Supported media formats

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almeath
Mac Mechanic
Posts: 170
Joined: Mon Jul 18, 2005 5:42 am
Location: Australia

Supported media formats

Post by almeath »

Yes, I am asking lots of questions while I get myself acquainted with QEMU :mrgreen: - I search around this forum and the web and cannot find answers, so..

May I ask, what are the supported CD/DVD image formats? I can get ISO and CDR to work. How about toast, dmg, bin/cue etc?

Can a physical CD be mounted and used? This is a major drawback with SheepShaver and it prevents use of some mixed mode CDs which I hope to see working again one day. It would be great if QEMU either supports it or it is being considered for development (support for BIN/CUE would also do the trick).
Programmingkid
Apple Corer
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Joined: Sun Jan 31, 2016 6:01 pm

Re: Supported media formats

Post by Programmingkid »

I'm not familiar with the BIN or CUE formats but I do know the Cocoa front-end supports these formats for media: img, iso, dmg, qcow, qcow2, cloop, vmdk, cdr, toast.

Also the qemu-img program that comes with QEMU does support converting a lot of other formats that could be turned into a format usable by QEMU. Here is what "qemu-img --help" displayed:

Supported formats: blkdebug blkreplay blkverify bochs cloop dmg file ftp ftps host_device http https luks nbd null-aio null-co parallels qcow qcow2 qed quorum raw replication sheepdog throttle vdi vhdx vmdk vpc vvfat
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adespoton
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Re: Supported media formats

Post by adespoton »

iso, toast and cdr are all the same format, just a different file extension, with some slightly different stuff put in the header. QEMU doesn't care about the header, but can read the container format just fine and load whatever it finds inside (HFS, HFS+ Joliet, FAT16) for the emulator to use. This *should* mean that it can read bin files the same way -- the cue file is the equivalent to the header info in the other formats.

What QEMU doesn't support is compressed images; so if you've got a DMG file that's got a compressed image inside, it will be unreadable. Disk images can be read as RAW, and ISO9660 CD images in DMG format (also known as CDR) can be referenced as type CD, as that's what they are.
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