Essential Utilities for Compressing ISOs

[Josh]

I have found this program made by Neill Corlett. He is the same guy that made the PSF and PSF2 format. (Playstation Sound Format) This program called ECM is made for reducing the file size of compressed ISOs. You can see how it works here
http://www.neillcorlett.com/ecm/how.html

You can download it here
http://www.neillcorlett.com/ecm/

I also use 7zip for compressing my ISOs. It has a better compression ratio the WinRAR. You can get it here.
http://www.7zip.org

Del_boy and I have tested some ISOs with this ECM program. Here are my results.

IQ.bin = 251,447,616 bytes This is the ISO.

IQ.bin.ecm = 229,212,741 bytes This is the ISO after going through the ECM program.

IQ.7z = 78,148,811 bytes This is the regular ISO compressed with 7zip. IQ.bin

IQ.7z = 69,743,831 bytes This is the compressed ecm iso. IQ.bin.ecm

This is ~ a 10.76% improvement.

Don't worry. You use the program unECM to make the ISO like it originally was.

If you are going to compress any ISOs with ECM please insert the ecm100.zip file in the archive.

[Del_Boy]

I made a few little tests myself (of which I will post the results later). In all of the tests though savings were seen.

The savings ranged from around 10-20% (this was done with Winrar at default compression + ECM removal).

The actual removal of ECM is incredibly simple (and fast), just drag and drop the .iso/.bin etc onto the ECM program file. Putting the ECM back into the program file is just as simple.

I would heartily recommend this to all, especially to those on 56k modems.