ISO 9660 is a file system for optical disc media. Being published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) the file system is considered an international technical standard. Since the specification is available for anybody to purchase, implementations have been written for many operating systems.
Universal Disk Format (UDF) is a profile of the specification known as ISO/IEC 13346 and ECMA-167 and 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 recordable and (re)writable optical media. UDF was developed and maintained by the Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA).
A disk image, in computing, is a computer file containing the contents and structure of a disk volume or of an entire data storage device, such as a hard disk drive, tape drive, floppy disk, optical disc, or USB flash drive. A disk image is usually made by creating a sector-by-sector copy of the source medium, thereby perfectly replicating the structure and contents of a storage device independent of the file system. Depending on the disk image format, a disk image may span one or more computer files.
An ISO image is a disk image of an optical disc. In other words, it is an archive file that contains everything that would be written to an optical disc, sector by sector, including the optical disc file system. ISO image files bear the .iso filename extension. The name ISO is taken from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ISO 9660 file system used with CD-ROM media, but what is known as an ISO image might also contain a UDF file system.
Optical disc authoring, including 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.
Alcohol 120% is an optical disc authoring program and disk image emulator created by Alcohol Soft.
UltraISO is an application for Microsoft Windows for creating, modifying and converting ISO image files used for optical disc authoring, currently being produced by EZB Systems.
A cue sheet, or cue file, is a metadata file which describes how the tracks of a CD or DVD are laid out. Cue sheets are stored as plain text files and commonly have a .cue filename extension. CDRWIN first introduced cue sheets, which are now supported by many optical disc authoring applications and media players.
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 vector image – .img.
A CloneCD Control File is a text descriptor with the extension .ccd used by CloneCD to mark the properties 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.
MPEG-4 Part 14 or MP4 is a digital multimedia container format most commonly used to store video and audio, but it can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images. Like most modern container formats, it allows streaming over the Internet. The only official filename extension for MPEG-4 Part 14 files is .mp4. MPEG-4 Part 14 is a standard specified as a part of MPEG-4.
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.
A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write to or erase—CD-ROMs, i.e. it is a type of read-only memory.
This article is a comparison of notable software applications that can access or manipulate disk image files. It compares their disk image handling features.
AcetoneISO is a free and open-source virtual drive software to mount and manage image files. Its goals are to be simple, intuitive and stable. Written in Qt, this software is meant for all those people looking for a "Daemon Tools for Linux". However, AcetoneISO does not emulate any copy protection while mounting.
.MDX files are a binary file format for storing 3D models, engineered and used by Blizzard Entertainment in its games, with several existing variations. This file format is mainly used in Warcraft III and its expansion pack The Frozen Throne. The format also has a human readable textual representation that uses the extension .MDL. Several converters exist to convert between these two formats. It was originally created by DAEMON Tools, and is generally used to create CD and DVD disc images and emulate the original discs as virtual drives. it contains both the disc volume formatting metadata and the disc data. MDX files are designed to replace the combination of .MDS and .MDF files by storing all disc image data in one file.
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.
DAEMON Tools is a virtual drive and optical disc authoring program for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS.
