Sometimes you may have downloaded a movie from a torrent site but it turns out that the files that are being downloaded are a bunch of .daa files.
What is daa?
DAA or Direct Access Archive is a proprietary file format for disk image files which supports advanced features such as compression, password protection, and splitting to multiple volumes. It can be handled directly just like other formats, such as an ISO image and BIN, but is currently only usable by PowerISO software. Popular disk image mounting programs such as Alcohol 120% and Daemon Tools currently do not support the mounting of DAA images.
And you might wonder how am I gonna convert this into an avi file? Well, most likely, the original source is already an avi file! Just that it’s been compressed into and imaged and split into various file parts.
I recently downloaded a file which has 28 .daa parts.
part01.daa
part02.daa
….
part28.daa
Here’s what you do - download poweriso from http://www.poweriso.com. The windows version cost $29.95. However, if you have linux, it’s free!
This article will cover how to convert a bunch of .daa files to the original avi file in Linux.
First of all, lets download poweriso
$ wget http://poweriso.com/poweriso.tar.gz
Next, untar the file
$ tar -zxvf poweriso.tar.gz
At this point, you’ll see a poweriso binary in the directory that you untared from.
Go to the directory where all your .daa files reside and run:
$ poweriso convert part01.daa -o filename.iso -ot iso
Converting the first part will join everything together giving you a final filename.iso file.
Remember, the iso file is an image created over the original file. So to see what’s actually in the iso file, enter:
$ poweriso list filename.iso / -r
You should see a file or files which makes up the iso.
So, let’s say inside the iso has a filename.avi which is the movie that you wanna watch.
Extract it out using the following command:
$ poweriso extract filename.iso / -od /home/user/vids/
Walah, you have your original file. Simple eh?
