Welcome to www.MagicISO.com


You are here: Tutorials > What's an ISO? A CIF? BIN and CUE? .DAT?

In common use, an "ISO" is a file that contains the complete image of a disc. Such files are often used when transferring CD-ROM images over the Internet. Depending on who you're talking to, "ISO" may refer to all disc image files or only certain kinds. 

Going by the more restrictive definition, an "ISO" is created by copying an entire disc, from sector 0 to the end, into a file. Because the image file contains "cooked" 2048-byte sectors and nothing else, it isn't possible to store anything but a single data track in this fashion. Audio tracks, mixed-mode discs, CD+G, multisession, and other fancy formats can't be represented. 

To work around this deficiency, software companies developed their own formats that *could* store diverse formats. Corel developed CIF, which is still in use by Roxio's Easy CD Creator. (What does CIF mean? Nobody knows, though "Corel Image Format" is as good a definition as any.) Jeff Arnold's CDRWIN created them as "BIN" files, with a separate "cue sheet" that described the contents. You can unpack a BIN/CUE combo with MagicISO. 

A ".DAT" file could be most anything, but usually it's a video file pulled off of a VideoCD. A program can convert .DAT to .MPG, and recording programs like Nero can record them directly. 

A ".ISO" file that contains an image of an ISO-9660 filesystem can be manipulated in a number of ways: it can be written to a CD-ROM; mounted as a device with the Linux "loopback" filesystem (e.g. "mount ./cdimg.iso /mnt/test -t iso9660 -o loop"); copied to a hard drive partition and mounted under UNIX; or viewed with MagicISO under Windows. There is no guarantee, however, that a ".ISO" file contains ISO-9660 filesystem data. And it is quite common to hear people refer to things as "ISO" which aren't. 

A ".SUB" file appears to contain subchannel data. Some programs pass these around in addition to one of the above formats. 

We now have many different file extensions, including ISO, BIN, IMG, CIF, FCD, NRG, GCD, PO1, C2D, CUE, CIF, CD, and MagicISO can open and manipulate just about any disc image format. 

(The rest of this section is a philosophical rant, and can safely be skipped. This is intended to be more illustrative than factual, and any relation to actual events is strictly coincidental.) 

The term "ISO" is ostensibly an abbreviation of "ISO-9660 disc image", which is itself somewhat suspect. ISO-9660 is a standard that defines the filesystem most often used on CD-ROM. It does not define a disc image format. "ISO-9660 filesystem image" would be more appropriate. 

When you capture or generate a CD-ROM image, you have to call it something. When a CD-ROM was generated from a collection of files into an ISO-9660 filesystem image, it was written into a file with an extension of ".ISO". This image file could then be written to a CD-ROM. As it happens, the generated image files were no different in structure from the images that could be extracted from other CD-ROMs, so to keep things simple the extracted disc images were also called ".ISO". 

(Some programs used the more appropriate ".IMG", but unfortunately that was less common.) 

This meant that, whether you extracted a data track from a disc written with the HFS filesystem or the ISO-9660 filesystem, it was labeled ".ISO". This makes as much sense as formatting a 1.4MB PC floppy for HFS, creating an image, and calling it a "FAT12 disk image" because such floppies are usually formatted with FAT. It didn't really matter though, because no matter what was in the file, the software used the same procedure to write it to CD-R. 

As a result of this filename extension convention, any file that contained a sector-by-sector CD-ROM image was referred to as an "ISO file". When CD recorders hit The Big Time and many people started swapping image files around, the newcomers didn't know that there was a distinction between one type of disc image and another, and started referring to *any* sort of disc image as an "ISO". 

These days it's not altogether uncommon to see messages about "making an ISO" of an audio CD, which makes no sense at all. 

 Quote from CD-Recordable FAQ

Related Topic:



Copyright 2002 MagicISO Inc. All Rights Reserved