Ripping your VCD Movie

Ripping VCDs can be due to many reasons a necessity but all the reasons aside, its FUN and EASY, so why not do it right away!





Akmal Khan Sapay

.2003.05.30.

VCDs are gaining more and more ground among PC users. Sometimes you want to put the film you have on your VCD on the net or you simply want to watch it on your PC. That's here the idea of VCD ripping comes in picture. You can rip the data from your VCD just like you rip data from a DVD. All you need is a free tool VCDGear. Go ahead and download it from vcdgear's site.

Ripping the vcd

After downloading VCDgear and installing it, click on its icon to start the program. You may now Load your vcd into your PC. The first window appears like the one below:

From the drop-down menu "Extraction/Covertion" choose "dat->mpeg". The data in a VCD is called .dat files and thats what we are going to convert to mpeg clips. Now click the "load" button and browse to your CD player. You will see different folders with different names like CD1, VCD, EXT, MPEGAV etc. MPEGAV is the one we are interested in since thats the folder which contains all the .dat files, in other words the whole movie. So go ahead, open the folder and you will see half a dosen .dat files. 

click the first .dat file, give your output file a name and the path. Back on the window, all that remains is the Start button to commence the encoding process. Click on the Start button and vcdgear will convet the .dat file to mpeg format in a matter of minutes.

Now repeat the same process until all the .dat files in the mpegav folder are converted to mpeg format. Thats all there is to it, enjoy watching your movie on your PC!

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Akmal Khan Sapay
Music Editor
Safis Web