VCDs Play well on External Players&TV but not on PC

[vaibhav]

Hello friends, Firstly forgive my humble errors as I am new to the forum Business. Actually the problem is that here in India we get a lot of poor quality vcds on rent due to piracy. These vcds have a bad habit of sometimes not playing on my pc(Asus 52x & Samsung ComboDrive 16x40x32x12x). windows does not recognize the vcd and says that the drive is empty or that It cannot read from the source. But these vcds play nive enough on any External VCD player. I did some R&d and found out that NERO shows that video tracks to be there on the VCD so I dont understand why windows does not recognise the vcds. I would be belssed if someone could give me a software player which plays the vcds directly insted of using the interface that windows provides.

[setarip]

"NERO shows that video tracks to be there on the VCD"

Exactly what is it that "NERO shows", that you are describing as "video tracks"?

[vaibhav]

When we go Nero>Recorder>View Tracks>(Select Vcd)
the tracks are shown. I extracted these tracks from the vcd and saved them in a image file. Then I played these tracks on VirtualDub (no other soft could open the file) it plays fine though jerky due to the lost index.

And I have actually solved my prob . A software called VideoLAN read the VCD like a external VCD player. It disables the retry option of the drive due to which the computer does not hang when the drive encounters errors on disk. And i can watch any kind of damaged disk which can just be detected by the drive.

[vaibhav]

In case anyone needs the link to VideoLAN post a message and I will put it up freely

[vuvan]

Hi vaibhav,
I have a disk VCD 1. which cannot be read by Windows (XP, 98SE). However I was able to make a backup (disk copy- burning without saving to HD first using Nero, NTI CD Maker...). I also like you backed it up to HD by using Nero to save it as Nero ISO images file.
1) I just downloaded VideoLan VLC Media Player Skin. I am not familiar w/ this software yet. I tried to open /play it using Open Target/Device F: (where my VCD is)/Disk type:VCD/Stream output setting: play locally/MPEG-1.
I havenot able to open/play any track. Please advice.

2) Have you ever tried to convert this type of VCD to Windows based format which can be open/play by Windows based player such as PowerDVD/Windows media player...

A similar case for DVD which is PAL format. To convert to NTSC format - I got some info. from dvdrhelp.com I wonder there should be some softwares (utilities) to do the same thing for VCD which may be produced under a different O.S. from Windows...

Thanks,
Vuvan

[vuvan]

Hi vaibhav,

I was able to play this VCD with VideoLan VLC Media Player Skin by open Files (instead of Disc) and select the tracks which are Nero ISO Images files (VCD was backed up to HD by Nero as the first step). VideoLan player cannot open the disc directly.

Thanks,
vuvan

[vaibhav]

Hi,
Well that was good. It is always nice to hear from people who research on VCDs n stuff like me.
I have done a lot of research on DVDs and Divx also. I have even tried to modify the divx codec and succeded partially and as soon as i make something noticable i'll put it up.

Vabs

[danbeherenow]

sounds good!