DiscImageCreator: dumping optical discs where the drive is the hard part

The software is easy, the drive is not

DiscImageCreator is a command line program that dumps a disc and a disk. The formats it names are CD, GD, DVD, HD-DVD, BD, GC/Wii, XBOX and XBOX 360 for optical media, and Floppy, MO and USB for magnetic and flash storage.

The important part of the design is that the tool does not treat all optical drives as interchangeable, and it says why in technical terms. For CD and GD it can dump taking into account a drive plus CD, that is a combined, offset, and the project links a document explaining what the drive offset is.

The reason the offset matters is that a disc image is not just the data area. A CD has a lead-in before track one and a lead-out after the last track, and a correct image has to include them, which means the drive has to be able to read regions that a drive reading data only will never touch. That is why the requirement section states that drives must be able to dump by scrambled mode and read the lead-out and the lead-in, and why there is a long list of drives that cannot.

The program runs on Windows XP or higher and on Unix based systems, Linux and macOS. The primary language is C++, the licence is Apache-2.0, and the last push to the repository was on 2026-10-12.

The homepage is a thread on the redump forum, which tells you where this tool sits: it is the dumper used to produce the images that redump catalogues, and the forum thread is where the drive compatibility discussion happens.

The recommended drive list is the documentation

The bulk of the project documentation is a drive list, and reading it is the fastest way to understand what the tool can and cannot do.

For CD, the recommended drives are PLEXTOR units, with the note that no OEM drive is to be used, and the models listed are the DVD models PX-760, PX-755, PX-716, PX-714, PX-712, PX-708 and PX-704, and the CD models Premium2, Premium, PX-W5224, PX-4824 and PX-4012. There is a firmware caveat attached, that the app needs the latest firmware except for the PX-708, which can use the latest and 1.04, and the project points at a document in the repository for firmware downloads and tools.

ASUS appears with the BC-12D2HT and BW-16D1HT, and for the latter there is a note that firmware 3.02 supports the combined offset plus disc. Hitachi-LG has the UH12NS30, marked as combined offset minus disc only.

Then there is a category for swappable drives, and the project is careful about its own evidence: it says this is the confirmed drive list and adds that actually many drives perhaps support swapping. Under that heading sit the Sony Optiarc AD-7200, combined offset plus disc only, and the TSSTcorp TS-H353A and TS-H352C, both combined offset minus disc only. For GD, the TSSTcorp TS-H353A, TS-H352C and TS-H192C, with a link to a forum post suggesting another drive might also work.

For DVD, the entry is simply all supported drive. For DVD in raw mode there is another PLEXTOR list, a Lite On LH-18A1P, and ASUS and LG models requiring firmware 3.02, and a pointer to the wiki redump page for MediaTek Blu-ray drives. And for HD-DVD, again all supported drive.

The pattern in the whole list is that PLEXTOR drives are the ones that appear for every format, and they are the ones the project insists must not be the OEM variant.

Game console discs and the extra hardware they need

The console formats are where the tool's requirements stop being about a drive and start being about modified firmware.

For GameCube and Wii, the recommended drive is the Hitachi-LG GDR-8082N, 8083N and 8084N, the GDR-8161B through 8164B, and the GCC-4160N, 4240N, 4243N, 4244N and 4247N. The documentation is honest about the gaps: the GDR-8085N, GDR-8087N and GCC-4246N have not been tested yet but probably support dumping, and the GCC-4241N and GCC-4242N support dumping but many errors occurred.

PLEXTOR drives are also listed for GameCube and Wii, including a separate development disc category, and for both the note is blunt: it's extremely slow.

For Xbox and Xbox 360 the drives listed are the TSSTcorp TS-H353A, TS-H352C, SH-D162C, SH-D162D, SH-D163A and SH-D163B, and the SH-D163A and SH-D163B need the firmware hacked by kreon. A swappable Hitachi-LG GSA-4163B also appears.

For Blu-ray, all supported drives work, with the exception that the PS3 is only supported by a MediaTek drive or a PS3 drive, and if you want to dump the data1 and data2 areas you need the 3k3y ripper, with a link to an archived copy of the original 3k3y site.

So the console media have three separate kinds of obstacle: a drive model requirement, a speed warning, and in two cases a firmware modification or a separate ripping hardware. None of that is a software problem, and that is the point of the drive list existing.

What it reads, and what it refuses to read

The supported media list is long and specific, and it covers far more than the current generation of optical formats.

For CD there are around thirty formats, from Apple Macintosh and Atari Jaguar CD through Commodore Amiga CD, CD32 and CDTV, Fujitsu FM Towns, NEC PC-88, PC-98, PC-FX and PC Engine CD or TurboGrafx-CD, Palm OS, Panasonic 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, Philips CD-i, Photo CD, Sega Mega-CD and Saturn, Sharp X68000 CD, SNK Neo Geo CD, Sony PlayStation and PlayStation 2, Tandy and Memorex Visual Information System, Tao iKTV CD, Tomy Kiss-Site CD, Video CD and VTech V.Flash.

For GD there are the Namco, Sega and Nintendo Triforce, the Sega Dreamcast, the Sega Chihiro and the Sega Naomi. For DVD there is DVD-Video, IBM PC compatible, the Sega Lindbergh, the Sony PlayStation 2 and the VM Labs NUON DVD. For Blu-ray there is the Microsoft Xbox One and the Sony PlayStation 3, 4 and 5.

Then the interesting part, the protected disc formats that are read rather than refused: Cactus Data Shield 100 with a fake TOC, 200 with an intentional C2 error, 300, CD Lock with a characteristic track, LaserLock with a no signal sector, LibCrypt with unique data on the subchannel, Key2Audio with a pregap, PhenoProtect, Proring, ProtectCD-VOB with an invalid sync, SafeDisc, SecuROM versions 1 to 3, and SmartE with a duplicated MSF. The brackets tell you what the expected artefact of each scheme looks like, which is a nice piece of engineering documentation.

Beyond optical media, the tool handles magnetic storage media, that is 3.5 inch floppy, SparQ, SuperDisk at 120MB, ZIP drives at 100MB and 250MB, and jaz; magneto-optical disks, MD in the Hi-MD format and MO at 128MB, 230MB and 640MB; and memory cards, CompactFlash, Memory Stick, Secure Digital cards and USB flash drives.

And then there is the section titled probably unsupported disc, listing CodeLock, and the section titled unsupported disc, listing SecuROM version 4 and higher, StarForce and CD-Cops, with the note that these need DPM, data position measurement, and cue.

Protected discs that the project says are the wrong tool for

There is a distinction in the documentation between what is unsupported and what is probably unsupported, and the reason given is a capability difference rather than a policy one.

The probably unsupported category holds CodeLock, described as an intentional C2 error and an invalid sync, and the comparison drawn is with CloneCD and CD Manipulator: the project says that compared with those tools, plextor detects double errors. So the difference is in error detection, and the argument is that the PLEXTOR hardware's behaviour is more precise rather than more permissive.

The unsupported category holds SecuROM version 4 and higher, StarForce and CD-Cops, and the reason given is recording density. These need DPM, data position measurement, and cue.

There is also a specific not recommend list for CD drives, and the reason is capability rather than policy: the drives listed cannot read lead-in or lead-out, and cannot execute the 0xd8 opcode. The list is long, covering PLEXTOR PX-8xx and PX-Bxxx units, a PX-751A, a PX-750A and UF, a PX-740A and UF, the PX-6xx series from Pioneer and Panasonic, a PX-504A and UF, the PX-2xx series, the PX-1xx series, a PX-S2410TU, a PX-54TA and a PX-R24CS, and then a line for other vendors generally.

One specific protected disc gets its own entry, SecuRom 3 on a PLEXTOR PX-4824A, with the note that the ecc or edc of the second sector does not match.

The pattern across all of these is consistent. The software is not refusing to attempt these discs because of a policy, it is stating that its output would be wrong, and the documentation is specific about why in each case.

Building it, and the two ways the project ships

The repository carries two Visual Studio solutions, DiscImageCreator.sln and DiscImageCreator_linux.sln, which tells you the project builds on both platforms from one source tree, and there is a meson.build at the top level as a third path. The source lives in the DiscImageCreator/ directory, with test/ and Release_ANSI/ alongside, and the Release_ANSI directory is where the release packaging assets live, which is also where the drive compatibility spreadsheet is referenced from, the DVDRawBruteforce drive sheet.

The project also documents how to build on a Unix system, through the wiki at the GitHub wiki link under how to use. The wiki is where the command line reference lives, since the readme itself deliberately does not describe the commands.

Bug reports have two destinations: the redump forum thread that is the project's homepage, and the GitHub issues page. The guidance in the project documentation is that if you report a bug you should try to use the latest test version, and the test builds are published as a 7z archive for Windows and a tar.gz for Linux on a mediafire link. And if a bug exists, you should upload all the .txt files the app created, which is the sort of instruction that only makes sense for a tool whose primary output is a file and whose logs are its diagnostic evidence.

The release naming is date based rather than semantic: the tags are 20260101, 20250901 and 20250501, dated 2026-01-01, 2025-09-01 and 2025-05-01. So a release is a snapshot, and there is no minor version line to track. The repository is not archived, and the last push was on 2026-10-12, which is after the most recent tagged release.

Where DiscImageCreator is the wrong tool

The first limit is the hardware, and it is the limit that decides everything. If the only optical drive attached to your machine is a laptop DVD-ROM or an OEM desktop drive, the tool will not produce a complete image, and no amount of configuration changes that. The requirement is that the drive can dump by scrambled mode and read both the lead-out and the lead-in, and the list of drives that cannot is a list of consumer drives. For most people reading this, the first question is not which command to run but whether their hardware is on the list at all.

The second is that this is a dumper, not an archiver. It produces an image file. What happens to that file, whether it is verified against a known-good hash, whether it is named and catalogued in the redump format, is outside this tool. A project that wants a preservation pipeline needs the imaging step and the catalogue step, and this is the first one.

The third is the platform split in the build. Two solutions and a meson.build means three build paths to keep working, and the Linux build is the one that is not a Visual Studio solution at all. The readme notes that MPF can drive the program with a GUI, which is a genuine option for anyone who does not want to learn the command line, but it also means another moving part.

The fourth is the console media in practice. The Xbox and Xbox 360 requirement for kreon-hacked firmware is a legal and technical obstacle that the documentation states plainly and does not help with. The 3k3y ripper for Blu-ray data1 and data2 is a separate piece of hardware that has to be sourced from an archived download. And the GameCube and Wii section warns that the PLEXTOR route is extremely slow, which for a full disc means a long process, repeatedly, for every disc.

The fifth is scope. The tool covers disc and disk imaging and the protected schemes it can read. It does not verify, it does not repair, and it does not tell you whether the image is correct beyond the read errors it can detect. For a preservationist the verification step is the one that matters, and it lives in the redump catalogue, not here.

Editorial conclusion

DiscImageCreator is the tool for someone building an archival disc image who has already worked out whether their drive is capable, because the project's centre of gravity is the drive compatibility list rather than the command line, and that list is detailed to the firmware revision. It is the wrong tool if you expect a single universal command, and the wrong tool if your only drive is a laptop DVD-ROM that cannot read the lead-in or the lead-out. Before you plan an archiving run, check the three things the project states: that the drive must be able to dump by scrambled mode and read both the lead-out and the lead-in, since a drive that fails that test cannot produce a complete image no matter what the software does; that the recommended hardware is a specific list of PLEXTOR, ASUS, Hitachi-LG, Sony Optiarc and TSSTcorp models, with firmware requirements stated per model and a link to a firmware and tool document; and that the game console media has its own conditions, since Xbox and Xbox 360 discs need a drive with hacked firmware from kreon, and Blu-ray data1 and data2 dumping needs the 3k3y ripper.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: Apache-2.0
2. Project website
3. README
4. Releases
5. saramibreak/DiscImageCreator on GitHub