Suggestion - Using ECM for ISO's

[Winged 2.0]

ECM is an awesome utility for compressing ISO's. Here are the steps in which to use it.

1. ECM the file by dragging the ISO to the program. (this compresses the ISO, although very slightly...)
2. Rar the ECM file with best compression and a solid archive. (this compresses the file GREATLY. I had Xenogears at 700+ MB and when it went through this process it was 200+!)

I think that doing this would really benefit EP. 1, it would cut down on bandwidth. And 2, it would make the 56k'ers happy and vote cause of something thats more easily accessible. To make this make sense to the people without ECM to un-ECM the ISO, I could write a tutorial if nessecary. Anything to help out EP!

There is more info about this here.

[Del_Boy]

Yep, I can recommend this utility too. In fact a user named Knowitman first directed me to it a while back (he made a post about it). Unfortunately the thread sank without a trace :/

Edit:

Which I see you have linked to yay

[Winged 2.0]

I was just about to post about ur edits topic. Good call.

[crusher]

Better compression than with 7-zip?

EDIT: Nevermind, appears to be something very different...

[Josh]

Yeah. Del_boy and I did several tests on a few ISOs and got good results. That is why I posted it. It is sad that the thread sank down without a response.

[Articwolf]

wow...im checking into it and if it works better then 7-zip then im all for it!


all i have to say is wow!
I took tekken which was a 30 meg rared file and unrared it...now it is 44 megs. I put it in ecm and it became 32 megs...then i added it to a 7-zip archive with ultra compression and although it hogged every single resource i had on my cpu and took 25 minutes to do....the file was only 9.55 megs!!!!just absolutely amazing!this will not only make it easier for people to download but also save me a lot of hard drive space and make me share more.thanks!

[Del_Boy]

Glad to see it worked You could theoretically use Moobys CDR plugin to compress it instead of 7zip which would then (hopefully) give you an image that will play compressed in EPSXE.

[az_bont]

You could compress it with ECM, which removes all that error correction stuff, and then compress it with 7-zip. By compressing it with both of those programs, you will get an image file that is typically two-thirds the size of an image that has simply been RARed.

However, ECM only exists for Windows and Mac OSX, at least at the moment, which would mean there would be quite a large percentage of people left completely helpless.

7-zip on the other hand, is a format for which compressors and decompressers are widely available on just about every operating system you could imagine. Even the Amiga.