Thursday, October 1, 2009

How to play vcds in Fedora?

I am running Fedora 10 on my Laptop. My sister brought a vcd and requested me to play that. I inserted the vcd, mounted on /mnt and started to play it. To my surprise, it didn't work.

$ cd /mnt/

$ ls
cdi ext mpegav segment vcd

$ cd mpegav/

$ ls
avseq01.dat

$ mplayer avseq01.dat

Playing avseq01.dat.
Seek failed

Exiting... (End of file)

Then I tried to copy the avseq01.dat to a local folder.

$ cp avseq01.dat ~/
cp: reading `avseq01.dat': Input/output error

Tried to copy using dd, but no luck.

$ dd if=avseq01.dat of=~/vcd.dat
dd: reading `avseq01.dat': Input/output error
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 0.00805312 s, 0.0 kB/s

Problem is neither with cdrom nor with the drive, but with the format of the data which need to be converted to another format which is free from the proprietry stuffs. So my friend Ritesh came to my help. Below is how I did it.

- Installed "vcdimager" package. That version that I installed was vcdimager-0.6.2-1.i386. It's available via yum.

- Create a folder named ~/vcd and cd into it.

- Run vcdrip (vcdxrip in the latest version of vcdimager package) to copy the video file to mpg format.

$ vcdrip --rip --cdrom-device=/dev/cdrom

- The above command will copy the avseq01.dat from cd to avseq01.mpg in the current working directory. This process will take sometime and will take more time if there are a lot of scratches on the cd. Once it exits, run "mplayer avseq01.mpg" in the current directory to play it.

4 comments:

Siddhesh said...

Or even better, add the rpmfusion repo and do a yum install gstreamer-plugins-good, gstreamer-plugins-bad and gstreamer-plugins-ugly.

Sadique Puthen said...

I have them all installed on my system. They failed to play my vcd and I forced to resort into the method explained here. I didn't investigate why ugly and bad but good plugins failed to play it :-)

Siddhesh said...

Ah, well only the good plugins won't do. It's the bad and ugly that matter you see. Good only has patent-safe stuff. The -bad and -ugly have to real stuff (vcd, dvd, mp3, etc.)

Sadique Puthen said...

I do have them all installed from rpmfusion already. So not sure what is going on wrong.

gstreamer-plugins-good-0.10.13-1.fc10.i386
gstreamer-plugins-bad-0.10.9-1.fc10.i386
gstreamer-plugins-ugly-0.10.10-2.fc10.i386