It's Burning!

With AcetoneISO you can directly burn ISO images to an optical storage medium without involving external software. To do this, click on the Burn CD/DVD tab at the top of the main program window. AcetoneISO now opens an area that only allows you to select whether you want to erase a rewritable storage medium or immediately burn the image to a new medium. This medium may be rewritable, but AcetoneISO currently does not support blank Blu-ray disks. After you provide the file name and path, AcetoneISO transfers the image to the optical medium and then notifies you when the burn process has completed (Figure  3).

Figure 3: Images can be burned quickly and easily on optical storage media.

Storage Options

Often a finished ISO image can exceed the storage capacity of an optical storage medium. Therefore, AcetoneISO lets you split the ISO image, which is especially useful when you only have access to older optical storage devices with lower capacities. In this case, you can split the ISO image via the menu Archive Manager  | Split Image in Volumes  | Split. Using the same menu, but the entry Merge Split Image, you can conversely merge split images.

Via the Archive Manager, you can apply compression to reduce the size of an ISO image, especially when it contains text or information stored in particular multimedia formats. The menu option Compress Image  | Compress (or Extract) allows you to process the existing images. Additionally, you may encrypt and decrypt them.

For encryption, AcetoneISO presents a perfectly simple dialog, during which you only have to enter and confirm your passphrase to encrypt an image. For the decryption step, you only enter the passphrase once. The encrypted image with file extension .gpg is stored in the predefined database directory, and it is a good idea to first check whether you have enough storage available.

Finally, the archive manager offers the capability of unpacking password-protected RAR archives. For this to work, the package unrar-nonfree must be installed on your system. If AcetoneISO warns that the package is not available, you can find it in the repositories of popular distros and install it via the appropriate package manager.

Multimedia Features

Via the Video and Audio menus, AcetoneISO makes available several useful functions for processing multimedia content, with the emphasis on data conversion and a primary focus on video DVDs and content offered by the online services YouTube and MetaCafe.

Because AcetoneISO provides no conversion routines of its own, you will first need to install MPlayer and the accompanying encoder MEncoder, both of which can be found in the repositories of various popular distributions. Via the menu entry Video  | Convert FLV 2 AVI, you can convert videos downloaded from YouTube or MetaCafe, which most often are available in FLV format. During conversion, AcetoneISO displays the progress of execution at the bottom left in the Process Progress window.

You can also convert video DVDs and XviD videos to an XviD AVI container, which is done via the appropriate entries in the Video menu. Because the AVI format is considerably more popular than FLV, and AVI videos can also be played back by many DVD players, the converted files are more suitable for archival purposes on an optical device, which can then be used by a computer or a home movie theater.

If you made DVD archives with multimedia content and would like to watch the video content without first having to convert the image, this can be accomplished via the menu entry Video  | Play DVD image  | Play; just select the desired track in the file manager as usual.

The Audio menu merely sports the entry Extract Audio from a Video file, which stores the extracted audio track as a WAV file at a location of your choice. In this way, you can decouple pieces of music from a video and add them to your music collection. AcetoneISO is quite flexible with respect to the video file format. During my tests, the audio track extraction succeeded for files of type AVI as well as FLV.