VCD movies - I can't find a ripper!

[robsamui]

Hi - VCD seems to have gone right out of fashion. All I want to do is to make a collection of some of my favourite scenes from VCDs that I made of my daughter when she was a toddler. These were converted onto VCD 7 or 8 years ago from the original video 8.

I'm looking for a program that will allow me to rip short clips of anything up to 3 or 4 minutes and save them im MPG or avi format. But *everything* now is DVD - rippers and converters! I'm looking at pulling apart dat files - or better still an application that reads directly from the VCD movie disk, plays it and allows me to set start and end times for clipping.

Any ideas??

Cheers

Rob

[guns1inger]

ISOBuster can, I believe, extract the mpg files from the dat container. Otherwise, try opening the dat files in virtualdubmpeg2 or AVI Demux.

[SanderMan]

You can also try vcdgear or the tools from tmpgenc.

[AlanHK]

VCDGear (freeware).
Use the DAT-> MPG option.

You can edit the resulting MPEG1 using many tools, notably TMPGEnc, which works on MPEG1 in free mode.

The old free version of SVCD2DVDMPG preps these to make a DVD.

[robsamui]

Thanks for the info - I'll check this out.

But does anyone know of something the same as, frinstance, Xilisoft DVD ripper? This reads the movie directly, you can preview a start point and choose "encode from this point". When you hit "stop" it leaves you with a ready-made mpg or avi. Real straightforward! It takes a couple of minutes for a clip and it's done.

Cheers

R

[AlanHK]

Thanks for the info - I'll check this out.

But does anyone know of something the same as, frinstance, Xilisoft DVD ripper? This reads the movie directly, you can preview a start point and choose "encode from this point". When you hit "stop" it leaves you with a ready-made mpg or avi. Real straightforward! It takes a couple of minutes for a clip and it's done.

I doubt it. Hardly any new software is written for VCDs now.
But it's possible some DVD tools also work on VCDs if you give them a try.
Ripping an entire VCD to mpeg with VCDGear only takes a few minutes anyway.

[robsamui]

Thanks AlanHK - you're probably right that there's no support for VCD. I'll have a go with VCDGear.
Cheers!
R

[jagabo]

You can open a DAT file directly with TMPGEnc's MPEG Merge/Cut tool, mark-in, mark-out, save...

This works best if you copy the DAT file to a hard drive first. But you can do it directly from the VCD.

[jman98]

jagabo's suggestion will work, but I don't recommend using TMPGenc's MPEG Merge/Cut tool. For a sizeable minority of people, this tool will introduce horrible audio sync problems into what it edits. I happen to have a PC that has this problem. In fact, it's specifically what drove me into purchasing MPEGVCR years ago to use as an MPEG editor. The original poster may or may not have sync issues with TMPGenc's Merge/Cut tool, but he should be aware that it is possible and if he is one of those people who does have problems, there's no fix for it. Nobody seems to know why certain systems have problems with it and others (most?) work fine.

MPEGVCR and VideoReDo both can edit MPEG-1 (VCD). Both are "try before you buy".

[jagabo]

But TMPGEnc, if it works for him, is free.

Also worth consideration, if you want to convert segments to AVI, is VirtualDub.

[mgh]

vcdcutter is perfect for the job-google for it- a free version was available