Earlier today I had need of a disc image that was only available in the irritating MagicISO “UIF” format, and my Linux box was the only machine available to deal with it.

MagicISO is an irritating, closed-source, proprietary Windows-only application that is available in free and paid versions; only the paid version enables all “features.” The tool’s officially-declared purpose is to permit easy conversion between all the various (and largely useless; the ISO and BIN/CUE formats are standardized and satisfy all CD and DVD imaging purposes) disc image formats. Such tools are only useful in the first place because of all the competing (and equally proprietary) disc formats being pushed by assorted companies, and the insistence by idiot newbies and posers of using the damned things.

What makes MagicISO so irritating isn’t the fact that it only runs on Windows, is closed-source, and requires payment of a fee to enable all its features — what makes it irritating is that it introduces yet another proprietary format for storing CD-ROM and DVD-ROM images. Naturally, because it only runs on Windows, other people who run Mac OS X, Linux, or any other platform at all can’t deal with the format. It introduces compression and encryption (again in proprietary ways, which is unnecessary because compression has been done before (and far better, by much smarter people), and encryption is something that should be done separately (do you really trust the encryption algorithm developed by some guy bolting on a feature to a proprietary disc image tool?).

Fortunately, Luigi Auriemma has written a utility to convert UIF images back to the standard-issue ISO file. Unlike MagicISO itself, this conversion tool is open source. Here’s how to build and use it.

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