Brennan's Weblog

DVD Installers, Is CD Media Dead?

Lately it seems that the choice media for installers is starting to be DVD. This has made sense for a couple of years for games which require tons of graphics and audio files but now Microsoft and Apple are starting to head in that direction.

A couple of weeks ago Microsoft released the Beta 2 release of the .NET 2.0 development environment. It comes as a 2.9gb download which is a DVD ISO file. It is massive and includes not just the 20mb .NET runtime but Visual Studio 2005 and tons and tons of MSDN documentation. My initial reaction was that it was annoying mostly due to the fact that I do not have a DVD burner and my drive at work does not even read DVD media. I waited in vain for a week for the CD ISO files but they are not coming. Microsoft is calling CD media dead and I was disappointed...

This week I find out that Apple is releasing MacOS X 10.4 Tiger on a DVD. You can get it on a multiple CD disk set through a $10 exchange program, but they really would prefer everyone just do DVD. It seems they are also calling CD media dead. I was also disappointed at that, but somehow since it was Apple it seemed innovative of them.

As I thought about past installations of Visual Studio or MacOS X I remember having to install everything in a certain order with multiple disks. With Visual Studio, SQL Server and SourceSafe it was especially a pain. And keeping 3 or 4 disks around for MacOS X can be a bit much. Since my iBook has had a DVD drive since I first purchased it I did not care about it being released on a DVD. At least I do not have to burn an ISO to a disk using my still yet to be purchased DVD burner.

And while I am on the topic, what is the deal with ISO files? I found that the versions of Windows I use do not have native support for mounting them. Instead you need to purchase some third-party tool like WinRAR which is able to extract the contents of ISO files. On MacOS X they have a format called DMG which is a sort of disk image and it is natively supported. It can pack up a group of files like WinZip but it is not just a zip archive. It is an actual disk image.

Perhaps the latest WinXP releases have native ISO support so those files can be mounted directly. If they do not, they really should. On my Mac apparently I can use hdiutil to mount an ISO image. I could use it to convert an ISO file to DMG and mount it natively. I do not see if there is a way to mount it directly in the Finder.

I would like to avoid purchasing a DVD burner as long as possible. I remember how bad the first CD burners were and I do not want to live through that again. And I also heard that DVD burners require a lot of processing power. I may just hold off since my next computer will likely have a DVD burner built-in anyway. That may actually be the second add-on to the Mac Mini I hope to purchase soon. The first add-on will be more memory.