ISO/IEC 12246:1993

This International Standard specifies the physical and magnetic characteristics of an 8 mm wide magnetic tape cartridge to enable interchangeability of such cartridges. It also specifies the quality of the recorded signals, the format and the recording method, thus allowing, together with ISO 1001 for Magnetic Tape Labelling, full data interchange by means of such magnetic tape cartridges. It is based on ISO/IEC 11319, but uses Dual Azimuth Recording to allow the raw capacity to be doubled. The format supports variable length Logical Records, high speed search, and the use of a registered data compression algorithm.