How to rip the video from (S)VCD CDs or BIN/CUE images

[mats.hogberg]

What do you mean by "DVD files"? TMPGEnc DVD Author (among other authoring apps) can author DVD with VCD mpg/dat as source material.

/Mats

[Baadshah]

I've always copied DAT files from VCD in the past (instead of using the process explained here) and have never had problems playing/editing the files in any software that plays VCD/MPG files.

They've even worked on different PCs. So I don't see the necessity of the steps explained above. Or am I missing something?

Also, if I have no problem playing the copied files on different PCs, do you think it's still a good idea to convert them to MPG using ISOBuster in case they might not work in future?

[mats.hogberg]

There are some differences between a VCD .dat and a VCD .mpg - Something with the headers. As the "conversion" from dat to mpg is 100% lossless, I see no reason for not doing it, to make as sure as possible, it will play on even the pickiest of players. YMMV.

/Mats

[DereX888]

There are some differences between a VCD .dat and a VCD .mpg - Something with the headers. As the "conversion" from dat to mpg is 100% lossless, I see no reason for not doing it, to make as sure as possible, it will play on even the pickiest of players. YMMV.

/Mats

There is no such thing as "VCD's .MPG file". Its either .DAT detruncated back to MPEG format, or it is SVCD (SuperVideoCD's truncated MPEG-2 on a disc).

[Baadshah]

There are some differences between a VCD .dat and a VCD .mpg - Something with the headers. As the "conversion" from dat to mpg is 100% lossless, I see no reason for not doing it, to make as sure as possible, it will play on even the pickiest of players. YMMV.

/Mats

I have a couple of more questions.

(1) If I copy (drag and drop) a couple of DAT files directly from a couple of VCD CDs and then burn the collection onto a DVD (to save storage space), will I run into trouble playing the DAT files from the burned DVD in future on different PCs? What about playing them on a standalone VCD players (after turning them back into VCDs of course, but without recompressing)?

(2) Would the ripping guide given at the top of this thread still apply to the files on the new DVD I burned or does it only apply to original VCDs?

Thanks.

[DereX888]

There are some differences between a VCD .dat and a VCD .mpg - Something with the headers. As the "conversion" from dat to mpg is 100% lossless, I see no reason for not doing it, to make as sure as possible, it will play on even the pickiest of players. YMMV.

/Mats

I have a couple of more questions.

(1) If I copy (drag and drop) a couple of DAT files directly from a couple of VCD CDs and then burn the collection onto a DVD (to save storage space), will I run into trouble playing the DAT files from the burned DVD in future on different PCs? What about playing them on a standalone VCD players (after turning them back into VCDs of course, but without recompressing)?

(2) Would the ripping guide given at the top of this thread still apply to the files on the new DVD I burned or does it only apply to original VCDs?

Thanks.

(1a)
No one knows what future holds
(1b)
But as of today, some of the standalone players are able to play .dat file copied from VCD without adding headers (detruncating) if you just change their extension to .MPG and burn as data disc.
(2)
I dont know what ripping guide you need to detruncate the files? Just open VCDgear and copy files with it if you need'em detruncated (proper MPEGs) or just copy them directly from cd to hdd if you don't, thats all, what kind of guide is needed to do that

[Baadshah]

(1a)
No one knows what future holds
(1b)
But as of today, some of the standalone players are able to play .dat file copied from VCD without adding headers (detruncating) if you just change their extension to .MPG and burn as data disc.
(2)
I dont know what ripping guide you need to detruncate the files? Just open VCDgear and copy files with it if you need'em detruncated (proper MPEGs) or just copy them directly from cd to hdd if you don't, thats all, what kind of guide is needed to do that

Thanks for the response.

OK, maybe "guide" is a very loose term, but I'm referring to the method given in the first post of this thread. If it really doesn't make a difference whether we copy the DAT files from VCD CDs or extract MPEG Stream from them, then what was the purpose of this "guide" and why is this topic being discussed? :P

BTW, personally I like IsoBuster better than VCDGear because its a lot faster.

[DereX888]

(1a)
No one knows what future holds
(1b)
But as of today, some of the standalone players are able to play .dat file copied from VCD without adding headers (detruncating) if you just change their extension to .MPG and burn as data disc.
(2)
I dont know what ripping guide you need to detruncate the files? Just open VCDgear and copy files with it if you need'em detruncated (proper MPEGs) or just copy them directly from cd to hdd if you don't, thats all, what kind of guide is needed to do that

Thanks for the response.

OK, maybe "guide" is a very loose term, but I'm referring to the method given in the first post of this thread. If it really doesn't make a difference whether we copy the DAT files from VCD CDs or extract MPEG Stream from them, then what was the purpose of this "guide" and why is this topic being discussed? :P

BTW, personally I like IsoBuster better than VCDGear because its a lot faster.

ISOBuster is fine too.
And it does make difference, it depends what you want to do with these files.
If you just wanna copy VCDs/SVCDs to DVD-Rs to save space, and your dvd player handles untruncated mpegs, then of course you don't have to detruncate .DATs and just rename their extensions to .MPG and save yourself time.
But if you were going to reencode such files to some other format, i.e. real DVD-Video, and your encoder wouldn't support .DAT files, what would you do? You'll look for ways to make them readable by your encoder. And thats for what this "guide" exists, I guess (IMHO its more like "how to use VCDGear" than a real guide, but then as you noted yourself - the term "guide" is actually very broad....)

Oh and youre right, I dont know either why is this topic being discussed (well, I'm bored at work, but I can waste my time on something else obviously, so I'm outta here :P )

[lexa695]

I just want to thank everyone here for making this great thread. I am a total noob at this stuff. My kids asked me to download some videos which were in Bin/cue files and I could not get them to play on my DVD player. I found this thread and downloaded isobuster (which I will now buy) and it worked the very first time. This is after wasting a lot of time with convertxtodvd and another converting software I demo from Cnet.

[acid_burn]

Umm i have a mp4 player that supports divx/xvid, so im ripping my vcd films with this way:
Encoding with vcdgear to mpg
Joining cd1 and cd2 with a mpg joiner
Encoding using Xilisoft Video Encoder with 350mb limit

Its a good way to rip movies from vcd but, those films i ripped are dark, i can make them brighter when watching on pc but my mp4 player doesnt support brightness/contrast options. So is there a way to make them brighter during those steps? (PS: I tried virtualdub/mod but they gave me errors)

[mysteriuz]

Hi.... I've tried using ISO Buster to extract a VCD dat file to mpeg following the threads and instructions in this site. But the strange thing is the original VCD movie is in 4:3 format. But after extraction in becomes 16:9... the video is stretched. I tried playing in various players - Nero, Media Player Classic, Windows Media, etc... all the same. I've also tried DVD Patcher which detects the mpeg file as 4:3.. which in fact its strected to 16:9. I'm clueless. What am I missing?

I've done this way back before on other VCDs (a year ago) and it works fine! But today.... its decided to jinx me.

HELP!

[wilsonwoo]

I have tons of asian's VCD which the left audio channel is Cantonese and right audio channel is Mandarin. I like to rip them all into mpg. However, I want to have the Mandarin channel removed with left channel dub to right channel, so that both audio channel become Cantonese. Is there anyway to do this easily?

Thanks,

-Wilson

[saucymare]

JUST A QUICK THANKS TO BALDRICK WITH THE BIN/CUE FILE PROBS USED ISOBUSTER AND IT ROCKS

[abrogard]

This is an excellent old thread. Back to '03 would you believe! Last post '09. And here I am using it/opening it (hopefully) again...

I used the isobuster method and it is fine. But I want to do many files at once. When I do that I don't get the option to save them as 'mpg' - like I can't rename them. One at a time you can but not by batch.

So I get them all converted okay but they're all still called '.dat'.

I rename them .mpg.

My little question is: Is this okay? Have they been converted to .mpg in fact, even though the filename when produced as part of a batch job remains as '.dat' ?

Or is that renaming to 'mpg' tells isobuster to convert the file and not renaming just extracts it 'as is' from the CD?

I ran the files through Gspot and it seems to me the unchanged 'dat' and the 'mpg' were identical but I just thought I'd ask...

[manono]

So I get them all converted okay but they're all still called '.dat'.

I rename them .mpg.

My little question is: Is this okay?

Nope, not OK at all. If you want MPG, you have to extract it from the DAT file. I use the free version of VCDEasy. Go Tools->MPEG Tools->DAT File (find the DAT)->MPEG File (give it a destination)->Convert

[abrogard]

So Isobuster has done nothing? Didn't do that M2F2 thing, whatever it was?

I'll try the VCDEasy route.

thanks for the help