Need help copying VCD to CD-R

[prmlscrmr]

This question is from an absolute beginner at this. There's a two disc VCD (original, not a CD-R copy) I have that I'm trying to copy to CD-R as backups to be played on my stand-alone DVD player. I have a decent CD Writer, but I don't know which program and what settings to use. So far I've attempted it once with the TMPGEnc program and it didn't play on my stand-alone DVD player. I'm not quite sure if I even did it right. The file I extracted from the original VCDs were the huge .dat files that are playable with Windows Media Player. And well that's as far as I got. I'm not really sure what to do. Should I try using VCDEasy? I don't want to go through trial and error and waste a bunch of CD-Rs to get this right so hopefully I can get some help here. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Also, my stand-alone DVD player says it's able to play DVD and VCD, but no mention of CD-R. Certain CD-R will play while others won't I think. Does it also matter what kind of CD-R disc to use? Thanks for any help.

[RealaT]

You don't need TMPGenc and VCDeasy if you are just wanting to copy the disc. Just try using nero, cdrwin, discjuggler, easy cd creator or whatever came with your cd writer drive and do a straight copy of the disc.

[gll99]

What about Nero's "CDCOPY option. This will make an exact duplicate of a CD, Disk to Disk. We all use tmpg and various other tools because our source is often avi which won't play on a DVD player or DVD with total file sizes from 5 gig and up which won't fit on 1 or 2 cd so we have to transcode the mpeg2(vob) to mpeg1 or (leave as mpeg2) at lower bitrate.

That is not your problem unless vcd disks have special layers and hold more info than standard CD.

[prmlscrmr]

Thanks for the help. I managed to use Nero's CDCOPY to duplicate a VCD onto a CD-R. On the computer, they are identical. Unfortunately, the CD-R copy does not play on my stand-alone DVD Player. I really don't understand what's wrong now. The original VCD did not have any menus or anything. Nothing special, and the CD-R copy still didn't work. I wonder if it's my DVD player?

[mdm]

Many DVD players don't support CD-R discs - try using a CD-RW.