direct disc-to-disc copies. The program has many default settings which can be customized by more experienced users. The actual disc recording in K3b is done by the command line utilities cdrecord or cdrkit, cdrdao, and growisofs. As of version 1.0, K3b features a built-in DVD ripper.
DVD Shrink is a freeware DVD transcoder program for Microsoft Windows that uses a DVD ripper to back up DVD video. The final versions are 3.2.0.15 (English) and 3.2.0.16 (German); all other versions, such as DVD Shrink 2010, are illegitimate. DVD Shrink's purpose is, as its name implies, to reduce the amount of data stored on a DVD with minimal loss of quality, although some loss of quality is inevitable. It creates a copy of a DVD, during which the DVD region code is removed, and copy protection may also be circumvented. A stamped DVD may require more space than is available on a writeable DVD, unless shrunk. Many commercially released video DVDs are dual layer ; DVD Shrink can make a shrunk copy which will fit on a single-layer writeable DVD, processing the video with some loss of quality and allowing the user to discard unwanted content such as foreign-language soundtracks.
IMG, in computing, refers to binary files with the .img filename extension that store raw disk images of floppy disks, hard drives, and optical discs or a bitmap image – .img.
A CloneCD Control File is a text descriptor with the extension .ccd used by CloneCD to store the subcode data of a CD/DVD image. These files need to be combined with an image file to be burned. It may also come with a subchannel file.
ImgBurn is an optical disc authoring program that allows the recording of many types of CD, DVD and Blu-ray images to recordable media. Starting with version 2.0.0.0, ImgBurn can also burn files and data directly to CD or DVD. It is written in C++. It supports padding DVD-Video files so the layer break occurs on a proper cell boundary.
In Unix-like operating systems, a loop device, vnd, or lofi is a pseudo-device that makes a computer file accessible as a block device.
Direct Access Archive, or DAA, is a proprietary file format developed by PowerISO Computing for disk image files. The format supports features such as compression, password protection, and splitting to multiple volumes. Popular Windows disk image mounting programs such as Alcohol 120% and Daemon Tools currently do not support the mounting of DAA images; Linux and BSD also do not support mounting images of this kind.
CDemu is a free and open-source virtual drive software, designed to emulate an optical drive and optical disc on the Linux operating system.
An NRG file is a proprietary optical disc image file format originally created by Nero AG for the Nero Burning ROM utility. It is used to store disc images. Other than Nero Burning ROM, however, a variety of software titles can use these image files. For example, Alcohol 120%, or Daemon Tools can mount NRG files onto virtual drives for reading.
Media Descriptor File (MDF) is a proprietary disc image file format developed for Alcohol 120%, an optical disc authoring program. Daemon Tools, CDemu, MagicISO, PowerDVD, and WinCDEmu can also read the MDF format. A disc image is a computer file replica of the computer files and file system of an optical disc.
MagicISO is a CD/DVD image shareware utility that can extract, edit, create, and burn disc image files. It offers the possibility of converting between ISO and CUE/BIN and their proprietary Universal Image Format disc image format.
Notable software applications that can access or manipulate disk image files are as follows, comparing their disk image handling features.
WinCDEmu is an open-source utility for mounting disk image files in Microsoft Windows. It installs a Windows device driver which allows a user to access an image of a CD or DVD as if it were a physical drive. WinCDEmu supports ISO, CUE/BIN, CCD/IMG, NRG, MDS/MDF and RAW formats.
AppleDisk Image is a disk image format commonly used by the macOS operating system. When opened, an Apple Disk Image is mounted as a volume within the Finder.
DAEMON Tools is a virtual drive and optical disc authoring program for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS.
CDRoller is a utility for CD and DVD data recovery. It supports a wide set of CD and DVD formats, including HD DVD and Blu-ray. CDRoller has the ability to read CD and DVD with UDF File System written by Roxio and Ahead Nero software. It allows users to find the VOB files on mini DVD when recorded video cannot be played due to a failure of camcorder, or disc finalization was accidentally interrupted. The built-in "Split Video" converts the recovered VOB data into generic MPEG-2 files that can be played back in Windows Media Player. CDRoller can also extract the pictures from 8 cm CD-R/CD-RW, created by Sony Mavica CD digital cameras.
