Peter O

---------------------------- Cynthia & Lightning, Thanks for your responses. Cynthia I am pretty sure you are correct but rather than trouble you in attempting an analysis of what went wrong, I will try to sort out the mess, that's well within my capabilities even if it means different SW. My burner I will check with a few audios MP3 songs, that should be quick. However if I end up using CDBurner XP (good reviews) I am still uncertain if I should burn my ISO files as data or ISO. Apparently I need to make this decision & the program selection options imply I should burn as ISO. Sounds simple I know, but if I had data files & wished to burn & convert to ISO would I not use the same selection? Now for the car example: it it does not help its just pointless (& it may be seen by some as condescending), & as you can plainly see because I told you, It did not help me. All I have been able to digest from your reply is: ISO files are very suitable for the electronic distribution of "regular" DVD video & you explained why quite well. I would like to see some other examples & some discussion of alternatives. I already have many video clips & a few "movies" on my HD. None got there by ISO means & some are obviously very condensed & the quality suffers, I guess in proportion to the degree of condensing. In what format are such files distributed? When I see "movie dwnld offers", there's no mention that I recall, of ISO files & the need to burn. I presume these are uncondensed movies & the user who paid for the dwnld would expect high quality, how is all the track material distributed in such cases? Finally you appear to acknowledge that there are plenty of idiots improperly using ISO files, as well as people like me who are frustrated by a format that is generally troublesome to the relatively inexperienced/non-technical, even though that ought not to be the case as you point out. Again thanks for taking the time to reply, Peter O

Look I genuinely respect your technical ability & that of other contributors & I note that as author of ImageBurn you have provided a free, simple, & apparently very useful tool for many users. However: I think your "car" example is just plain silly, it helps not one jot in establishing what iso files are for & why they are created as a presumably optimal distribution format. As for CD' burning being very simple I suppose Yes it is. But take my example of today: I have to locate a suitable CD burn program, for some reason the one I had just failed. I chose CDBurner XP. I have to dwnld & install. I searched for forum advice on how to view my iso file. The answer was burn a CD as an iso, which I did using the new program, set to burn iso files (possibly it should hav been set to data since i already had the iso file). I burned at a conservative rate of x10 having previously been disappointed with failures at high burn rates. The burn process took an unbelievable 43 minutes. And best of all I can't open/ read the damned files so burned. What a simple & glorious waste of time. Ah, you may say, well you did something wrong, or maybe you had a burn failure, or file corruption, or ..... whatever. My point is simply this, I strongly doubt that the iso format was justified in the first place, & the trouble it has caused me, & maybe thousands of others, is just not worth the use of iso in envronments/applications where, with a little thought, a simpler package of zipped files could have been created. What was gained, God knows except maybe the file packager got to demonstrate his technical prowess. Please just describe in simple terms an example of a real world situation in which the iso format is clearly superior given a "recipient audience" of average non-tecnical users. Also bear in mind that there are several forums where threads like this have gone on almost endlessly until one or other party gives in. Nobody should need to understand it, the enquirer can be "satisfied" with a work around (burn to CD ..... ) but I think I know how you would feel if say, MS suggested a work around to you. Rgds & thanks for the response

I now freely acknowledge that the best thing about ImageBurn and similar software is that burning an image, allowed using a single file to contain six individual short movies, instead of the poster having to post each short for download separately. That is the magic of ISO. STILL wrong! --------------------------------------------- Well I have read all the comment on the this lengthy exchange, & what seems remarkable to me is that the original poster, although he now has a practical solution, is still probably uninformed about the best use of iso files. That's not remarkable because I am also, despite the above "explanations", here & elswhere. For those of us who wish to use our computers in a simple effective way, it's beyond belief that so much material is posted in iso format. Who cares whether its a container file, we want something we can use without engageing in an education forum. Why rar anyway zip is only about 1 to 2 % less well compressed & most zip programs are easier to manage. I still have no real idea when you might use an iso file which elsewhere I read does not compress anyway. As for the original poster who wants to recieve playable Vid files, surely he should expect just that perhaps in zip format. Thats my $0.02 worth anyway.