.\"
.TH ECM-COMPRESS 1 "December 22, 2008"
.SH NAME
ecm-compress \- selectively strips error correction codes from CD images
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B ecm-compress
.RI " \fIcdimagefile\fR" " [\fIecmfile\fR]"
.br
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B ecm-compress
reduces the size of a CD image file (ISO, BIN, CDI, NRG, CCD or any other format that uses raw sectors) by eliminating the Error Correction Codes (EEC) and Error Detection Codes (EDC) from each sector when possible.
.TP
Since the data \fBecm-compress\fR strips is usually nearly impossible to compress with traditional tools, the resulting ECM file will compress far better than the raw CD image.
.TP
Hard drives already have mechanisms to protect data integrity, EEC/EDC data can thus be discarded safely.
.TP
This data can then be generated again using the command \fBecm-uncompress\fR.
.TP
Because \fBecm-compress\fR only discards EDC/ECC data for sectors where it's verifiably possible to recreate that data, the process is lossless. In case of copy protection, \fBecm-compress\fR will preserve the bogus data.
.SH EXAMPLES
.TP
.B ecm-compress foo.bin
strips the ECC/EDC data from the foo.bin CD image and save the resulting file as foo.bin.ecm
.TP
.B ecm-compress foo.img foobar
strips the ECC/EDC data from the foo.img CD image and save the resulting file as foobar
.br
.SH SEE ALSO
.BR ecm-uncompress (1).
.br
.SH AUTHOR
\fBecm-compress\fR was written by Neill Corlett.
.PP
This manual page was written by Loïc Martin <loic.martin3@gmail.com>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others), using the documentation written by ECM author Neill Corlett.