VCD to modern container

[TooNice]

I am trying to back-up some old VCDs. There are two ways I can easily do:

1. Rip the discs as ISO. Mount and play. Making the ISO is not difficult, but mounting before playback feels unnecessary like a waste of time when VCDs do not have any menus or anything else but the movie. Also, many films come in two discs, so having mount/open again mid-film is sub-optimal.

2. Just copy the DAT files. Will I lose anything if I only did that? I could save having to mount this way. I don't suppose that I could join the dat files together?

I am just wondering if there is any way of just putting VCD data into an MKV container or similar. Preferably joining two discs into one if necessary. Without transcoding.

Thanks :)

PS: Also, if someone could answer my other question here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?goto=newpost&t=168448 it would much much appreciated :)

[Video Dude]

Since VCD is MPEG-1, I would recommend you use a MPEG-PS container instead of MKV, unless you wanted to add subtitles.

It's been a while, but I believe VCDGear will do what you want.

http://www.vcdgear.com/

[Ghitulescu]

The DVD allows for a bit-perfect integration of VCD (there are two small differences, but I notice no issues in real world).
Author therefore a DVD using the DATs files as input - if this doesn't work I think there was a possibility to use ISObuster to extract only the real A/V streams.
Yes, you can use only the DATs, the other files are for CD-i compatibility and some rudimentary navigation. There are no chapters and no subtitles and no multilaguages ... so you won't loose anything :)

BD dropped the VCD compatibility, but retained the SDTV DVD one (not VCD). I am not sure you can play the DVD (off VCD) on a BDplayer though... do a test, many MPEG-2 chips can MPEG-1 too.

[TooNice]

@Video Dude: Thanks. How about SVCD? As far as I can tell, those are MPEG-2. What tool would be good to join parts?
@Ghitulescu: Thanks. My goal is not to play on a standalone player though. I am trying to go disc-less and use my computer as my main media player. MPC seems to handle individal DAT files fine, but I'd like to join them so that I don't have to open another file mid-film.

[Video Dude]

VCD/SVCD to MPG using ISOBuster:
http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/88803-How-to-rip-the-video-from-%28S%29VCD-CDs-or-BIN-CUE-images


I join MPEG-2 files using VideoReDo, but it is not free. Some free alternatives would be ffmpeg or AviDemux. I'm sure there are other free programs you can find by doing a forum search on how to join mpg files. Make sure you set whatever program you use to do a stream copy and do not re-encode the video or audio.

If you want to use MKV, it would be very easy to join the mpg videos using mkvtoolnix / mkvmerge.

[hello_hello]

I don't think MKVMergeGUI will open dat files, but it looks like VCDGear will extract them as mpeg, and MKVMergeGUI shouldn't have a problem appending mpeg files together and saving the output as (naturally) MKV.

Or you could try using tsmuxer in a similar way to output a ts or m2ts file.

[TooNice]

I understand that .DAT files in VCD contain additional information on top of the MPEG stream hence the need to extract the MPEG stream first before merging to avoid issues.

In the case of SVCD, the video files are already MPG files. Are those non-compliant files of some sorts that requires special extraction (with ISOBuster) to avoid trouble when merging?

Thanks again for the replies :)

[qyot27]

You don't have to treat them with special tools. ffmpeg works fine:
ffmpeg -i "concat:AVSEQ01.DAT|AVSEQ02.DAT|AVSEQ03.DAT" -c copy output.mpg
And that's it. I just tried it with one of the VCDs I authored years ago.


The only 'extra' thing I'm aware of concerning VCD tracks is that the files have a CDXA riff tag, but are in an otherwise-normal MPEG-PS container. Some tools don't like the riff tag, but others that ignore it or know what it is can handle the things fine. I used to copy the .DAT files off, change the extension to .mpg, and they'd play in WMP6.4 with no issues. Even mplayer* handles them, as does ffmpeg like shown above.

*or your designated mplayer variant:
>mpv AVSEQ26.DAT
Playing AVSEQ26.DAT.
Detected file format: MPEG-PS (MPEG-2 Program Stream) (libavformat)
[stream] Video (+) --vid=0 (mpeg1video)
[stream] Audio (+) --aid=0 (mp2)
Selected video codec: MPEG-1 video [lavc:mpeg1video]
Selected audio codec: MP2 (MPEG audio layer 2) [lavc:mp2]
AO: [dsound] 44100Hz stereo 2ch s16le
VO: [direct3d] 352x240 => 352x262 420p
AV: 00:00:03 / 00:00:19 (24%) A-V: 0.005


Exiting... (Quit)