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What is ISO Format

What is ISO format? This article will tell you exactly what ISO image is and what ISO file is or not capable of, etc...

What is ISO

ISO is the abbreviation of International Organization for Standardization originated from Greek "ISOS" which means "Equal". Though non-governmental, ISO is still a very important global organization.

In reference to video, ISO refers to a file format of an optical disc such as CD, DVD or Blu-ray Disc. ISO actually owned its name from the ISO 9660 file system and is used together with CD-ROM media.

What is ISO Image

ISO image, or called an ISO file, is the image of an entire CD or DVD, the whole contents of which can be completely duplicated and contained in a single ISO file. ISO image is an image file produced by copying all information in an optical disc. Therefore, ISO image is qualified to be the genuine digital copy of the original. It usually has a file extension of .iso and might contain a UDF (ISO/IEC 13346) file system. ISO image can be created from optical disc, or used to further create optical disc using specific software.

ISO image file can be played by VLC, MPlayer, KMPlayer, SMplayer, Splayer and DAPlayer, etc.

Under Windows OS,

ISO image file can be read by: WinRAR, WinMount, WinRAR3.0 or above
ISO image file can be operated only by: WinISO, WinImage, Daemon Tools, Alcohol 120%, and WinMount, etc.

Related ISO Resource

How to Clone DVD to ISO Image and Mount DVD ISO

The usage of ISO Image

ISO image can be mainly used to:

Replicate CD/DVD by use of CD/DVD mastering programs, namely, further create a CD/DVD disc therefrom;
Write the disc image to hard drive once, and record the same several times to different CD/DVDs to save processing time. Simply speaking, it is only necessary to duplicate the CD/DVD once before creating DVDs from ISO file as many times as possible;
Create a disc image file to be written to CD/DVD on another system (UNIX, Macintosh);
Backup CD/DVD data. More actually, all data and contents can be copied such that ISO file can be taken as a backup;
Act as a virtual CD/DVD drive. ISO image file can be mounted to a virtual drive as if a physical disc was loaded in the drive or treated as a regular Compact Disc inside a computer while maintaining the original structure of CD/DVD, which is convenient for further DVD burning;
Transfer CD/DVD images over the Internet.

The Advantages of ISO Image

Uncompressed
One single file merged with multiple files
Easy to burn
Virtual disc acting like a physical one

The Disability of ISO Image

Unable to support multi-track video
Unable to store and recreate CD-Audio discs
Unable to be mounted to a USB flash drive

Related Software

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WinX HD Video Converter for Mac: Professional HD Video converter for converting HD Videos on Mac OS, provides the perfect solution to convert Blu-ray videos and videos from HDTV and HD camcorders, like JVC, Panasonic, Sony and Cannon to other formats. Running perfectly on Mac OS X Tiger/Leopard/Snow Leopard.

Related Source

Clone DVD to ISO: Mount DVD ISO image file.

Copy DVD to Hard Drive : New DVD to hard drive copy software with smart DVD Info Reader.

Clone DVD to DVD : Clone DVD to DVD without any copy limitation.

Copy DVD to MPEG2: Copy DVD to a single MPEG2 file without quality loss

Convert DVD to MPEG: Convert DVD movie to MPEG format to achieve excellent image/sound quality.

Related External Source

ISO Image - An ISO image (International Organization for Standardization) is an archive file (also known as a disc image) of an optical disc, composed of the data contents of every written sector of an optical disc...

UDF - UDF (Universal Disk Format) is an implementation of the specification known as ISO/IEC 13346 and ECMA-167 and is an open vendor-neutral file system for computer data storage...

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