PSX ISO's

[f00]

Why are the majority of psx isos stored in a layer of archives like this
rar -> .7z'd bin -> ecm'd bin

Wouldn't multiple iterations of compression algorithms be redundant and actually add onto the resulting file size due to adding headers and such onto data that is already as compressed as can be, no?

The script which packs the isos into multiple archive layers also changes the .bin's name so that it doesn't match the name inside the .cue file. I've also found several isos where in the case of multiple tracks the script must have changed track names from .bin to .ape for some reason.

It's very tedious to decompress these multiple layers especially the ecm on distributions of linux where they don't provide ecm packages, so you have to search for the ecm source code and compile yourself, this isn't hard, but some people probably wouldn't be able to do it.

[MasJ]

I don't think there are instances where the files are rar->7z->bin.ecm. It could be just rar->bin.ecm or 7z->bin.ecm. As for why it's this way, a lot of our files are very old. They were uploaded to our servers almost 15 years ago. Over the years different methods of compression were tried and although with today's broad band connections it's almost all unnecessary, back in the day, every MB made a difference.

This is why you'll find some of our files with strange compression methods. We do replace/upgrade our sections from time to time (we did the gamecube section last year) but as you can see with the size of this site, it can take quite a while to carry out such changes.

Hope this explains the situation. If you make a Youtube video explaining to people how they can work through these various compression techniques, we'd be more than happy to feature it