Rented VCDs appear as blank discs on my laptop

[terhi]

Hiya, Newbie here. I'm in Ethiopia with my HP Pavilion dv4000 laptop (with all the basic trimmings). I've WinDVD etc. software that came with the laptop.

I've been renting films from local vendors (whose disks are about 1500 copies from the original). They mostly use the VCD format, on 2 disks. Around 2 months ago, any new films that these vendors recieved work on their (usually stand alone) VCD players, but on my computer they just appear as blank disks. Before, I hardly ever had any problems with their disks, bar the ones they'd used to brush the floor.

Any help on the issue is GREATLY APPRECIATED!!!!!

Love!
t

[jman98]

Either there is something wrong with the discs or they are copy protected to prevent you from playing them in a PC. If you can play it, you can copy it, so that's why in India they deliberately "break" the VCDs so that PCs can't play them. They may be doing the same in Ethiopia for all I know.

What can you do? If you can find a computer that runs Unix/Linux, load the disc in it and see if it can see anything on it. Anti-copy stuff only works on Windows, so if you see data on the disc under Unix or Linux, you have a copy protection issue with Windows.

[Bjs]

No so ...

Try going here : http://cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_utils_2.shtml

Down the bottom of the list are two popular tools ... that might pickup whats going on

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It might be softlock ... dosent affect top set players that support vcd ... just every thing else .

Info from else where suggest's isobuster , sellect dat , and choose filter mpeg frames ... dont know , it was mentioned in another forum .

Then there's this sucker ... http://forums.xbox-scene.com/lofiversion/index.php/t77076.html .

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Get hold of a capture device , and record them playing back from dvd player that supports vcd / svcd's ... then you'll have your own copy ... and it wont mater what they do to them .

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Just out of curiosity ... you could try the following ... if your up for a challenge ... I'd do it myself , but dont have a protected vcd ... never seen one .

Download this : http://www.freeweb.hu/doscdroast/index.html

And go here

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm , download the win98se one .

Unpack ... use zipgenious ... the default for the os may work ... but there's no guarantee's .

You now have a folder containing all of doscdroast ... and a folder with an ima image

If you have nero , create a bootable cd ... and load this ima file , and add doscdrosts folder content (not the folder itself) and burn at 2x .

Or imgburn ... mode = build .
Click advanced , then bootable cd .

Here there is an option to include the ima file ... do it before anything else .

Back on the file side of things .
You will see above one of the box's the name "source ... next to it a green +
Click the file icon ... and add all the files from the doscdroast folder .
Then click the folder icon under it , and add the three remaining folders .

You can now insert a cd and burn it .

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Problem with ntfs might exist as you need somewhere to put this file unless you can get dosntfs reader included , should it work .

From here : http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/Active-NTFS-Reader-for-DOS-Download-6609.html

Or : http://partitionlogic.org.uk/download/index.html

Is able to resize partitions ...
Also one called prezz ...

Resize hd partition , to create a new 3 gig partition at the end of the hd , and format it to fat32 .

It will be this partition that doscdroast will write the file .

You can also burn it from here ... worth atleast giving it a go .

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Thats about the extent of it ... you could even try a linux distro to rip it , but that depends if the tool's have been included

See how you go ...