How reliable are vcds compared to burning them in mode 1?

[McQuaid]

I have a bunch of mpegs that I'm ready to burn, and was curious how reliable vcds are.

FWIK, VCDs are burnt in mode 2 similar to red book audio. A lot of cd readers in the old days had difficulty 'extracting' audio. Drives are much better at extraction these days but its still not as trivial as just copying files from a cd.

I'm posting this cause a friend of mine burnt a lot of vcds and while they played fine on his dvd player, he couldn't properly extract the mpegs without errors. He blamed it on cheap media, but even with cheap media, I can be relatively sure that, with good care, I can copy those files again.

Has anyone had the above situation where they could play a vcd but no longer copy/extract it?

It's just after encoding all this stuff I'd hate to think I could never back it up again.

Does anyone actually burn it as a vcd and a normal disc to retain the 2nd level of error correction? I can't imagine doubling my discs.

So how reliable are your vcds? What's the oldest that you can still reliably copy?

[KingJohn]

Cheap media is always a problem, as is finger marks and scratches. Poor quality writers, may also contribute to disks not lasting.

Use good quality disks and don’t touch them and they last for ever.