Mac OS X: Best Way to Make an ISO from a CD or DVD

Question

Both command-line and screen-oriented pointers appreciated!

update:

I verified the disk utility, hdiutil, and dd methods. dd seems the fastest, 30 minutes on my macbook pro vs. 40 minutes for hdiutil. I was able to simplify dd to use just if= and of=

For DVD, I used /dev/disk2. I unmounted it first

$ sudo umount /dev/disk2
$ dd if=/dev/disk2 of=mydisk.iso

Answer 1

There are generally three ways to create a disk image on an OS X box:

1. Disk Utility - The on-screen prompts will guide you, but it will indeed only create a .dmg, which is an OS X-specific file format.

2. Roxio Toast - The de facto third-party standard in creating optical media on Mac OS for over a decade, it will create almost any CD or DVD format you want.

3. The hdutil command-line utility, which will, in fact, create every format that Toast supports, for free, though it is far less pretty. If you want to create an ISO with this tool, use hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o Image.iso /input_path

There is a fourth, extremely direct command-line way using dd that sysadmins might know: dd if=/dev/disk1 of=Image.iso

Answer 2

Open /Application/Utilities/Terminal.app/

dd if=/dev/disk1 of=~/myCD.iso bs=2048 conv=sync,notrunc

That should do it!

Answer 3

Actually Disk Utility will create an ISO (.cdr extension). Just ensure you select the "CD/DVD Master" option before creation the image.

That file can then be used like any other ISO file only requiring a rename for certain dumb Windows apps that baulk at the .cdr extension.

Been using this method for ages with no problems.

Answer 4

As mentioned in other answers you can use Disk Utility or dd to create an ISO image of the original disc. But if the disc is copy protected, it contains decryption keys in the lead-in area of the disc which cannot be read directly, and are not part of the ISO image. So if you burn a new disc with this image it will not play on a standard DVD player. Nevertheless, you can play it using a program like VLC which doesn't need the keys, since it is able to circumvent the encryption.

If you want a program that will copy the disc to the hard drive and also remove the copy protection so that you can burn it to a new unprotected disc, MacTheRipper will do that, but it looks like it hasn't been updated in a while. (Only a PowerPC version is listed.)

For storing on your hard drive you might find it more useful to transcode the content to unencrypted H.264 using Handbrake. This will save you a lot of disk space compared to storing the MPEG-2 content that is used on DVD-Video discs. However, it will not preserve the DVD menus, and if you want to burn a DVD that you can play on a standard DVD player then you would have to convert it back to MPEG-2.

Answer 5

After looking into dd command line tool...

I found you can also create a disk image using disk utility.

Just create a new image and select “DVD/CD Master”. - Apple adds the extension .cdr but you can rename the file to end in .iso and it will work as a standard ISO.

Anyone know how this effects any drm protection on disks?

Answer 6

You can use the dd command line tool. Make sure you unmount the drive first though.

dd if=/dev/dvd of=dvd.iso

This will make a bit-for-bit copy of the DVD.

Answer 7

As far as I know, Disk Utility won't create an ISO image, only a Mac image. But the command-line utility hdiutil will create an ISO image; I had to do this the other day. Check the man pages for the gory details. Toaster Pro from Roxio will create ISO images directly. Note that even though I've never been able to figure out how to create an ISO image with Disk Utility, it will happily burn them to CDs with no problems.

Answer 8

http://macapper.com/2007/03/29/disk-images-create-virtual-disk-images-on-os-x/

Here's a method that uses the built in Disk Utility application.

Answer 9

Don't forget asr, the Apple Software Restore command-line utility: it can operate like a raw copy program like dd, but it has more bells and whistles. Not least, it will work directly with volume pathnames, as dd won't.

Answer 10

I've been looking for a way to do this for a while (obviously didn't look too hard) and this works really well for me. My goal is to get all my disks "backed up" and encoded so that my AppleTV can play them from my NAS box with an AC3 soundtrack.

I have a Mac Pro with 2 DVD drives in it.

Opening 2 terminal windows allows me to make 2 ISO's at the same time, by specifying the different drive in each window. The hard disk is faster than the two DVD drives, so there doesn't appear to be a bottleneck, even when they are both being written to the same disk or folder.

The crucial piece, and if like me you just want the main feature, not the menus etc...is to use Handbrake as mentioned, but if you have VLC sitting in your Applications folder, the latest version of Handbrake uses VLC on-the-fly to bypass the disk protection.

My solution is now to RIP 2 disks at once and when they are done, queue them up in Handbrake to change them to my preferred video profile. I reckon I will be saving hours and hours by the time I have been through my collection!

Thanks again for the inspiration found here!

Answer 11

disk utility, hdiutil are both OK to create an ISO from DVD or other disks, but they are not easy to use, especially the outputed ISO file is not good. Recommend this better method to Make an ISO from DVD.