VCD Player

[Astrogirl]

Hello, I want to know what freeware VCD player is the best...because I tried play my disc with VLC Player but does not appear the menu I made for it and also freezes.

Thank you,

[LJB]

Have you tried Media Player Classic?

[Astrogirl]

Media Player Classic works fine, but the menu does not appear, know why???, I made the menu with Nero.

[tomlee59]

Although your question doesn't seem to belong in this particular forum, the quick answer is that if you want menus, you should see http://www.videohelp.com/play

As the page says, you'll need other software to do what you want. VLC and MediaPlayer will just play the movie itself (as you've found).

[jman98]

Maybe you didn't make the menu correctly. With Nero, that's certainly possible. Nero is not recommended for this. Note that VCD menus are only supposed to be still images with text. No audio, no movie clips and so on. Nero doesn't really obey the standards for VCDs, although it comes close enough for most uses. It may let you create menus that are invalid, which is probably why VLC and MPC won't play them.

Menus are seriously overrated and just about useless for VCD. You'd be better off to create your VCDs with VCDEasy and skip the menus, but there's a guide somewhere (search and you can find it at the VCDEasy website) on how to make menus that will work with VCDEasy. If you insist on using Nero, then you'll probably need to find a non-free DVD player like WinDVD or PowerDVD to try to play the menus with.

[tomlee59]

Maybe you didn't make the menu correctly. With Nero, that's certainly possible. Nero is not recommended for this. Note that VCD menus are only supposed to be still images with text. No audio, no movie clips and so on. Nero doesn't really obey the standards for VCDs, although it comes close enough for most uses.

As jman98 notes, Nero is a dodgy tool. If you search this site, you'll see no end of unhappiness over Nero's many quirks. It may very well be the case that re-authoring your VCD with better software *might* get your menus to play on VLC/MediaPlayer. But I agree with jman98 that menus on a VCD are sort of a waste of time, really.

[Midzuki]

It seems that nowadays there are no other applications than
Win"bloat"DVD and Power"bloat"DVD that support VCD 2.0
(read: PlayBack Control) If you show to MPC
where is the damn file ITEM0001.DAT, MPC will display the VCD menu,
but the menu will not be allowed to interact with the user.

[E D I T ]

P.S.: Another saddening "discovery": MPlayer's UI, MPC, Lalim VCD Player,
et coetera, stupidly assume "AVSEQ**.DAT == MPEG track".
--- which means that even a compliant multi-clip VCD probably will not be played
back properly (because an MPEG track may span across two consecutive .DAT files),
and a non-compliant VCD surely will never be played back correctly by such
lazily-designed applications.

[Midzuki]

[ ooops ]