Greetings!

I burned some VCDs using our office CD writers. I usually use the writer with Nero but one time I had to use the other writer which had Adaptec Easy CD Creator Deluxe 4 installed.

I created several VCDs, some of which were 2-segment VCDs. Using Nero, the files avseq01.dat and avseq02.dat were created. Using Adaptec, music01.dat and music02.dat were created.

My problem is that with the VCDs I created using Adaptec, music02.dat is always totally unreadable. Using Windows Media Player or Xing Mpeg Player, I could view music01.dat but not music02.dat. That is not the case with VCDs created using Nero -- both seqments are playable. In addition, 2-segment VCDs created using Adaptec are unreadable from standard VCD player devices. Finally, when I try to upload music02.dat from the CD to my hard drive, I can't finish the file transfer.

The original mpeg files I created the VCD from are now gone so I'm hoping to find a way to recover the second segments of the Adaptec-created VCDs. Is there a way I can read the problematic music02.dat that I haven't tried yet? Or if the software was bugged, is there a way to recover the movie file?

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.

Wilson Bautista

-- Wilson Bautista (bogsdb@rocketmail.com), October 28, 2001

Answers

There is freeware called VCDGear at www.vcdgear.com that can repair and convert *.dat VCD files back to *.mpg. White Book allows playable tracks in the MPEGAV directory to be named either avseqxx.dat or musicxx.dat. With everyone using avseqxx, Adaptec had to stand out using musicxx but even with the latest version of Easy CD as buggy as ever (VCD-creation wise, at least) compared with the previous ones it's hard to figure out why. Now it looks like Adaptec is also going to kill the wonderful WinOnCD only Nero is left to fend it off.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), October 30, 2001.

Well, I tried using the latest vcdgear but I'm afraid whatever I extract is still garbled (fixed mpeg errors or not). Unless anyone actually tried this on an Adaptec-created VCD and actually was able to recover the 2nd movie, I think Adaptec just screws up the second movie entirely and makes it unrecoverable. I can't even read the CD (create an image) using BlindRead. :(

Thanks very much anyway. :)

-- Wilson Bautista (bogsdb@rocketmail.com), November 05, 2001.