For the complete list of available options, please read the man page. The Syntax for a standard Video CD (VCD) is as follows:
mplayer vcd://<track>
[-cdrom-device<device>
]
Example:
mplayer vcd://2 -cdrom-device /dev/hdc
The default VCD device is /dev/cdrom
. If your setup
differs, make a symlink or specify the correct device on the command line
with the -cdrom-device
option.
At least Plextor and some Toshiba SCSI CD-ROM drives have horrible performance
reading VCDs. This is because the CDROMREADRAW ioctl
is not fully implemented for these drives. If you have some knowledge of SCSI
programming, please help us
implement generic SCSI support for VCDs.
In the meantime you can extract data from VCDs with readvcd and play the resulting file with MPlayer.
VCD structure. A Video CD (VCD) is made up of CD-ROM XA sectors, i.e. CD-ROM mode 2 form 1 and 2 tracks:
The first track is in mode 2 form 2 format which means it uses L2 error correction. The track contains an ISO-9660 file system with 2048 bytes/sector. This file system contains VCD metadata information, as well as still frames often used in menus. MPEG segments for menus can also be stored in this first track, but the MPEGs have to be broken up into a series of 150-sector chunks. The ISO-9660 file system may contain other files or programs that are not essential for VCD operation.
The second and remaining tracks are generally raw 2324 bytes/sector
MPEG (movie) tracks, containing one MPEG PS data packet per
sector. These are in mode 2 form 1 format, so they store more data per
sector at the loss of some error correction. It is also legal to have
CD-DA tracks in a VCD after the first track as well.
On some operating systems there is some trickery that goes on to make
these non-ISO-9660 tracks appear in a file system. On other operating
systems like GNU/Linux this is not the case (yet). Here the MPEG data
cannot be mounted. As most movies are
inside this kind of track, you should try vcd://2
first.
There exist VCD disks without the first track (single track and no file system at all). They are still playable, but cannot be mounted.
The definition of the Video CD standard is called the Philips "White Book" and it is not generally available online as it must be purchased from Philips. More detailed information about Video CDs can be found in the vcdimager documentation.
About .DAT files.
The ~600 MB file visible on the first track of the mounted VCD is not a real
file! It is a so called ISO gateway, created to allow Windows to handle such
tracks (Windows does not allow raw device access to applications at all).
Under Linux you cannot copy or play such files (they contain garbage). Under
Windows it is possible as its iso9660 driver emulates the raw reading of
tracks in this file. To play a .DAT file you need the kernel driver which can
be found in the Linux version of PowerDVD. It has a modified iso9660 file system
(vcdfs/isofs-2.4.X.o
) driver, which is able to emulate the
raw tracks through this shadow .DAT file. If you mount the disc using their
driver, you can copy and even play .DAT files with
MPlayer. But it will not
work with the standard iso9660 driver of the Linux kernel! Use
vcd://
instead. Alternatives for VCD copying are the
new cdfs kernel
driver (not part of the official kernel) that shows CD sessions as image files
and cdrdao, a bit-by-bit
CD grabbing/copying application.