Problem extracting DAT to MPEG

[Nico...]

Hello!

I own a great Star Trek VCD collection. I would like to convert them to xvid for the convenience of 1 cd by movie when I travel. I had no problems with some them. I extracted the movie with vcdgear GUI, then I converted to xvid using VirtualDub.
But some of my movies had problems. VCDGear was not able to extract the mpeg. So I decided to move the DAT to my hard drive, hoping VirtualDub would be able to open them directly but the operating system told me that it wasn't an authorized MS-DOS function... I have to admit I don't know exactly what it means.
Can you help me with this?

Thanks a lot,
Nicolas

[MaDmiZe]

Do you have any problems playing VCDs or viewing the associated dat fill on the PC you are trying to do this on??

[Nico...]

Yes and that's what's strange... the movie works perfectly on my computer... I use WinDVD to watch my VCDs and I have no problems watching them...

[offline]

Nico,

VCDgear is a program that gives many ppl problems! I've seen
it totally wreck mpeg files.

Download a copy of VCDEasy (see tools section link, left hand side)
and install it. Goto the tools, click on the button MPEGTOOLS,
goto the Cdxa2mpeg dialog at the bottom and use that
to process your .DAT files. You will then be able to load the
newly created x.mpg files into Virtual Dub without a problem

Note: processing from the hard drive is an advantage so if you
have the space copy your dat files across to your hard drive.

[Nico...]

Thank you but I already tried that! VCDEasy refuses to copy to my hard drive unfortunately and when I convert with VCDGear it refuses to load in Virtual or TMPGEnc... quite boring ... It really seems to come from the VCD, does some protection systems exist on VCD?!?!?

[offline]

does some protection systems exist on VCD?!?!?

yeah.. there are ways to prevent file copying (you have to use clonecd or
blindwrite to copy the whole cd as is)

Sometimes, just on occasion you can feed the .dat as the
source video and audio into tmpgec and it will transcode
a new mpeg correctly from your VCD. Only if you feel lucky.

[Nico...]

So... the best thing to do would be to write a new cd using cloneCD? because yesterday i tried creating a .nrg image with Nero and then extracting the file with VCDEasy, it didn't worked!
Which program would you recommand me so, Blindwrite or CloneCD?
By the way, thanks a lot for your help

[offline]

i tried creating a .nrg image with Nero and then extracting the file with VCDEasy, it didn't worked!

No.. even with clonecd it will copy the disc as is - if you can't do a file
copy from the original you won't be able to do it from the clone cd
copy either.

[Nico...]

So what to do???
Nothing's possible???