Friday, January 9, 2009

Convert cue bin files to iso on linux

When faced with cue/bin files the first reaction is to convert them to something you can use.  Essentially this isn't necessary.

If the contents of the cue/bin files is a movie or audio, mplayer can read the files natively:


mplayer "cue:///path/to/image.cue:track"


If you do need to access the contents of the raw image, then cdemu is your friend.  Once installed you need to start the cdemud daemon, then use the cdemu tool to expose your raw image on a new cdrom or dvd device, such as /dev/dvd2.


root@ # /etc/init.d/cdemud start
user@ $ cdemu -b system load 0 "/path/to/image.cue"
user@ $ mount -t iso9660 /dev/dvd2 /mnt/dvd2


Like this you have no need to perform any time consuming conversions with tools such as bchunk or bin2iso which proved to be unreliable for me.


If you want to burn the cue/bin files to disk - cdrdao should be able to do that, though I haven't tested it.