This question got me curious so I decided to investigate.
First of all, BIN
is not a file format. It's just an extension that says it is a binary file. Several CD/DVD disk image file formats are proprietary to the application that creates them while others are open (ISO 9660, Juliet, UDF)
When you create a disk image from files and folders using ImgBurn, by default it uses the
Universal Disk Format
file system to store the data. UltraISO on the other hand usesJoliet
. ISO 9660 is common between the two of them. (I got this information using IsoBuster)When you create a
BIN
file using ImgBurn containing nothing but an empty folder (ImgBurn wouldn't allow creating an image with absolutely nothing in it) the filesize is about1 MB
and do the same in UltraISO and you end up with a much smaller57.4 KB
BIN
file. However, theBIN
file created using ImgBurn contains a lot of null bytes and is highly compressible (1.64 KB using RAR) while UltraISO seems to add some kind of extraneous information to the image file so it doesn't compress as well (3.23 KB using RAR)ISO 9660 file name format for images created using UltraISO are
DOS 8.3
(by default) which allows for 8 character file names and 3 character extensions while ImgBurn uses Windows/Unix compatible 31 character name format.