Extracting jpg photos from the ITEM####.dat files in the VCD segment folder

[H-Man1953]

Hello,

I'm new to this forum so please excuse me if I have posted this message in the wrong area.

I am trying to help someone who needs to recover their vacation photos that were put onto a CD-R disc in the VCD format.

The person I am trying to help didn't know how to transfer pictures from their camera to a computer so they asked someone that they met while on vacation to do this transfer of the pictures for them.

The person that transferred the pictures put the pictures onto the CD-R disc in a VCD picture show format.

All the person that originally took the pictures wanted to do was to store their vacation pictures on a disk so that they could view them on their computer, print them out later, or send them by e-mail to others.

I have searched through your FAQ's and used your search engine to see if anyone else had already posted a message on this topic.

I didn't find any message about doing the recovery of jpg photos from the ITEM####.dat files in the SEGMENT file folder.

Is it possible to recover the original still photos from these ITEM####.dat files that are located in the SEGMENT folder?

If so, what are the steps that I need to do to make this happen?

The CD-R disc will play in my DVD player that is attached to a television, but it won't play on my computer's DVD player.

I have downloaded and installed the Isobuster software version 2.1 and was unable to get this software to recover the still photos.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[Cornucopia]

The "original" photos are gone, unless the person who authored the disc saved them in the 'photos' folder, or somewhere else on his hard drive.

You CAN retrieve clean MPEG stills (usually 704x480 for NTSC, 704x576 for PAL) that can be converted back to same size JPG (I'd user Vdub or similar for this last part). The extraction uses the "Disassembly" MPEG tool from within VCDEasy.

1. Put disc in drive
2. run VCDEasy
3. Disassemble the disc (extracting) to harddrive (whatever folder you choose)
4. Find those *.DAT items (if they haven't already been renamed to MPEG) and rename to MPEG (it's recommended to do so at this point but not earlier)
5. Open each in Vdub, saving as BMP/TIF/JPG (your choice).

The CD-R may not play in your DVD player, because your player may not be set up to accept (S)VCDs. Or it could have been authored badly.

Scott

[H-Man1953]

Thanks Cornucopia for your quick reply to my problem,

I tried following the steps you mentioned using the software that you suggested and I was able to retrieve photos from the VCD disk.

I must have been doing something wrong however because I was only able to get 1/4 of the photo to show up in the retrieved JPEG's.

Since the VCD disk played on my DVD player that was attached to my TV, I connected this DVD player to my computer's RCA video and audio input jacks.

I was then able to use the Sonic DigitalMedia Plus version 7 software that came with my computer to capture the video from this VCD disk onto my computer as an MPEG movie file.

I then used EasyMPEG MX 3.2.2 build 140 software that I had purchased sometime ago to play the MPEG movie file that I had created and then I stopped the player each time the vacation picture slide changed so that I could take a snapshot of the picture.

I then saved the snapshot of each vacation picture on my computer's hard drive as a JPEG file.

So, long story short, I was able to retrieve the original vacation photos that my cousin had taken of her vacation.

I have since shown my cousin how to transfer the pictures from her camera to her computer so hopefully she won't have this problem again in the future.

I mentioned the software that I used to solve my problem in case someone else has the same problem and needs to find a solution that will work.

I'm sure that there are many ways that this task could have been accomplished, but this is the way that I came up with.

Everyone may not have a media computer equipped with TV and RCA input jacks so my method won't work unless your computer has these input jacks.

Once again thanks for taking the time to reply to my problem.

[Bjs]

If the camera involved uses removable media memory , you may be able to retrieve them using drive rescue with the memory card in a memory reader ... dont do it via camera .

There's a couple of other freeware programs esspecially designed for such recovery .

Damn handy when nurses grab digital cameras during births and delete photos for fear of law suites .

The may know nursing , but they know little about recover tools designed for modern equipment recovery .

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Unless they nuke it with something like a degaussing unit similar to http://www.garner-products.com/deg-hdtd-8200.htm

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Talking to a freind who works in a security center in act , au ... they complained about people bring psps to work ... until they hanged up a security notice declaring all portatable media devices must be degaussed before leaving the premises .

They mean any device ... phones , laptops , ipods , psps ... all get same treatment .

Leave them at home , in the car , or check them in at front counter and pick them up when leaving ... or else you'll be leaving with an expensive brick .

[tejana]

Hi,

I have a similar problem .... that's kinda different:

I used MacTheRipper to rip a DVD for a video project ... but what I was hoping to access was extra content ... not video files ... I need to access the photo gallery.

I can't find the photos (or a movie file of still frames) in the elements. Did I use the wrong method for extracting? Did I miss a necesarry setting or option?

Does anyone know of a better mousetrap?

thanks in advance!
ana

[Baldrick]

tajana: Please make a new topic in the macos forum. Extracting extra content from a dvd is not same as vcd.