Hi all,

I have an original commercial VCD that has a lot of pixelations and blocks during playing on VCD player. I converted the dat file to mpeg using VCDGear. Window media player played it with similar result but every now then it hang. I tried to import it into TMPEnc for re-encoding but TMPEnc came up with "File cannot open or unsupported" message. Trying with VirtualDub got the folowing messge: "Mpeg import filter: packet sync error on packet stream (14bec4). I also tried IsoBuster with same result. Window media player played it with pixelations and blocks but every now then it hang.

Any suggestion on the best way to extract the dat file for re-encoding will be very much appreciated.

-- Edward (Skedton@yahoo.com.au), October 07, 2003

Answers

VCDgear is your best bet and you were right to use it. However, what you want to do is not really going to help. Let me give you an example. Let's say you have an old style cassette tape recorder with a microphone and you turn it on and record, using the microphone, a vinyl LP playing on your turntable. Now you want to take this tape and "make it better" for burning to audio CD. You're not really going to be able to do that. VCD uses very low bit rates and pixelation is part of the price you pay. If you had the original video source, you could re-encode it and maybe make it better, but trying to re-encode from the VCD video file itself is NOT going to help and almost certainly will result in an even worse final product.

-- Root (root@yahoo.moc), October 09, 2003.

Hi Root,

Thanks for your help.

What I was trying to do was to extract the mpeg from the dat and then burn a new VCD with it so I have a VCD that will play smoothly without any picture break-up. I have done this a few times before and every time I can produce a smooth running VCD with the extracted mpeg without further re-encoding as they play pretty smoothly in Window Media player. However, this time, the extracted mpeg plays exactly as jumpy and breaking up as the original VCD, so I thought TMPGEnc may be able to clean up some encoding error in the mpeg. But it didn't even look at it! One thing I can't understand is that the extracted mepg files I had before, they all can be loaded into TMPGEnc. But this time, the mpeg file is not readable by TMPGEnc or VirtualDub. Can anyone explain?

-- Edward (Skedton@yahoo.com.au), October 10, 2003.

I find that VCDCutter never failed me. Try it.

-- waro (warozzo@yahoo.com), October 11, 2003.

I just copy the DAT file, change the extension, and it plays exactly as the DAT file, without reencoding it. But, if the original DAT is bad, I guess that cannot be fixed.

-- (lxalvarz@udc.es), January 02, 2004.

dont bother re-encoding it,you will save a lot of time and effort by just changing the file extension from dat to avi/mpeg or whatever you want to change it to. All you need to do is get a file extension changer off the internet and you should be sorted

-- EnVe19 (enve19@hotmail.com), May 17, 2004.

use vcd easy.it has a feature which inputs dat files and converts them to mpeg

-- femi (superunknown@whsmithnet.co.uk), June 20, 2004.

I was under the impression that the DAT file on a VCD was actually an MPG file with a different extension anyway. No re-encoding should be necessary Tim

-- Tim Smithers (timw1111@aol.com), October 10, 2004.