image format support

[Guest]

Is there any support presently or in the future for support for other image formats other than the two presently supported?

[Val (staff)]

Is there any support presently or in the future for support for other image formats other than the two presently supported?

Hi,

Do you mean the CD/DVD image formats supported by StarPort?
Currently ISO and MDS (Alcohol/Daemon Tools format) are supported by StarPort directly.

There are a lot of CD/DVD emulators in the world, so I doubt we will add any other image formats to the StarPort at least in the nearest future.

FYI our StarWind iSCSI server also supports the image formats and it is built as an easily extensible modular software (supports plugins).
I think we will extend StarWind's functionality if there are some users who need some additional image formats...

BTW what image formats do you need to be supported?
We'll add your suggestions into our wish list.

[Guest]

Yes that is what I meant.

The file format extensions that come to mind are .cue, nrg, mds, ccd, with cue being the big one.

And yes there are a lot of DVD/CD emulators out there, but with a few notable eceptions most of them err....ummmm...stink. and most do not have an associated server platform (Starwind)

Flexibility is the name of the game , especially if you've been archiving for years in one format and then wish to use your product.

I will look at Starwind. Where do I find the extensible fille format plugins?

[Guest]

See, the problem is it's a bit out of our interest I'll try to describe what I mean. StarPort was not planned as complete CD emulator. Just b/s we're good friends with Daemon Tools, Alcohol Software and Paragon Software (I guess they all share 90% of CD emulator market). So releasing free CD emulator would destroy their business. That's why you'll never see lot of supported formats in StarPort itself. We're looking for OEM market only, so showing we can deal with ISO and subdomain of MDS is enough to proove we're capable of doing virtually any CD/DVD emulation related project

Back to StarWind and plug-ins. It's another story. Keeping universal client (*any* iSCSI compatible initiator can be used to emulate CD/DVD device on the client side) and easily extendable server (thru the plug-in DLLs) provides us with a way to support any CD/DVD image format in a counted days. So again OEMs should be happy with 1) compatibility (iSCSI is all of the same) 2) stability (kernel components and core service ones are not changing) 3) easy to extend (30KB DLL takes care of MDS support for example). For now MDS (Daemon Tools/Alcohol Software format), CDI (Paragon format) and ISO (ww) plug-in DLLs are present. Purchasing StarWind SDK and StarWind redistributable license allows virtually everybody have own CD emulator project in a hours. Networkable and cross-platform out-of-box. That's what we do

Thank you for understanding!

Yes that is what I meant.

The file format extensions that come to mind are .cue, nrg, mds, ccd, with cue being the big one.

And yes there are a lot of DVD/CD emulators out there, but with a few notable eceptions most of them err....ummmm...stink. and most do not have an associated server platform (Starwind)

Flexibility is the name of the game , especially if you've been archiving for years in one format and then wish to use your product.

I will look at Starwind. Where do I find the extensible fille format plugins?

[anton (staff)]

Last posting was from me