How to play video CDs (SOLVED)

[satimis]

Hi all,

I found old video CDs on my stock of audio CDs but I couldn't play the old video CDs. VLC media player has been running.

$ apt policy vlc

vlc:
  Installed: 3.0.16-1build7
  Candidate: 3.0.16-1build7
  Version table:
 *** 3.0.16-1build7 500
        500 http://hk.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

$ apt policy ibdvdread4

N: Unable to locate package ibdvdread4

$ apt policy libdvdnav4

           
libdvdnav4:
  Installed: 6.1.1-1
  Candidate: 6.1.1-1
  Version table:
 *** 6.1.1-1 500
        500 http://hk.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Already installed

Please advise. Thanks

Regards

[Holger_Gehrke]

Have you tried File->Open Medium->VCD/SVCD ? At least that's what the wiki says to do.

Holger

[ajgreeny]

Were these commercially produced DVDs that need libdvdcss?
See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Re...ts/PlayingDVDs for all the information about installing and configuring libdvd-pkg that could be your solution.

[satimis]

Have you tried File->Open Medium->VCD/SVCD ? At least that's what the wiki says to do.

Holger

Hi Holger,

Thanks for your advice,

Please see attached screenshots. That are all found by me

Regards

[satimis]

Were these commercially produced DVDs that need libdvdcss?
See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Re...ts/PlayingDVDs for all the information about installing and configuring libdvd-pkg that could be your solution.

Hi ajgreeny,

Thanks for your advice.

That link is for older version of Ubuntu. I'm now running Ubuntu 22.04.

It is very strange to me. I have smplayer installed and running. But it can't play the video CD

Regards

Edit
====
smplayer;

After reconfig;
Open -> Disc -> VCD

Now I can play old video CDs.

Is there any way ripping video CD as .mp4 file and save it to hard drive?
I have very old film video CDs such as;
Gone with the Wind
Casablanca
The Guns of Navarone
Lethal Weapon
etc.

HandBrake ?

Thanks

[ajgreeny]

Yes, handbrake should do it for you.

Depending on your hardware it may take a long time to encode the video file chosen.

[satimis]

Yes, handbrake should do it for you.

Depending on your hardware it may take a long time to encode the video file chosen.

Hi ajgreeny,

I have handbrake installed on REPO

I found following URL
How to Convert DVD to MP4
https://www.wikihow.com/Convert-DVD-to-MP4

and follow the steps on;
Method 1 - Using HandBrake

But unable to find the source of VCD. Pls refer to attached files.

It is quite strange to me. I can play the video CD without problem

Regards

[ajgreeny]

I suspect what you have is not a normal DVD but a DVD disk with video files on it.
Unfortunately I have no experience or knowledge of how best to deal with those.
What, if anything, does the file manager of you system show if you look at the DVD using that, assuming you can mount it to show the files, of course.

[satimis]

I suspect what you have is not a normal DVD but a DVD disk with video files on it.
Unfortunately I have no experience or knowledge of how best to deal with those.
What, if anything, does the file manager of you system show if you look at the DVD using that, assuming you can mount it to show the files, of course.

Those Video CDs are very old CDs. I don't think they are DVD. The films recorded on them are very old films. I suspect whether DVD came to birth at that time.

Gone with the wind
Casablanca
The Guns of Navarone
etc.
are very old films. I purchased them long time ago. Unfortunately there is no indication on those video CDs, only showing 'Video CD"

They can be converted to .mp4 directly running VLC to .mp4. On another thread I made a mistake. The filename "Track 10.wav" was assigned by VLC automatically. Actually I can rename them before OR after conversion to "filename.mp4". It is NOT necessary running ffmpeg again to convert them to .mp4 on Terminal.

Those Video CDs can be mounted automatically or manually. Their contents are shown on the screenshot of my posting above.

Regards

[qyot27]

Video CD is the precursor format to DVD. It was developed in the early 90s by Sony, Philips, etc., and published as one of the color book standards like audio CDs.

DVD uses MPEG-2 at standard definition resolutions (for the most part). VCD uses MPEG-1 at VHS-level resolution. VCD is also not encrypted, although there are blurbs in the Wikipedia article about *some* later discs in Asia having some sort of copy protection on them (but otherwise no information on what kind it is). But AFAIK, the White Book standard itself does not define anything of that nature the way DVD and Blu-ray both mandated particular DRM schemes for inclusion (not mandatory to use, but a company couldn't use some other weird DRM instead of the ones in the standard).

What that means is that, it's highly likely (read: near 100% certainty, barring the above-mentioned blurb) that just copy and pasting the .dat files from the MPEGAV directory to the hard disk and renaming them from .dat to .mpg is enough to get literally any player to recognize them if they aren't smart enough to recognize them by MIME type alone or from FFmpeg's format probing. The .dat files are just standard MPEG-1 Program Streams, although when authoring them there is a parameter that mplex has to set to create VCD-compliant files.