Media Descriptor File (MDF) is a proprietary

disc image A disk image, in computing, is a computer file containing the contents and structure of a disk volume or of an entire data storage device, such as a hard disk drive, tape drive, floppy disk, optical disc, or USB flash drive. A disk image is usua ...

file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file formats ...

developed for

Alcohol 120% Alcohol 120% is a disk image emulator created by Alcohol Soft. It can create and mount disc images in the proprietary Media Descriptor File format. Images in this format consist of a pair of .mds and .mdf files. Alcohol 120% can also convert imag ...

, an

optical disc authoring program Optical disc authoring, including DVD authoring, DVD and Optical disc authoring#Blu-ray Disc, Blu-ray Disc authoring, is the process of assembling source material—video, audio or other data—into the proper logical volume format to t ...

. Daemon Tools,

CDemu CDemu is a free and open-source virtual drive software, designed to emulate an optical drive and optical disc (including CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs) on the Linux operating system. , CDemu is not available in the official repositories of Debian, Ubuntu ...

MagicISO MagicISO (also referred to as MagicISO Maker) is a CD/DVD image shareware utility that can extract, edit, create, and burn disc image files. It offers the possibility of converting between ISO image, ISO and Cue sheet (computing), CUE/BIN and the ...

, PowerDVD, and WinCDEmu can also read the MDF format. A ''disc image'' is a

computer file A computer file is a computer resource for recording data in a computer storage device, primarily identified by its file name. Just as words can be written to paper, so can data be written to a computer file. Files can be shared with and transfe ...

replica of the

s and

file system In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...

of an

optical disc In computing and optical disc recording technologies, an optical disc (OD) is a flat, usually circular disc that encodes binary data (bits) in the form of pits and lands on a special material, often aluminum, on one of its flat surfaces. ...

. Unlike an

ISO image An optical disc image (or ISO image, from the ISO 9660 file system used with CD-ROM media) is a disk image that contains everything that would be written to an optical disc, disk sector by disc sector, including the optical disc file system. IS ...

, a Media Descriptor File can contain multiple layers (as used in

dual-layer recording The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...

) and multiple optical disc tracks. Like the IMG file format, a Media Descriptor File is a "raw" image of an optical disc. The word ''raw'' implies that the copy is precise, bit-for-bit, including (where appropriate) file-system

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

. A Media Descriptor File may be accompanied by a Media Descriptor Sidecar file. This optional binary file (with file extension .mds) contains metadata about an imaged optical disc, including a delineation of where disc layers begin and end ("layer breaks"), and which portions of the MDF belong in which disc layer. The MDS file also stores the location and value of the layer breach bit, a

CD/DVD copy protection CD/DVD copy protection is a blanket term for various methods of copy protection for CDs and DVDs. Such methods include DRM, CD-checks, Dummy Files, illegal tables of contents, over-sizing or over-burning the CD, physical errors and bad sectors. M ...

mechanism. The MDS file is comparable to the CloneCD Control File and cue sheet (.cue) file formats. However, their capabilities are not identical; also the cue sheet is a text file format.

's MDF/MDS format is one of the few formats besides Nero's NRG, BIN/CUE and CloneCD's CCD/IMG/SUB disc image formats to support

Mixed Mode CD A mixed mode CD is a Compact Disc which contains both data and audio in one session. Typically the first track is a data track while the rest are audio tracks. The most common use for mixed mode CDs is to add CD-quality audio to video games on a ...

s which contain audio CD tracks as well as data tracks.

References

{{Disk images Archive formats Computer file formats Disk image emulators Hacker culture Optical disc authoring Hardware virtualization Warez Compact Disc and DVD copy protection

See also

References