how to copy the contents from a scratched vcd

[sumeshkri]

I want to copy the contents from vcd in order to convert it to dvd. but some vcd disks are scratched and i am not able to copy the contents.

sometimes when the copy progression bar reaches the end and shows five seconds left,.ERROR...., cannot copy. wrong path parameters

sometimes it gives wrong message as cannot copy, i/o problem. I found that most of the time the disk has some scrtches. with some disks,..... it happens even though the disk is fine. I just want to copy the mpeg (DAT) file only.

how to copy the contents from a scratched vcd? Any spl software fo this?
kindly help. thanks in advance.

[guns1inger]

Perhaps ISOBuster or ISOPuzzle. It depends just how scratched they are.

[redwudz]

Most data recovery programs will just skip the damaged sections under the scratches, not recover them. So if the disc has extensive damage, you may still have large gaps in your video.

You may be better off trying to polish out the scratches to recover more data. Some CD or video stores can polish discs for you for a nominal fee. Or if you have the time and energy, you can do it by hand with some polishing compound. In a pinch, white abrasive toothpaste and some cotton balls work.

And sometimes just washing off the disc with mild dishwashing soap to remove grease and fingerprints can help. Also some optical drives may do a better job with reading damaged discs than others. You might try a different drive if you have one available.

[AlanHK]

Perhaps ISOBuster or ISOPuzzle. It depends just how scratched they are.

Isopuzzle doesn't do VCDs.

Otherwise, scratch removal, first try toothpaste and rub with your fingers, rinse off.

If deeper scratches, try Brasso.
Thoroughly wash the disc after, of course.

[fritzi93]

Isobuster is your best bet, AFAIK. I just the other week had to deal with a similar situation. My sister came here for Thanksgiving and brought a couple VCDs of her tour group in Egypt. "How come they won't play?" says she. "Maybe cuz the guys doing the video were incompetent? Full-face labels on them. Brand new and scratched/smudged up. Wouldn't even play on my old Apex. I removed the labels and cleaned the discs, first off.

Anyway, load the CD, let it parse the file system and display in the left-hand pane, right-click the root directory and have it extract the MPEG(s). (At that point I demuxed and filtered the audio enough to make it bearable. Didn't do a full-on conversion, didn't have the time, so I fed it through DivXtoDVD, forcing to NTSC. She gave me a blank stare when I asked if her player could convert to NTSC. Maybe I'll get around to a proper job of it, but the assets are hardly worth the trouble.)

Good luck.

[lordsmurf]

Toothpaste is mostly a myth. For starters, you must use plain white toothpaste. No gels, no tartar control, nothing extra. That eliminates almost everything available on store shelves. Second, it doesn't even work all that well. You'll do just as good with a soft cloth and soapy water.

Brasso is an abrasive. It can work, but it's easier to just make the disc worse, by ADDING more micro-scratches to the disc. Not something for novices to try.

Getting discs re-buffed professionally ($3-5 max) in a machine is the way to go. Then rip as an ISO in ImgBurn. Try ISO Buster is ImgBurn fails to rip the image.

[redwudz]

I agree about Brasso. Mostly too abrasive and you will still have to polish afterwards. You need a 'shiny' surface. 'Frosted' doesn't work.

For my part, I have had fair luck with toothpaste. The cheaper brands have worked well enough for me. No matter what you might use, it will take a lot of time and effort to do it right manually. I spent over an hour to get just one nasty scratch out a a XP OS disc. But I was able to save it.

A really scratched up disc, have someone resurface it. It will grind off a fair bit of the cover plastic over the actual DVD surface, so you only want to do this once. Really deep scratches, especially if they reach to the metal of the disc are likely a lost cause.

I don't think much of the 'power grinders' you can purchase for home use. I've seen too many discs 'belt sanded' to where they ended up with a frosted surface that was unusable. Polishing takes a lot of time and effort to do if you don't have good equipment for the purpose.

JMO,

[AlanHK]

Toothpaste is mostly a myth. For starters, you must use plain white toothpaste. No gels, no tartar control, nothing extra. That eliminates almost everything available on store shelves. Second, it doesn't even work all that well. You'll do just as good with a soft cloth and soapy water.

Brasso is an abrasive. It can work, but it's easier to just make the disc worse, by ADDING more micro-scratches to the disc. Not something for novices to try.

Of course Brasso (and toothpaste) is an abrasive. How else could they remove scratches.
How do you think "buffing" works? That abrades the disc too.

If the surface is scratched, the scratches reflect or absorb light, interfering with or preventing reading. Only by either smoothing (by abrading, buffing, polishing) them down, or perhaps filling them, can you get a smooth enough surface to allow enough light to pass through.

These are all potentially destructive, not guaranteed to work, and only used when the disc is unreadable and there is nothing to lose.

An "urban myth" is something passed on by word of mouth, the "friend of my cousin..."

This is not a myth, it's something I've done, personally.

[redwudz]

Other less desirable methods, none of which I've tried and are a bit questionable, are: Candle or similar wax to fill the scratches. Floor or furniture polish to fill the scratches. The last has the possibility to melt the plastic surface if you used the wrong brand or formula.

And you definitely will have to remove some amount of plastic that covers the metal data surface if you are polishing. Too much and you end up with a coaster.

Scratches scatter the laser beam and don't allow the focus mechanism to properly function to track the 'groove'. Making the surface of the scratch smoother can help and give the laser a better chance of focusing. If you do this by hand, your arm will get tired, guaranteed. It's not so easy when using a mild abrasive. But for just a big gouge, it's probably better than grinding down and polishing the whole surface.

With video, you can usually afford to lose a few seconds of video here and there. For that a program that can ignore errors when reading may be fine. If it's a data disc, like my OS disc, one error and the whole disc is trash.

[lordsmurf]

I'm sorry, AlanHK, but you're giving out really dangerous information.
Some of it is just plain wrong, you don't know what you're talking about.

1. Buffing is even and smooth. "By hand" is chaotic and uneven. Those are not even close to being the same.

2. You don't understand light very well. A scratch is not going to reflect light. It's sure as hell not going to absorb light. What happens is refraction. While a large scratch will surely refract light, imperfect micro-abrasions are far more damaging. Those can not only shatter the light beam into thousands of pieces, it can damage the surface into an opaque mess (as opposed to the transparent nature of the poly material on the disc).

3. Trying to fix a scratch by yourself almost always results in making the disc worse. Hand rubbing with an abrasive is the worst you can do. Those "disc doctors" sold in stores almost never work, they're pieces of crap. The only reason those are made is because people are dumb enough to buy them (a lot like DVD labels). They're a kind of digital snake oil.

To clean a disc, use 70% isopropyl alcohol. Sometimes you can get away with using 100% acetone (no additives), but that is damaging to the disc polycarbonate, so be careful (at least it's not an abrasive). I'm careful in there %'s here, don't pick a different one.

To those reading: Redwudz refers only to pressed media, with the "metal" comment. Recordable media have dye or phase change crystalline surface long before you'd hit the foil.

Redwudz, very often those "scratches" are not actually scratches at all, but build-up of material on the surface of the media. Put it under a microscope, I've done it. It's a similar concept to "swapping paint" with cars, in terms of where the gunk comes from. Or protein build-up on contact lenses. Toothpaste has some degree of cleansing ability, but 70% IPA or acetone would have been faster, more effective, and taken you less time. True scratches will not disappear with toothpaste or anything else. Resurfacing is 100% required as the fix here.

Sometimes the error on the disc is not even related to a scratch, it's just a knee-jerk reaction/conclusion. The mere act of cleaning the disc could help, or movement of dust off the laser lens when you took the disc out. There really are a good dozen or so factors that create reading errors (I refuse to use the term "disc error" until it's been proven through process of elimination).

DVD media inherently has some degree of scratch resistance. However, the nature of disc materials attracts funk, especially as the static electricity in air increases.

Hope this info helps everybody better understand these situations.

[AlanHK]

I'm sorry, AlanHK, but you're giving out really dangerous information.
Some of it is just plain wrong, you don't know what you're talking about.

You keep telling me that things I've done with my own hands and seen with my own eyes are wrong and impossible.

Is it impossible for you to disagree with someone without insulting them?

You don't understand light very well.

I understand light. I studied physics and electromagnetism at university.

3. Trying to fix a scratch by yourself almost always results in making the disc worse.

Except when it works.

1. Buffing is even and smooth. "By hand" is chaotic and uneven. Those are not even close to being the same.

They are both abrasive methods.

[redwudz]

Sounds reasonable. Yes, I was only referring to pressed discs. Burned discs would be very problematic to even try to buff. And I also agree about the 'Disk Doctor' type of surface 'grinders'. I have seen several discs that have the 'belt sanded' appearance from a dirty home polishing machine.

But I have used hand polishing of large scratches with success several times. It requires a very light abrasive and a lot of work, along with testing and checking your progress as you buff only the scratch. I wouldn't bother with a video disc, though.

In my experience fine surface scratches can be polished out easy enough on commercial discs, often with commercial polishing machines. Sometimes just cleaning the surface is enough. Large gouges only seem to respond to careful manual buffing of just the gouge, and then it's a gamble if you can still recover all the data.

[lordsmurf]

Is it impossible for you to disagree with someone without insulting them?

If telling you that you're information is wrong is insulting, I guess not. I hate misinformation, and you (for whatever reason) seem to give out a lot of it.

I understand light. I studied physics and electromagnetism at university.

Then you shouldn't be saying silly things like "reflection" and "absorption" as those are wrong. For the record, physics and electromagnetism probably are not as helpful as basic photography would have been, on this topic. Degrees and classes honestly don't mean crap anyway, without the experience to back it up.

_________

Redwudz, the degree of repair often depends on the skill of the machine operator, when it comes to a professional resurfacing. it's not one of those machines with a "go" button, there are quite a few settings to be made, and it requires judgment calls from the operator, based on his or her observation of the disc. It's something I learned earlier this year.

Spot polishing can work, but it's still dangerous. At least you're aware of this, unlike some other posters.

_________

I've seen people suggest everything from steel wool to sandpaper, and all of them swear it works, but it's got to be some of the dumbest crap I've seen. Those people have no idea what the hell they're doing, and it's awful advice. I hate to see people get bad advice, especially if it causes a loss of memories (destruction of information archived to optical disc).

[jman98]

I want to copy the contents from vcd in order to convert it to dvd. but some vcd disks are scratched and i am not able to copy the contents.

You should be aware that many commercial VCDs in India are copy protected and if this is your real problem, not scratches, then you are probably wasting your time. I haven't read of any successful methods to copy these VCDs.
If this is your problem, then the rest of us are wasting our time helping you deal with scratches. I am deeply suspicious that this is the REAL problem here and you have come to the wrong conclusion as to why you can't copy your discs.

[mgh]

I want to copy the contents from vcd in order to convert it to dvd. but some vcd disks are scratched and i am not able to copy the contents.

You should be aware that many commercial VCDs in India are copy protected and if this is your real problem, not scratches, then you are probably wasting your time. I haven't read of any successful methods to copy these VCDs.
If this is your problem, then the rest of us are wasting our time helping you deal with scratches. I am deeply suspicious that this is the REAL problem here and you have come to the wrong conclusion as to why you can't copy your discs.

If there was copy protection (one used on indian vcds), windows will not be able to read the disc at all, let alone start copying. Secondly, it is child's play to copy such copy protected disc with isobuster.

I am not aware of any disc cleaning services in India. If the disc is out of print, just clean it and try isobuster. If the disc is badly scratched, isobuster will take hours to copy the disc. It may even seem to hang. Ignore, it continues to work till it has copied whatever you have asked it to.

[fritzi93]

Hmm, interesting. I know next to nothing about VCD copy protection, but I wondered if maybe there was some sort of protection on my sister's VCDs. Since she now has the originals and the backup, I can't investigate further.

Anyway:
1) Both VCDs appeared to be overburned.
2) Neither would copy.
3) Neither would extract as RAW (*bin, *iso). (Using IsoBuster).
4) Neither would extract as RAW to User Data (*tao, *iso).
5) Neither would extract as User Data (*tao, *iso).

The method that worked was: Extract CD <Content> -> Treat as video only, Extract but filter only M2F2 Mpeg video frames (*mpg). At that point, I quit, but perhaps there were other ways to do it. I dunno, does it sound like copy protection?

[videobread]

I've tried the white tooth paste trick. It does not work on DVD-R- period. Take an old DVD that you don't like and try it. You will see for yourself.

Experimenting I took a DVD and taped it to a board using double sided tape. The data side was up. I then took mt car polisher with a big buffing pad on it and buffed the DVD with a liquid car polish with minimal abrasive particles in it. It worked.

Fritzie93: Your 1) Both VCDs appeared to be overburned.
That what foiled the ripper.

[Kayembee]

redwudz wrote:
>For my part, I have had fair luck with toothpaste. The cheaper brands
>have worked well enough for me. No matter what you might use, it will
>take a lot of time and effort to do it right manually. I spent over an
>hour to get just one nasty scratch out a a XP OS disc. But I was able to
>save it.

I can't say I've had much luck with toothpaste; improvement,
occasionally, but not real rescue. Likely this is because I lack the
patience and dedication to polish thoroughly enough.

>I don't think much of the 'power grinders' you can purchase for home
>use. I've seen too many discs 'belt sanded' to where they ended up with
>a frosted surface that was unusable. Polishing takes a lot of time and
>effort to do if you don't have good equipment for the purpose.

Just a data point, but I've had success with these. I had a
commercial, stamped DVD lock up repeatedly in the same chapter, when
played on two different machines, a settop and a PC. Visual inspection
revealed nothing, no visible damage. I tried copying it, and that went
fine, just a moderate slowdown of the read-rate in the damaged section.

Having successfully made a full-clone, dual layer backup, I was
ready to risk the original. I bought a $40 home polisher called Skip
Doctor, a motorized job, and gave it a try. It fully restored the disk
to playability. I stuck the backup in the case with the original, in
case the fix turns out not to be permanent, but so far, so good.

Since then it's been used 3-4 times on a friend's burned CD-Rs.
The CD player in his car seems to be scratching the disks. So far it's
worked every time.

The "belt sanded" effect you've seen could be due to users
failing to read the instructions, which tell you how much polishing is
advisable.

[sumeshkri]

i would like to thank everybody who took part in the discussion and given their valuable oinions. they have suggested to use imgburn and isobuster. i will try.

[Marvingj]

Try CD Clinic, years ago it work great on scratch Cd's. its a reasonable restoring system.

[AlanHK]

Is it impossible for you to disagree with someone without insulting them?

If telling you that you're information is wrong is insulting, I guess not. I hate misinformation, and you (for whatever reason) seem to give out a lot of it. .

You think of the world in black and white: any process, or disc, or person, is either perfect (i.e., agrees with you) or stupid/bad/idiotic.

You feel no need to be polite to people you have decided are "wrong". You simply assert your opinions as are facts and you discount everyone else's experience as misguided, dangerous, stupid.....

I've seen people suggest everything from steel wool to sandpaper, and all of them swear it works, but it's got to be some of the dumbest crap I've seen. Those people have no idea what the hell they're doing, and it's awful advice. I hate to see people get bad advice, especially if it causes a loss of memories (destruction of information archived to optical disc).

Argue with your stupid straw man somewhere else, not in a post quoting me.

It's possible to disagee with someone without insulting them. Try it sometime, unless you just enjoy starting flame wars.

[DereX888]

Best is ti visit any local jewellry store.
They will polish your disc to a perfect shine for a small fee, and even deep scratches will get as small as possible, both silver-pressed and writables.
From that point it is only up to those deep bad scratches if they can or cannot be recovered by your reader/software.

They have plenty of jewellry shops everywhere in India from what I've seen.

[videobread]

Too bad it's not a DVD. I have had DVD Decrypter go back and make up 50 retries and finally recover a scratched area. It just kept going. I thought the burner was going to burn out. It stopped at a spot and went over it and over it till it found enough data. When playing I think there was a little glitch but it copied and played. I was really impressed. What a work horse. Is there something similar for CD's?

[lordsmurf]

I see the world in shades of gray, but wrong is still wrong, black is black.

[redwudz]

videobread, if no one has mentioned it, you might try dvdisaster as it says it will work for CDs.

[AlanHK]

videobread, if no one has mentioned it, you might try dvdisaster as it says it will work for CDs.

I haven't used it, but its info says

Error correction data must be created before the medium fails, preferably at the same time the medium is written.

Error correction data requires additional storage space either on the protected medium or by using additional media. Using the standard settings the additional storage space amounts to 15% of the original data size.

So I don't think it will help with discs without this error correction data.

[redwudz]

That will teach me to read the 'fine print'.

[tomlee59]

There is altogether too much flaming here, with strong opinions asserted with little scientific backup. I prefer data to settle arguments, because any bright person can construct a seemingly plausible theory. It's easy to fool people (including yourself), but it's harder to fool nature. Here's my data:

I had a group of 20 students run a simple series of experiments polishing troublesome CDs (mainly; there were a couple of VCDs) they had brought (both factory-pressed and burned). The toothpastes we tried were largely ineffective. Given enough time, they may have worked, but within the timespan of a single lecture hour (and further limited by the patience of 20-somethings), they concluded that toothpaste was not particularly effective. I instructed them to avoid polishing circumferentially, so that any scratches they induced would be radially oriented.

We did not try candle wax or furniture polish or other suggestions that some students dug up on the web.

Brasso was far and away the *clear* winner. It was so good, in fact, that students stayed after class to finish polishing the remaining "broken" CDs they'd brought. I was surprised at first, because the surface left behind was clearly not of high optical quality. However, it's important to recognize a couple of salient points. One is that radially-oriented defects are much less harmful than are circumferentially-oriented ones. The other is that the primary effect of a quasi-uniform imperfect surface is a more or less constant attenuation of laser strength due to scattering. As long as the attenuation isn't too great, there is still plenty of SNR for the read electronics to unbend the bits. Students reported back during the next lecture that they had successfully played the repaired CDs on their home equipment, so we may conclude from this limited experiment that using Brasso is not "dangerous" or harmful. Indeed, success with the large variety of drives involved in the experiment suggests that Brasso is a pretty good choice.

I would be less sanguine about Brasso's prospects for fixing DVDs, however, owing to the higher numerical aperture of the optics there, the tighter track pitch, and the higher linear bit denisty. But I've not tried enough experiments on DVDs to draw any firm conclusions. Maybe that's a good experiment for the next time the class is taught.

[sumeshkri]

can anyone suggest me a software with which i can identyfy the bad video frames in a vcd and to remove them? in some parts of the vcd there are glitches( unclear video and false sounds). the reason is,The vcd might have been used for a long time.even if we manage to copy the content to the hdd, when converting to dvd, problem comes. any help in this regard ...plz...

[AlanHK]

can anyone suggest me a software with which i can identyfy the bad video frames in a vcd and to remove them? in some parts of the vcd there are glitches( unclear video and false sounds). the reason is,The vcd might have been used for a long time.even if we manage to copy the content to the hdd, when converting to dvd, problem comes. any help in this regard ...plz...

There are a few tools that can clean up MPEG video.
VCDGear has a function, MPEG ->MPEG, with an option "Fix MPEG errors" that might be helpful.

TMPGEnc works on MPEG1 in its free mode.
It has "MPEG Tools". Use "Merge and Cut" and just read in the file and save it out as a new file.

I assume you know you will need to change the audio sampling rate to 48000 if you're going to use this on a DVD.
You can use TMPGEnc to change this when you save.