Hi

I had a same problem when reading three VCDs. 'plaympeg' said it cant find mpeg data. 'gtv' was unable to play it. 'cp' reported an I/O error.

I tried to view it from Windows and it worked ! Then I tried to copy it using Windows. Almost the whole dat file was copied except the last 5 seconds saying that "the system can't read the specified device". This happened for all the VCDs. But the VCDs surface seemed to have no problem as they were newly written. And it looks very improbable that all the VCDs which i had, had errors in the *last* 5 seconds !

I think that there is some kind of protection mechanism built into the CD. But I could cheat it by using VCDGear (under windows). I first tried to use VCDGear under Linux with option 'dat2mpg' but it said that it couldn't find mpeg data. VCDGear under Windows converted the '<cdrom drive>:\mpegav\Avseq01.dat' file into "<dest drive>:\Movies\Avseq01.mpg' without any errors ! ! I used dat to mpg conversion option to achieve this.

Now the mpg file plays fine in Linux.

I think VCDClipper also could have done the job.

Well, my guess... Since Windows could read *almost* the whole file (actually i think the whole file), it seems that there is some bit in the CD file system (or similar kind of information) that indicates whether it is legal (??) to copy the file or not. Now whether to make use of that or not might be upto the copying program. Now if the cdrom driver in Linux checks the info before copying and windows driver checks it after the data has been copied (before writing the directory entry), the situation seems to be consistentent.

Now whether that kind of information really exists on a VCD FS is to be discovered....anybody knows ?

Well, initially i thought of a long way... It could have been achieved this way....(in Windows)

- First make a drive empty by moving all the data to a different drive. - Now, data if written on this drive, will start from cluster 2. - Then copy the dat file to this drive unitl it gives the error message. - Now the FAT entries have been made, only the directory entry needs to be written. - Next instead of saying OK to that error, cold reboot your PC by pressing directly the reset key (!!) - Goto to real mode. - unlock your disk using 'lock' - use Norton's Diskedit supporting FAT 32 to make a root directory entry which points to cluster 2 as starting cluster. Also the size of the file and attributes have to be written here. OR writing a C program to directly write the directry entry of 32 bytes to the root directory without using standard function or DOS services but by using bios interrupts. - Now after rebooting the PC the file should be playable (most probably ! Never tried actually)

Abhir

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