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.
Dude you and me both. My parents bought a combo VHS/DVD player that as it turned out could also handle VCDs, and I was able to watch a pirated version of AI with it. Eventually I got hold of a PowerMac 8500 with RCA in/out and really got cooking.
Seeing content created on my computer actually play on a TV really felt like a miracle in the 90s.
In 1997 there was the Pure3D graphics card, it was a 3DFX Voodoo 1 that could do TV output. Of course it could only do it on games as it still needed the 2D pass through for VGA output, but it was neat to see the PC doing what consoles could do.
Credit to HDMI, it finally standardized the IO systems that means PC to TV is trivial nowadays.
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.
Oh yes. I stepped through most of those, including the region-hackable Apex and a plays-anything Phillips.
Previous to that, I was doing some process or other on the PC that converted VCDs into a format that could be played on a modded PSX. The quality was terrible and I did it anyway.
When DVD was still a very new and expensive-to-use format, I scored a very cheap SCSI DVD-ROM drive that was a pull from some Sun machine or other. I never did succeed at playing a glitch-free film with it.
Part of that disappointment was due the 3dfx Voodoo 3 card lacking the MPEG 2 decoder that it had, at one point, been advertised to feature. In its place was a mail-in coupon that could be sent in for a software decoder...which never showed up, either.
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.
Additionally, I remember from this time (perhaps this was a very German thing) that bands and stars whose CDs used Cactus Data Shield or a similar copy protection system suddely got hated and abandoned by parts of their fanbase.
2002 was about when the whole market got disrupted by Lite-on, ironically. I was working in retail at the time and recall how their models just kept dropping from the 100-150ish range down to 50-75$ (and just kept going lower.)
What was even crazier was how fast DVD burners saw commoditization. The first Pioneer DVD Burner in 2001 launched at something like 1000$, and by 2004 lite-on was selling models for under 75$.
And, for most people, the Lite-On models were fine. I did have one customer that switched back to either Pioneer or Plextor (I can't remember which) because they were doing a -lot- of DVD writing (we're talking 4 burners running at once, that was a fun build to spec out!) and the Lite-On drives kept failing under the extreme use. Lite-On did have a good warranty process, however the downtime cost him enough that one day that he flat out asked what he should buy that was better. The drives we wound up going with were more than double the cost of the Lite-Ons, but he never had to warranty those [0].
[0] - Although, they did get seized in a raid apparently <_<
I'll then add that when I helped them with their first 4 burner build, they were so happy that they gifted me with a subtitled copy of Battle Royale before such existed on the open market (they somehow clocked me as a closeted weeb I guess...)
The reason I know about the raid, is they came in one Saturday in a frantic state, asking to build a new basic-as-hell rig to 'get back up and running' after the fact. Showed me the local news article, and yep in the seized goods if you zoomed in you could about make out our shop's case badge. They did have to go with Lite-Ons for that temporary build due to stocking, but did also have me re-order the better drives after the fact.
Have to add, he was a very honest customer with us. By that I mean, he was not one of the 'hagglers' we had to deal with[0], and we got the better drives in quickly, he came in and paid for them, but he did not abuse our return policy and return the Lite-On drives even though he could have [1].
Also wasn't a super frequent customer, but he was overall chill enough that he did have the note in our system of "This guy is cool, hook him up!" even the first time I got to work with him [2]
[0] - Ever have someone try to haggle a used K5 or Pentium chip that was priced at 5$ in 2002? I have.
[1] - One of our other customers that ran an independent computer repair shop, had a habit of buying products from us to complete a repair while ordering the same part from Newegg, and then returning the part Newegg delivered to them once they got it delivered. We only discovered it due to RMA discrepancies. That customer was 50% of the reason we started tracking Serial numbers for certain items, the other 50% being people who abused our return policy to deal with defective creative labs products.
[2] - Life pro tip, do not assign the note of "Customer Stole from us Call police" to yourself as a shitpost, when you go to a store 2 years after you left and the floor staff has rotated it gets a bit weird till they double check with management.
Reading the first half or so made me think, "Wow, they should really fix this."
They don't care. It works like this for copying over a network (i.e. copying speed goes to 0) but then recovers. They rewrote explorer and now it needs twice the clicks to achieve something.
Microsoft at its best.
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.
There was also CD+Graphics which encoded graphical information in a subchannel not used by CD audio. It ended up providing about 28kbps of data for the graphics. It is used for karaoke but some commercial albums were released that displayed images of the bands and stuff when played on a compatible player.
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.
VCD's look like standard iso9660 filesystems, but they are not. Attempting to use the filesystem entries for other than pointers to the start of files will result in pointing off the disk due to invalid data.
I wonder what they were thinking, whoever designed the VCD.
The only way to get the system working properly again is to restart the PC. A "soft" restart from Windows doesn't work, though; it just gets stuck at the "Restarting" screen forever. You need to do it by pressing the restart or power button.
Don't do this, you might lose data or mess stuff up. Just use task manager to kill explorer.exe before restarting. Or probably you can just kill explorer.exe and then go to File > Run new task, type "explorer" and press OK to start a new instance which should fix everything without restarting.
From the description I'm not sure Explorer is actually the culprit, as they mention other apps also causing this, if they use Windows’ own file copying routine. And that might mean just restarting Explorer might not work, when the CopyFile call hangs somewhere in the kernel.
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.
Dude you and me both. My parents bought a combo VHS/DVD player that as it turned out could also handle VCDs, and I was able to watch a pirated version of AI with it. Eventually I got hold of a PowerMac 8500 with RCA in/out and really got cooking.
Seeing content created on my computer actually play on a TV really felt like a miracle in the 90s.
In 1997 there was the Pure3D graphics card, it was a 3DFX Voodoo 1 that could do TV output. Of course it could only do it on games as it still needed the 2D pass through for VGA output, but it was neat to see the PC doing what consoles could do.
Credit to HDMI, it finally standardized the IO systems that means PC to TV is trivial nowadays.
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.
Oh yes. I stepped through most of those, including the region-hackable Apex and a plays-anything Phillips.
Previous to that, I was doing some process or other on the PC that converted VCDs into a format that could be played on a modded PSX. The quality was terrible and I did it anyway.
When DVD was still a very new and expensive-to-use format, I scored a very cheap SCSI DVD-ROM drive that was a pull from some Sun machine or other. I never did succeed at playing a glitch-free film with it.
Part of that disappointment was due the 3dfx Voodoo 3 card lacking the MPEG 2 decoder that it had, at one point, been advertised to feature. In its place was a mail-in coupon that could be sent in for a software decoder...which never showed up, either.
It was an interesting time in digital video.
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.
Indeed:
Additionally, I remember from this time (perhaps this was a very German thing) that bands and stars whose CDs used Cactus Data Shield or a similar copy protection system suddely got hated and abandoned by parts of their fanbase.
2002 was about when the whole market got disrupted by Lite-on, ironically. I was working in retail at the time and recall how their models just kept dropping from the 100-150ish range down to 50-75$ (and just kept going lower.)
What was even crazier was how fast DVD burners saw commoditization. The first Pioneer DVD Burner in 2001 launched at something like 1000$, and by 2004 lite-on was selling models for under 75$.
And, for most people, the Lite-On models were fine. I did have one customer that switched back to either Pioneer or Plextor (I can't remember which) because they were doing a -lot- of DVD writing (we're talking 4 burners running at once, that was a fun build to spec out!) and the Lite-On drives kept failing under the extreme use. Lite-On did have a good warranty process, however the downtime cost him enough that one day that he flat out asked what he should buy that was better. The drives we wound up going with were more than double the cost of the Lite-Ons, but he never had to warranty those [0].
[0] - Although, they did get seized in a raid apparently <_<
Go on…
I'll then add that when I helped them with their first 4 burner build, they were so happy that they gifted me with a subtitled copy of Battle Royale before such existed on the open market (they somehow clocked me as a closeted weeb I guess...)
The reason I know about the raid, is they came in one Saturday in a frantic state, asking to build a new basic-as-hell rig to 'get back up and running' after the fact. Showed me the local news article, and yep in the seized goods if you zoomed in you could about make out our shop's case badge. They did have to go with Lite-Ons for that temporary build due to stocking, but did also have me re-order the better drives after the fact.
Have to add, he was a very honest customer with us. By that I mean, he was not one of the 'hagglers' we had to deal with[0], and we got the better drives in quickly, he came in and paid for them, but he did not abuse our return policy and return the Lite-On drives even though he could have [1].
Also wasn't a super frequent customer, but he was overall chill enough that he did have the note in our system of "This guy is cool, hook him up!" even the first time I got to work with him [2]
[0] - Ever have someone try to haggle a used K5 or Pentium chip that was priced at 5$ in 2002? I have.
[1] - One of our other customers that ran an independent computer repair shop, had a habit of buying products from us to complete a repair while ordering the same part from Newegg, and then returning the part Newegg delivered to them once they got it delivered. We only discovered it due to RMA discrepancies. That customer was 50% of the reason we started tracking Serial numbers for certain items, the other 50% being people who abused our return policy to deal with defective creative labs products.
[2] - Life pro tip, do not assign the note of "Customer Stole from us Call police" to yourself as a shitpost, when you go to a store 2 years after you left and the floor staff has rotated it gets a bit weird till they double check with management.
They don't care. It works like this for copying over a network (i.e. copying speed goes to 0) but then recovers. They rewrote explorer and now it needs twice the clicks to achieve something. Microsoft at its best.
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.
There was also CD+Graphics which encoded graphical information in a subchannel not used by CD audio. It ended up providing about 28kbps of data for the graphics. It is used for karaoke but some commercial albums were released that displayed images of the bands and stuff when played on a compatible player.
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.
Google's feedback systems feel pretty much the same way
Yeah, also my impression.
An online /dev/null. Cool
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.
Take pcaps on your client and your server and compare...
I've seen some nasty things happen with broken NICs/drivers. One side gets nonsense data that the peer didn't send, and has poor behavior as a result.
Maybe add iperf3 to the test case to really get the network working...
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"
I wonder what they were thinking, whoever designed the VCD.
Don't do this, you might lose data or mess stuff up. Just use task manager to kill explorer.exe before restarting. Or probably you can just kill explorer.exe and then go to File > Run new task, type "explorer" and press OK to start a new instance which should fix everything without restarting.
From the description I'm not sure Explorer is actually the culprit, as they mention other apps also causing this, if they use Windows’ own file copying routine. And that might mean just restarting Explorer might not work, when the CopyFile call hangs somewhere in the kernel.