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
I too was fascinated by VCDs for a stint during my younger years.
For me, the attraction was the potential of breeching the then-seemingly impenetrable wall between my computer and TVs. I had recently come into the possession of a CD burner (DVD burners were not yet available, at least not cheaply) and when my family picked up a dedicated DVD player that was advertised as also handling VCDs, I saw an opportunity.
The associated software ecosystem was quite flaky, though. I tried burning them with Roxio Toast and Nero among other utilities, but producing VCDs that player would actually play was hit or miss. I burned several coasters and eventually gave up.
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.
These were big in the late 90s going into the early 00s. And there were also SVCDs which were MPEG2 video insead of MPEG1. There were a few brands of DVD players that supported them, APEX was the 90s one form China and then Phillips had some models that played lots of formats including avi files. The avi files often used a testing mpg4 video codec in the microsoft video player that got extracted and became the standard and grew into Divx and later Xvid.
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 inside 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.
Seeing all the AI-assisted RE projects that have appeared recently, that was my thought too.
...and despite MS having their own AI, one which many here have said their employees are required to use, and yet bugs like this remain unfixed, is a good example of why AI isn't replacing any developers. Ultimately a human has to care enough to even point the AI at the problem.
I ran into this bug myself recently when trying to digitize a family collection of old CDs. Lots of family photos and videos, that were backed up in a mix of file formats and disc formats. I used Linux for most of the process after figuring out that windows fully locks up and becomes unusable with video CDs.
I ended up simply skipping most of the video CDs because the format is simply awful. In my case most of them were slideshows of family photos, and in every case I was able the find the same photos in a better format on other CDs.
Additionally with a good third of the video CDs, they were essentially unreadable. I assume due to lack of error correction. The whole process I did was surprisingly lossy. I ended with a too-large stack of CDs that I got little to no data off of. Two disks were seemingly identical and I got different sets of corruption on each. A puzzle for me to reassemble some other time.
That odd behaviour and "can't even do a safe restart" state sounds very familiar to those who have used Win9x; and there, it's usually the result of some memory corruption in the kernel.
The bug first appeared with the monthly updates 2023-03 (KB5023706) for Windows 11 and 2023-04 (KB5025221) for Windows 10. The initial releases of Windows 10 and Windows 11 22H2 with no updates do not have this bug
...and everything older likely doesn't either, especially from the time when VCDs were far more commonly used.
Pulling the files off (and ignoring errors, the way Windows does) loses that.
I suspect this might be the clue; perhaps some overzealous "security scan" tool (or these days, AI) flagged a "bug" in the error handling path, and something was done to appease it, but created this other subtle bug.
I've had luck ripping VCDs on Linux with vcdxrip -v -p -i /dev/sr0
Alternatively, first creating a bin+cue on windows with imgburn (ISO won't do!) and then vcdxrip -v -p -b the.bin -c the.cue
Having been such a popular format in Asia, a rich assortment of VCDs keep showing up at flea-markets in Norway; both original productions sold as VCDs, as well as "silvers", that is, exceptionally poor-quality pirated movies, often amusingly so. A popular example is "Star Wars: Backstroke of the West", with subtitles machine-translated from english to chinese, and then back to english.
VCDs, like DVDs, tend to have multiple audio tracks with different languages, even though the format doesn't actually support that technically. Take "yangtze three gorges" for example; a Chinese nature documentary with perfectly cheesy intros and outros. There was three "audio tracks"; the original Chinese, plus English and Japanese dubs. VCD only allows for a single audio track, so you find Chinese in the left channel, and English on the right. Televisions sold in Asia would have a toggle-switch on the remote to select one of the two audio channels to duplicate to both speakers.
Of course, having two dubs, the Japanese dub was made by having another copy of the whole video file, except with Chinese+Japanese.
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
I too was fascinated by VCDs for a stint during my younger years.
For me, the attraction was the potential of breeching the then-seemingly impenetrable wall between my computer and TVs. I had recently come into the possession of a CD burner (DVD burners were not yet available, at least not cheaply) and when my family picked up a dedicated DVD player that was advertised as also handling VCDs, I saw an opportunity.
The associated software ecosystem was quite flaky, though. I tried burning them with Roxio Toast and Nero among other utilities, but producing VCDs that player would actually play was hit or miss. I burned several coasters and eventually gave up.
They were best sourced form a relevent alt.binaries. groups. Two I recall were Movies and Videos, which had TV show rips.
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.
These were big in the late 90s going into the early 00s. And there were also SVCDs which were MPEG2 video insead of MPEG1. There were a few brands of DVD players that supported them, APEX was the 90s one form China and then Phillips had some models that played lots of formats including avi files. The avi files often used a testing mpg4 video codec in the microsoft video player that got extracted and became the standard and grew into Divx and later Xvid.
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.
Yeah, also my impression.
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 inside 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.
Works without source code too tbh.
Seeing all the AI-assisted RE projects that have appeared recently, that was my thought too.
...and despite MS having their own AI, one which many here have said their employees are required to use, and yet bugs like this remain unfixed, is a good example of why AI isn't replacing any developers. Ultimately a human has to care enough to even point the AI at the problem.
I ran into this bug myself recently when trying to digitize a family collection of old CDs. Lots of family photos and videos, that were backed up in a mix of file formats and disc formats. I used Linux for most of the process after figuring out that windows fully locks up and becomes unusable with video CDs.
I ended up simply skipping most of the video CDs because the format is simply awful. In my case most of them were slideshows of family photos, and in every case I was able the find the same photos in a better format on other CDs.
Additionally with a good third of the video CDs, they were essentially unreadable. I assume due to lack of error correction. The whole process I did was surprisingly lossy. I ended with a too-large stack of CDs that I got little to no data off of. Two disks were seemingly identical and I got different sets of corruption on each. A puzzle for me to reassemble some other time.
That odd behaviour and "can't even do a safe restart" state sounds very familiar to those who have used Win9x; and there, it's usually the result of some memory corruption in the kernel.
The bug first appeared with the monthly updates 2023-03 (KB5023706) for Windows 11 and 2023-04 (KB5025221) for Windows 10. The initial releases of Windows 10 and Windows 11 22H2 with no updates do not have this bug
...and everything older likely doesn't either, especially from the time when VCDs were far more commonly used.
Pulling the files off (and ignoring errors, the way Windows does) loses that.
I suspect this might be the clue; perhaps some overzealous "security scan" tool (or these days, AI) flagged a "bug" in the error handling path, and something was done to appease it, but created this other subtle bug.
I wonder if this could be escalated to a vulnerability somehow. How privileged is the operation of mounting virtual drives?
I've had luck ripping VCDs on Linux with vcdxrip -v -p -i /dev/sr0
Alternatively, first creating a bin+cue on windows with imgburn (ISO won't do!) and then vcdxrip -v -p -b the.bin -c the.cue
Having been such a popular format in Asia, a rich assortment of VCDs keep showing up at flea-markets in Norway; both original productions sold as VCDs, as well as "silvers", that is, exceptionally poor-quality pirated movies, often amusingly so. A popular example is "Star Wars: Backstroke of the West", with subtitles machine-translated from english to chinese, and then back to english.
VCDs, like DVDs, tend to have multiple audio tracks with different languages, even though the format doesn't actually support that technically. Take "yangtze three gorges" for example; a Chinese nature documentary with perfectly cheesy intros and outros. There was three "audio tracks"; the original Chinese, plus English and Japanese dubs. VCD only allows for a single audio track, so you find Chinese in the left channel, and English on the right. Televisions sold in Asia would have a toggle-switch on the remote to select one of the two audio channels to duplicate to both speakers.
Of course, having two dubs, the Japanese dub was made by having another copy of the whole video file, except with Chinese+Japanese.
"Do not want"