Hector Martin

Stuff like Wii/GameCube yes rely on a laser-cut BCA (readable barcode) and laser-created marks that cause errors in the bitstream. Actually encoding physical copy protection schemes in an archival format is extremely difficult.

Some protections rely on the physical angular position of sectors in the single track bitstream. A format encoding that would have to encode the raw EFM bits *and* a detailed timing code encoding the exact coordinates of the data on disc.

Afaik these systems can all be handled pretty simply and just amounts to storing some metadata to reconstruct answers to challenge/response protocol similarly to how you can rebuild the physical bitstream from decoded data on the fly instead of storing the expanded bitstream form

I was thinking a format could be designed that made anything unexpected optional. The ECC data could be discarded if there were no errors in the sector, any errors in the 8 to 14 encoding could explicitly pointed out as a diff. Wobble could be marked as constant across the disk.

Agreed - though, I think, given a format with "complete" data it should be possible to build tools to extract a subset and dump it elsewhere as a different format.