There is an odd bug in Windows related to Video CDs . To reproduce it: Insert a Video CD (if you don't have one, you can download this fi...

148 points•ClydeN•4 days ago•56 comments•

56 comments

tripflag3 days ago
I've had luck ripping VCDs on Linux with vcdxrip -v -p -i /dev/sr0

Alternatively, first creating a bin+cue on windows with imgburn (ISO won't do!) and then vcdxrip -v -p -b the.bin -c the.cue

Having been such a popular format in Asia, a rich assortment of VCDs keep showing up at flea-markets in Norway; both original productions sold as VCDs, as well as "silvers", that is, exceptionally poor-quality pirated movies, often amusingly so. A popular example is "Star Wars: Backstroke of the West", with subtitles machine-translated from english to chinese, and then back to english.

VCDs, like DVDs, tend to have multiple audio tracks with different languages, even though the format doesn't actually support that technically. Take "yangtze three gorges" for example; a Chinese nature documentary with perfectly cheesy intros and outros. There was three "audio tracks"; the original Chinese, plus English and Japanese dubs. VCD only allows for a single audio track, so you find Chinese in the left channel, and English on the right. Televisions sold in Asia would have a toggle-switch on the remote to select one of the two audio channels to duplicate to both speakers.

Of course, having two dubs, the Japanese dub was made by having another copy of the whole video file, except with Chinese+Japanese.

Dwedit3 days ago
"Do not want"
encom3 days ago
>I have reported the bug to Microsoft through the Feedback Hub at the end of 2025. Nothing has happened since — no feedback, no confirmation, no fix.

That's Feedback Hub working as intended. Think of it more as a black void to scream into, to relieve frustrations, than an avenue of communication with Microsoft.

robotnikman2 days ago
iirc most of the things submitted to the feedback hub are things from not so tech savy users, think things such us "my mouse is not clicking right", "how do I delete facebook" or "my google is not working". Its hard to separate the wheat from the chaff here.

The idea for the feedback hub was good in theory, but making it easily accessible to any user has basically turned it into a black hole which nobody bothers to probably check.

mrheosuper3 days ago
An online /dev/null. Cool
anticensor1 day ago
more like /dev/random
RHab3 days ago
Yeah, also my impression.
k4rnaj1k3 days ago
Google's feedback systems feel pretty much the same way
snailmailman3 days ago
I ran into this bug myself recently when trying to digitize a family collection of old CDs. Lots of family photos and videos, that were backed up in a mix of file formats and disc formats. I used Linux for most of the process after figuring out that windows fully locks up and becomes unusable with video CDs.

I ended up simply skipping most of the video CDs because the format is simply awful. In my case most of them were slideshows of family photos, and in every case I was able the find the same photos in a better format on other CDs.

Additionally with a good third of the video CDs, they were essentially unreadable. I assume due to lack of error correction. The whole process I did was surprisingly lossy. I ended with a too-large stack of CDs that I got little to no data off of. Two disks were seemingly identical and I got different sets of corruption on each. A puzzle for me to reassemble some other time.

operation_moose3 days ago
I've had a fairly similar issue recently:

Something related to directly copying a file from inside a zip file on the c: drive to a network samba drive. The file will copy to about 40%, transfer drops to 0 kb/s, the .zip file gets corrupted, and I have to restart Windows to exit the file transfer.

Not 100% repeatable and I'm not sure how many of those specific details are required to trigger it. Extracting the .zip file before copying does seem to prevent it though, which is as far as I've gotten debugging it.

toast03 days ago
Take pcaps on your client and your server and compare...

I've seen some nasty things happen with broken NICs/drivers. One side gets nonsense data that the peer didn't send, and has poor behavior as a result.

Maybe add iperf3 to the test case to really get the network working...

Eisenstein3 days ago
Copying a file from inside a zip in Windows extracts it into a temporary directory first.
xp843 days ago
Reading the first half or so made me think, "Wow, they should really fix this."

The second half made me think, "Wow, what a gross format. Really glad we have no use for these anymore!" (Not that they should leave the Explorer crash unfixed, of course).

It's bananas to me that a CD-ROM cost like $400 in 1990s money at one point; then I spent $150 on my first CD burner around 2002, and now you can buy a USB Blu-Ray/DVD/CD recorder drive for under $40.

ssl-33 days ago
VCD was in-keeping with the style of the time. General-purpose compute was expensive, so it was avoided.

Like the red book audio CDs that preceeded them, white book VCDs were a way to make playback a light-weight task on very specialized (maybe even single-purpose) hardware.

That's not necessarily a meaningful goal these days, but our limitations were different back then.

Projectiboga3 days ago
These were big in the late 90s going into the early 00s. And there were also SVCDs which were MPEG2 video insead of MPEG1. There were a few brands of DVD players that supported them, APEX was the 90s one form China and then Phillips had some models that played lots of formats including avi files. The avi files often used a testing mpg4 video codec in the microsoft video player that got extracted and became the standard and grew into Divx and later Xvid.
encom3 days ago
>Wow, what a gross format.

It's about as gross as regular Red Book CD audio. Sacrifice error correction for capacity. Errors in either audio or video streams are non-critical (to a point) and can be masked on playback. That's what C1 and C2 error correction does. There used to be copy protections that played silly games with error correction to foil CD audio rippers while not affecting playback on normal players. Think it was called Cactus Data Shield. It was not very effective.

And similar to VCD disks, the *.cda files Windows shows on audio CDs also aren't real.

aleph_minus_one3 days ago
> it was called Cactus Data Shield.

Indeed:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cactus_Data_Shield

Additionally, I remember from this time (perhaps this was a very German thing) that bands and stars whose CDs used Cactus Data Shield or a similar copy protection system suddely got hated and abandoned by parts of their fanbase.

DanielHB3 days ago
I am from the biggest port town in south america, I remember when I was a kid some of the local shops would sell blank CDs incredibly cheap. This was around 1999 so blank CDs were not quite so cheap yet.

Eventually I found out what was really happening, thieves somehow got notice of container ships with blank CDs and were breaking into those to steal the CDs. A single container could keep a city fed (and all its modded playstation 1) for years.

hulitu3 days ago
> Reading the first half or so made me think, "Wow, they should really fix this."

They don't care. It works like this for copying over a network (i.e. copying speed goes to 0) but then recovers. They rewrote explorer and now it needs twice the clicks to achieve something. Microsoft at its best.

to11mtm3 days ago
2002 was about when the whole market got disrupted by Lite-on, ironically. I was working in retail at the time and recall how their models just kept dropping from the 100-150ish range down to 50-75$ (and just kept going lower.)

What was even crazier was how fast DVD burners saw commoditization. The first Pioneer DVD Burner in 2001 launched at something like 1000$, and by 2004 lite-on was selling models for under 75$.

And, for most people, the Lite-On models were fine. I did have one customer that switched back to either Pioneer or Plextor (I can't remember which) because they were doing a -lot- of DVD writing (we're talking 4 burners running at once, that was a fun build to spec out!) and the Lite-On drives kept failing under the extreme use. Lite-On did have a good warranty process, however the downtime cost him enough that one day that he flat out asked what he should buy that was better. The drives we wound up going with were more than double the cost of the Lite-Ons, but he never had to warranty those [0].

[0] - Although, they did get seized in a raid apparently <_<

Mistletoe3 days ago
>[0] - Although, they did get seized in a raid apparently <_<

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