can't open mpegs made over 5 years ago - used tmpg

[heidihagen]

Back in 2001, I converted ALL of the family videos to mpeg vcd. They still PLAY on the dvd player, but won't open in windows. I had an ATI all in wonder capture card, and used TMPG. Is there any way to open these? My goal is to convert them to dvd since there are over 50 VCD disks... but can't get far with windows not recognizing them. Any ideas?

[Ai Haibara]

Did you actually write them to VCDs, or did you just convert the MPEGs to VCD standards?

If they are indeed VCDs, it could be that Windows just doesn't know what to do with the .dat extension files. You should be able to use VCDGear to convert the .dat files to MPEG. Others might suggest simply renaming the files from .dat to .mpg, but it's probably a better idea to do the conversion instead (I don't remember how different the .dat files were from a plain MPEG.)

[Baldrick]

Or isobuster. Right click on the dat and choose to extract it to a mpg.

[tomlee59]

The fact that they play ok in standalone players but none do in Windows strongly suggests a problem with Windows. Try playing them with VLC, rather than Windows Media Player. If they play then, you're golden.

In any event, VCD Gear or VCD Easy will convert the .dat files on the VCDs into ordinary .mpg files. You'd need to do this anyway to finish your job of converting to DVD. You can then use TMPGEnc to demux the streams, and then to resample the audio to 48kHz (from VCD's 44.1kHz). Remux, and the result will be DVD-compliant -- no transcoding required, so you can get the job done quickly. You can fit up to 5 standard VCD mpg streams on a DVD5 blank. If you use (Verbatim) DL media, you can put your entire VCD collection on a half-dozen discs or so.