How can I get a Video back off a VCD?

[pochrist]

I recently created a VCD useing VCD Easy, I bascially bottched up a Title -Menu atempt, I created an image to mpg and told it to run "forever" and set it as the first scene, the second scene is the actual video. so now when I put it in the DVD player it won't play unless I tell it to skip to the next scene, I want pull off the original Mpeg file and burn it back. but I don't know what it is on the VCD a "dat" file or what, what do I need to do get it back off?

[dinesh]

If you have already burnt it to a CD-R, there is nothing you can do to change it.
Use VCDGear or vcdxrip ( www.vcdimager.org ) to get the MPEGs. vcdxrip will even generate the XML for you.
You will need to create a BIN image of your VCD before using the above. You can use CDRWIN for this.

[Freshman]

The VCD Rip option in VCDEasy > Tools should allow you to do what you want to do. Another option would be to use VCDGear (http://www.vcdgear.com/).

[Freshman]

Oh, I've seen that dinesh was a littler faster than me.

BTW, you don't need to make an image of your VCD before you use either VCDGear or VCDEasy for retrieving mpeg-files from it.

In VCDGear you can simply use the dat>mpg option to extract your video from the VCD, in VCDEasy you can select whether to rip from an image file (default) or one of the drives that you have specified as CD-Reader or CD-Writer under Settings>CDRDAO.

[kjmacke]

put the vcd back in the computer open the folder mpegav you will see your dat. file. copy that to your hard drive then rename the with the .mpg extension. Now you have your mpg file just like before.

[Freshman]

No, that's not right. Even though *.dat-files are essentially mpeg-1 files, the file structure is still different from standard mpeg-1 files. Renaming the file to *.mpg won't change that - all it does is make sure that media player gets started when you click on the file (you could just as well rename it to *.avi but of course that wouldn't turn it into an avi-file either).

Copying the dat file to your harddisk is of course possible, but in order to get the original mpeg1 structure back you need to use one of the programs mentioned above.

[neomaine]

Funny, I've copied the .dat file to the hard drive, renamed it to *.mpg plenty of times. Opened it up with MPEG Tools in TMPGenc to cut out some stuff, played it in Windows Media Player or ATI's file player.

All without any issues....yet. Where should I see problems with this method??

[Freshman]

This is from the VCD-Gear FAQ:

How does a DAT differ from MPEG?

A DAT file is basically an MPEG file with the exception that it is bigger - but for a good reason. A DAT file contains extra information inside such as error correction information and extra sector information, but it also contains the MPEG stream. The MPEG file, of course, does not contain all the extra data that a DAT contains and is smaller.

You could verify this for yourself by writing an mpg1-file (one which you know NOT to be a renamed dat-file) to a VCD, copying back the dat-file to your harddisk and comparing the sizes of both files.

Even though many programs are able to deal with dat-files, the cleanest solution is converting them back to a standard mpg-1 file.[/quote]