I wanted to get into VCDs when I was a kid and I got a portable CD player that could also play VCDs, but the player was so buggy I just gave up. Maybe now is the time
Reading the first half or so made me think, "Wow, they should really fix this."
The second half made me think, "Wow, what a gross format. Really glad we have no use for these anymore!" (Not that they should leave the Explorer crash unfixed, of course).
It's bananas to me that a CD-ROM cost like $400 in 1990s money at one point; then I spent $150 on my first CD burner around 2002, and now you can buy a USB Blu-Ray/DVD/CD recorder drive for under $40.
VCD was in-keeping with the style of the time. General-purpose compute was expensive, so it was avoided.
Like the red book audio CDs that preceeded them, white book VCDs were a way to make playback a light-weight task on very specialized (maybe even single-purpose) hardware.
That's not necessarily a meaningful goal these days, but our limitations were different back then.
It's about as gross as regular Red Book CD audio. Sacrifice error correction for capacity. Errors in either audio or video streams are non-critical (to a point) and can be masked on playback. That's what C1 and C2 error correction does. There used to be copy protections that played silly games with error correction to foil CD audio rippers while not affecting playback on normal players. Think it was called Cactus Data Shield. It was not very effective.
And similar to VCD disks, the *.cda files Windows shows on audio CDs also aren't real.
Random anecdote: There was Video Cd, but also CD Video. CD video had both an (inner) CD part with audio, as well as a Laserdisc part which would usually contain a music video. Very weird format, but cool to have both analog and digital storage in one medium.
win10/11 should be able to automagically mount ISO image with double click. There might be a way of isolating exact problem bit and distills it into USB flashable image with arbitrary filename.
From a brief look, an ISO won't capture a video cd. The video data is listed in the iso 9660 filesystem, but it's on a different track. iso files are a single track.
I have reported the bug to Microsoft through the Feedback Hub at the end of 2025. Nothing has happened since — no feedback, no confirmation, no fix.
That's Feedback Hub working as intended. Think of it more as a black void to scream into, to relieve frustrations, than an avenue of communication with Microsoft.
Something related to directly copying a file from a zip file on the c: drive to a network samba drive. The file will copy to about 40%, transfer drops to 0 kb/s, the .zip file gets corrupted, and I have to restart Windows to exit the file transfer.
Not 100% repeatable and I'm not sure how many of those specific details are required to trigger it. Extracting the .zip file before copying does seem to prevent it though, which is as far as I've gotten debugging it.
The funny thing is, with current AI systems I am reasonably sure you could point Fable or Astra at windows source code, give it that article to read, and tell it to try and figure out what the problem is, and couple hours later it would find out what the problem is. The issue, of course, it trying to get this support ticket to land in front of an engineer at MS in the first place.
Hilarious! Thanks for the research and write-up. I enjoyed the read.
I never thought we would talk about VCD's again LOLLL
nice to see something about this technology again. It was pervasive across SE asia for a little :).
I wanted to get into VCDs when I was a kid and I got a portable CD player that could also play VCDs, but the player was so buggy I just gave up. Maybe now is the time
Reading the first half or so made me think, "Wow, they should really fix this."
The second half made me think, "Wow, what a gross format. Really glad we have no use for these anymore!" (Not that they should leave the Explorer crash unfixed, of course).
It's bananas to me that a CD-ROM cost like $400 in 1990s money at one point; then I spent $150 on my first CD burner around 2002, and now you can buy a USB Blu-Ray/DVD/CD recorder drive for under $40.
VCD was in-keeping with the style of the time. General-purpose compute was expensive, so it was avoided.
Like the red book audio CDs that preceeded them, white book VCDs were a way to make playback a light-weight task on very specialized (maybe even single-purpose) hardware.
That's not necessarily a meaningful goal these days, but our limitations were different back then.
It's about as gross as regular Red Book CD audio. Sacrifice error correction for capacity. Errors in either audio or video streams are non-critical (to a point) and can be masked on playback. That's what C1 and C2 error correction does. There used to be copy protections that played silly games with error correction to foil CD audio rippers while not affecting playback on normal players. Think it was called Cactus Data Shield. It was not very effective.
And similar to VCD disks, the *.cda files Windows shows on audio CDs also aren't real.
Random anecdote: There was Video Cd, but also CD Video. CD video had both an (inner) CD part with audio, as well as a Laserdisc part which would usually contain a music video. Very weird format, but cool to have both analog and digital storage in one medium.
win10/11 should be able to automagically mount ISO image with double click. There might be a way of isolating exact problem bit and distills it into USB flashable image with arbitrary filename.
From a brief look, an ISO won't capture a video cd. The video data is listed in the iso 9660 filesystem, but it's on a different track. iso files are a single track.
Most use of VCD I saw was in karaoke, the low res graphics but decent sound worked fine for that - my karaoke DJ mate had hundreds.
VCD was the home video format of the masses throughout much of Asia in the late 90s and early 2000s.
That's Feedback Hub working as intended. Think of it more as a black void to scream into, to relieve frustrations, than an avenue of communication with Microsoft.
I still have in my possession somewhere printouts in 3 ring binders of the red, blue, and yellow books.
I am very glad that stuff all died.
Red Book is still very much alive AFAICS. I have nothing about Blue Book either, but its extensions make things better, of course!
I've had a fairly similar issue recently:
Something related to directly copying a file from a zip file on the c: drive to a network samba drive. The file will copy to about 40%, transfer drops to 0 kb/s, the .zip file gets corrupted, and I have to restart Windows to exit the file transfer.
Not 100% repeatable and I'm not sure how many of those specific details are required to trigger it. Extracting the .zip file before copying does seem to prevent it though, which is as far as I've gotten debugging it.
The funny thing is, with current AI systems I am reasonably sure you could point Fable or Astra at windows source code, give it that article to read, and tell it to try and figure out what the problem is, and couple hours later it would find out what the problem is. The issue, of course, it trying to get this support ticket to land in front of an engineer at MS in the first place.