Quote Originally Posted by gildedlink
Well my general goal is simply to make the iso file fit on the disc overall, so that is done as the disc is being burned? ......
No, an ISO that is too large cannot be made to fit on a CD "while burning" (not counting "overburning", which doesn't seem to be the issue here).

What is this ISO that you speak of? If you have remaster and created an ISO with more stuff on it, then it is likely that the ISO is too large and something will have to be removed to make the ISO smaller. This has been happening to Knoppix since I first saw it, every time something has been added to Knoppix, other things have had to be removed to make space for them. There were a lot more games on 3.1 than on the current Knoppix CD's. Some other things have been removed too.

On the other hand, at least one person has posted insisting that the Knoppix ISO he downloaded is too large, but he also insisted that the md5 checksum matched the published md5 sum. If the md5 file matched, then his ISO was certainly not too large and not as large as he was insisting it was. He never did post about the final resolution of the problem or what the confusion was though, as far as I know.

Compression is used to make one of the files in the iso. This results in a file on the CD that is less than 700 megs in size but holds about 1.8 gig of applications (based on their size before the compression). But the ISO (an image of all the files as they will be written to the CD) cannot be further compressed. Maybe someday someone will apply a differnt compression approach to the file that contains all of the applications and in doing so gain a little more space, but the current approach is pretty efficent and hard to improve upon.