VCD recognized as audio CD only

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I recently got an old CD single (New Order - "True Faith") containing 3 audio tracks and 1 video. The disc is gold in color and claims to be a CDV.

My Sony DVD player and my Pioneer DVD-ROM drive both recognize it as an ordinary audio CD only. When I look at the DVD-ROM drive in the file explorer, I can only see the usual .cda pseudo-tracks, nothing else.

Is it possible to view the video on my Win2000 box? What software do I need? Windows Media Player only sees the audio, just like Explorer.

Thanks.

-- Mike Brown (mike-vcd@hyperreal.org), April 20, 2001

Answers

Your message says everything - you have a CDV. This is NOT the same thing as VCD. CDV is an old laser disc format. It contains up to 20 minutes of audio that can be played by any CD player, which is why your drives recognize it as an audio CD. The format supports up to 5 minutes of analog video. This video is only viewable using a laser disc player. It is not possible to play it on a computer. I know of no CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drives that understand this old format. If you put it in your computer, you will see that it looks like an ordinary audio CD to your PC and you won't be able to tell that there is video on it anywhere. I have a few of these myself as I own an old laser disc player and I converted mine to SVCD so I could still watch them by recording the video and audio from the laser disc player as inputs to my ATI capture card. You will have to get access to a laser disc player if you ever want to see the video on this disc.

-- Jason Shumate (Jason.Shumate@sita.int), April 20, 2001.

Wow. I didn't realize VCD and CDV were 2 different things. I might try to find a laserdisc player on eBay or something.

Thanks for the response!

-- Mike Brown (mike-vcd@hyperreal.org), April 20, 2001.


vcd is not play in cd rw

-- subhan ali hisbani (subhan18@hotmail.com), April 24, 2001.

Jason thanks for your fine explanation. I have a CDV of DOnald Fagen and I now realise I will have to buy an old laserdisc to see it again. I also have a laserdisc of the Quadrophenia movie. That one is 30cm and silver.

-- Bas Möllenkramer (bas@mollenkramer.nl), July 12, 2001.

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