ISO vs CSO?

mikej3131 · 04-04-2008, 12:26 AM

Can any1 tell me the difference between these two in detail and which one is better?

legendofaj · 04-04-2008, 12:29 AM

iso and cso are the exact same thing, but a cso is a compressed iso.

mikej3131 · 04-04-2008, 12:57 AM

hmmm i see. what sites test their compression and are good to get backups from?

Ive read that to play a cso, i would need to have a UMD in the psp as well. is this true?

If i convert the cso to an iso using "PSP ISO Compressor v1.4", would it be a 1:1 iso image of the game like it orignally was? or is it a (lossless compression), or whatever you call it when you can never convert it back to exactly what it originally was?

p70471 · 04-04-2008, 01:00 AM

Getting .iso's or .cso's without paying is piracy and is not allowed to be discussed on this site.

mikej3131 · 04-04-2008, 01:03 AM

whats the point of converting it back to an iso file then if its lossless?

pazuzu · 04-04-2008, 01:03 AM

some games lag in cso format

mikej3131 · 04-04-2008, 01:07 AM

do the graphics get worse when it is compressed?

NuMB3Rs · 04-04-2008, 02:24 AM

not every game

mikej3131 · 04-04-2008, 02:50 AM

How many MB's are games compressed when they change to cso?

darkprodigy · 04-04-2008, 02:54 AM

ok well from my knowledge a cso takes some files out and compresses the rest of the iso. Also for instance I took my god of war umd and put it on my computer and compressed it and then it became laggy. Put it on as an iso and it wasnt anymore.
I also did this with my final fantasy crisis core umd and on the cso it took out some of the cut game scenes. The iso didnt.

All I can say is which do you value more the gameplay or memory space?

mikej3131 · 04-04-2008, 02:57 AM

how much do the graphics suffer?

ringding · 04-04-2008, 08:29 AM

i am very new to this PSP scene, but have been dealing with "image" files like bin/cue etc for many moons, so please take what i am about to say w/ a grain of salt... an ISO is a straightup image of a CDROM/disk/UMD. What i heard is that back when there were only 1GB MS's, and UMD ISOs were bigger than 1GB, that someone figured out how to rip certin un-needed parts of the ISO image out... i have heard that the un-needed parts could be music or cutsceens, or just "blank" parts of the image. After they figured that out, they "recompiled", if you will, the ISOs w/out the aforementioned needless info, thus making them smaller and able to fit on a 1GB MS. Kinda like if the ISO was a picture of a building and the area around the building, someone figured out how to get rid of the non-building portions of the picture (image), making the ISO image smaller yet still large enough to hold all the necessary info to see the building. So it's lossy compression, but what is lost is needless anyway. The reason they lag is because the info left on the CSO image is not in the exact same sector of the image, so the laser has to look around on the image until it finds the info it needs. That's the jist of what i heard, please go ahead and call me a 'n00b' and correct me if i am mistaken/misinformed, as I am just as curious to know the 100% correct reasoning for making CSOs as the next 'n00b'. On another note, i think that 'n00b' is a stupid word; everyone is a 'n00b' at one point--no one was born with this knowledge, so it seems to me that people who call others 'n00bs' are just trying to look "cool" when they know good and well that they had to start learning from square one just like everyone else. Unless they are robots or aliens--don't get me started there

Sharing info is the only way the scenes will survive, so if someone has a definitive answer on this i would love to hear it--not so i could become "l33t" and call people "n00bs", but so i could help spread the word so we can all understand how it works.

Palmtree · 04-04-2008, 11:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by darkprodigy

I also did this with my final fantasy crisis core umd and on the cso it took out some of the cut game scenes. The iso didnt.

Are you sure about this? I have an original UMD of Crisis Core as well as a backup and I've noticed no difference. I'm not saying there could be no lag on a compressed image, but what I am saying is that I'm pretty sure all the files are still there, there have been no missing cut scenes for me.

I'm going to make up some numbers for an example, let's say I have an ISO at 1.3gb, if I compress that to a CSO, I might get a number around 900mb. If I take the CSO and turn it back into an ISO, I get the full 1.3gb back... nothing is ripped from the image.

The only problem I've noticed with compressed images is in PaRappa the Rapper, there is flicker in the videos so I play that as an ISO, everything else is CSO

Tets · 04-04-2008, 12:28 PM

I don't understand why people claim that compressing UMD dumps can diminish the graphical quality, it's an outright lie. ISO compressors can't magically find all the files that textures are stored in and lower their quality. CSO is more comparable to zip or rar archives than mp3 audio or jpg images. Everything that goes in comes back out exactly the same, and the only disadvantages are potentially longer loading times and more CPU cycles spent on decompression.

But if you're experiencing things like the flickering video that Palmtree reports, you should use a compressor that will allow you to leave video files uncompressed. There's no point in compressing them further anyway.

Palmtree · 04-04-2008, 12:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tets

I don't understand why people claim that compressing UMD dumps can diminish the graphical quality, it's an outright lie.

I was going to say that too, but I wasn't 100% sure, I tend to not notice things like textures or even audio quality, so I thought I'd leave it for someone who knows more... hell I can't even tell the difference between an mp3 at 128kb/s and 320kb/s