Open An .ISO File
An ISO image is what’s called a disc backup – an exact copy of a CD or a DVD disc. ISO images are typically created as DVD backups, but they can also be made “from scratch” using a specialized editor like WinISO. An ISO file can only store a single track of data, so it doesn’t work for music CDs and a few more arcane disc types.
It may help to think of the .iso archive like a kind of archive because it usually contains a number of files and folders. However, unlike other archives (e.g. ZIP or RAR), the ISO archive stores everything in uncompressed form. Some commercial disc archive formats like UIF files and .daa file also support file compression.
To open an ISO image you will need to install one of the many ISO file tools. There’s a multitude of applications that can extract the ISO images, but most of them are either very expensive or simply lack any defining traits that would let you make an informed choice. So which one should you pick? Depending on your goal, there are two applications that I would recommend.
First, if you only need to open the archive, use 7-zip. It’s a free open-source archiver that can open ISO DVD images. It will let you open the disc image, but that’s it – 7-zip can’t burn, mount or create new .iso files. It’s a neat and simple application and it supports Windows and Unix-based systems.
In case you need a bit more features you should probably get a fully-fetured ISO image application like PowerISO. Yes, it’s shareware, but it will let you do nearly anything you want with an ISO or .uif files – open it, edit, load it in a virtual drive, convert to a different format, and burn to a physical disc. PowerISO only supports Windows, though.
To summarize, ISO is a popular, open DVD archive format that is supported by most DVD applications. Some general-purpose archivers can also extract .iso archives, but they generally can’t do anything else with them.