Anyone tried DiscImageCreator?

[mrpijey]

BA member ChlorideCull mentioned this tool to me, has anyone tried it? Does it generate proper files etc usable for preservation? Has anyone tried it?

https://github.com/saramibreak/DiscImageCreator

A UI project for DiscImageCreator

https://github.com/reignstumble/DICUI

[Darkstar]

Claunia can probably tell you in more detail, but the bottom line seems to be that no, it cannot create better dumps. It was designed to replicate A120 dumps, not to improve upon them. This is especially important for protected disks or discs with bad sectors.

If you want to ditch Alcohol120%, your best bet would be DiscImageChef (Homepage: https://github.com/claunia/DiscImageChef)

I switched to DiscImageChef recently and dump everything into its own *.dicf format, which is a superset of iso,mfd+mds,bin+cue, etc. and stores more data than each and every single one of these. Then I generate an mdf+mds from that, to upload here and/or on archive.org. During the conversion, some data is lost (such as the lead-in) but since I keep the .dicf it's no big deal.

Again, feel free to ask Claunia more about that, she can be reached through the forum here or in #DiscImageChef on FreeNode.

[mrpijey]

It's offtopic of course, but perhaps you can make a guide on how to use DiscImageChef. I am still not convinced it's good enough for preservation needs, and I hope you don't upload the "DIC>MDF" dumps as original here since I need to be able to trust that the dumps being uploaded are made with A120 and not converted to it...

But I am keeping my eye on DIC as well since it could very much be a format we fully endorse, but that depends if the author wants us to endorse it... and it's good enough to both dump a disc properly and duplicate it back.

[ChlorideCull]

While DIC has, shall we say, user-hostile requirements, I like the idea of it just dumping into files with well-known formats, saving the raw data of all tracks, C2 data, substreams, etc. That's mostly why I looked at alternatives to Alcohol 120%, because MDS/MDF isn't fully understood yet, and I'm not particularly fond about preservation depending on a specific piece of software.

Now, downsides: DIC isn't designed to burn discs from the created images, but you do have all the data there to burn them if you find/make a burner for it, or you could convert the data to MDS/MDF once the format is better known. DIC doesn't support DPM either.

Basically, at the point we are right now, I don't think any format should replace Alcohol 120% produced MDS/MDF, but I don't think that should be the only version kept.

[silasqwerty1]

As far as I can tell, DIC and the dicf format aren't 100% ready to be used for dumping and/or converting to MDF quite yet. I don't think it dumps MDF exactly the same as Alcohol 120%, but I do use it for converting from MDF to ISO. Also I don't know if dicf format supports everything perfectly, as it isn't as widely tested as other formats yet.

[Darkstar]

It's offtopic of course, but perhaps you can make a guide on how to use DiscImageChef. I am still not convinced it's good enough for preservation needs, and I hope you don't upload the "DIC>MDF" dumps as original here since I need to be able to trust that the dumps being uploaded are made with A120 and not converted to it....

The first dumps I made with DIC were unprotected discs and I compared them to the A120 dumps, until I was convinced that the dumps are bit-identical, which exactly 100% of all dumped discs were. Of course I will do the same comparison once I dump protected discs, but from what I gather, A120 fills unreadable sectors (those that have wrong ECC for example) with dummy data that is later detected and "faked" by its Protection Emulation, while DiscImageChef does not... If that turns out to be true then I will choose the format that provides better preservation If that means that the dumps will not be accepted on BA anymore, then I guess I'll just have to accept that...

I don't think it dumps MDF exactly the same as Alcohol 120%

Well, I tried it and in all cases the dumps were bit-identical, at least for non-protected CDs and DVDs. I have not tested protected discs so far, simply because I have none that require dumping

[silasqwerty1]

Huh, the dumps are never bit-identical for me (the last I checked at least). But it may be a good idea to make dumps using both for now, at worst it just uses up a little more storage space. Especially if there is a weird edge case that DIC hasn't been programmed to deal with yet. So imo using an established program just in case couldn't hurt If nothing else, the faults of Alcohol 120% are known pretty well, but DIC hasn't had as much testing done, so there could be a more unpredictable issue.