5.3. VCD playback
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## 5.3. VCD playback

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.

### Note

At least Plextor and some Toshiba SCSI CD-ROM drives have horrible performance reading VCDs. This is because the 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. VCD disks consist of one or more tracks:

- The first track is a small 2048 bytes/sector data track with an iso9660 filesystem, usually containing Windows VCD player programs and maybe other information (images, text, etc).

- The second and other tracks are raw 2324 bytes/sector MPEG (movie) tracks, containing one MPEG PS data packet per sector instead of a filesystem. Similar to audio CD tracks, these tracks cannot be mounted (Did you ever mount an audio CD to play it?). As most movies are inside this track, you should try `vcd://2` first.

- There exist VCD disks without the first track (single track and no filesystem at all). They are still playable, but cannot be mounted.

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 filesystem (`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.

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