Video CDs Break Windows Explorer

I've had luck ripping VCDs on Linux with vcdxrip -v -p -i /dev/sr0

Alternatively, first creating a bin+cue on windows with imgburn (ISO won't do!) and then vcdxrip -v -p -b the.bin -c the.cue

Having been such a popular format in Asia, a rich assortment of VCDs keep showing up at flea-markets in Norway; both original productions sold as VCDs, as well as "silvers", that is, exceptionally poor-quality pirated movies, often amusingly so. A popular example is "Star Wars: Backstroke of the West", with subtitles machine-translated from english to chinese, and then back to english.

VCDs, like DVDs, tend to have multiple audio tracks with different languages, even though the format doesn't actually support that technically. Take "yangtze three gorges" for example; a Chinese nature documentary with perfectly cheesy intros and outros. There was three "audio tracks"; the original Chinese, plus English and Japanese dubs. VCD only allows for a single audio track, so you find Chinese in the left channel, and English on the right. Televisions sold in Asia would have a toggle-switch on the remote to select one of the two audio channels to duplicate to both speakers.

Of course, having two dubs, the Japanese dub was made by having another copy of the whole video file, except with Chinese+Japanese.

Reading the first half or so made me think, "Wow, they should really fix this."

The second half made me think, "Wow, what a gross format. Really glad we have no use for these anymore!" (Not that they should leave the Explorer crash unfixed, of course).

It's bananas to me that a CD-ROM cost like $400 in 1990s money at one point; then I spent $150 on my first CD burner around 2002, and now you can buy a USB Blu-Ray/DVD/CD recorder drive for under $40.

I ran into this bug myself recently when trying to digitize a family collection of old CDs. Lots of family photos and videos, that were backed up in a mix of file formats and disc formats. I used Linux for most of the process after figuring out that windows fully locks up and becomes unusable with video CDs.

I ended up simply skipping most of the video CDs because the format is simply awful. In my case most of them were slideshows of family photos, and in every case I was able the find the same photos in a better format on other CDs.

Additionally with a good third of the video CDs, they were essentially unreadable. I assume due to lack of error correction. The whole process I did was surprisingly lossy. I ended with a too-large stack of CDs that I got little to no data off of. Two disks were seemingly identical and I got different sets of corruption on each. A puzzle for me to reassemble some other time.

I never thought we would talk about VCD's again LOLLL

nice to see something about this technology again. It was pervasive across SE asia for a little :).

I've had a fairly similar issue recently:

Something related to directly copying a file from inside a zip file on the c: drive to a network samba drive. The file will copy to about 40%, transfer drops to 0 kb/s, the .zip file gets corrupted, and I have to restart Windows to exit the file transfer.

Not 100% repeatable and I'm not sure how many of those specific details are required to trigger it. Extracting the .zip file before copying does seem to prevent it though, which is as far as I've gotten debugging it.

I still have in my possession somewhere printouts in 3 ring binders of the red, blue, and yellow books.

I am very glad that stuff all died.

Most use of VCD I saw was in karaoke, the low res graphics but decent sound worked fine for that - my karaoke DJ mate had hundreds.

That odd behaviour and "can't even do a safe restart" state sounds very familiar to those who have used Win9x; and there, it's usually the result of some memory corruption in the kernel.

The bug first appeared with the monthly updates 2023-03 (KB5023706) for Windows 11 and 2023-04 (KB5025221) for Windows 10. The initial releases of Windows 10 and Windows 11 22H2 with no updates do not have this bug

...and everything older likely doesn't either, especially from the time when VCDs were far more commonly used.

Pulling the files off (and ignoring errors, the way Windows does) loses that.

I suspect this might be the clue; perhaps some overzealous "security scan" tool (or these days, AI) flagged a "bug" in the error handling path, and something was done to appease it, but created this other subtle bug.

>I have reported the bug to Microsoft through the Feedback Hub at the end of 2025. Nothing has happened since — no feedback, no confirmation, no fix.

That's Feedback Hub working as intended. Think of it more as a black void to scream into, to relieve frustrations, than an avenue of communication with Microsoft.

Random anecdote: There was Video Cd, but also CD Video. CD video had both an (inner) CD part with audio, as well as a Laserdisc part which would usually contain a music video. Very weird format, but cool to have both analog and digital storage in one medium.

Hilarious! Thanks for the research and write-up. I enjoyed the read.

The funny thing is, with current AI systems I am reasonably sure you could point Fable or Astra at windows source code, give it that article to read, and tell it to try and figure out what the problem is, and couple hours later it would find out what the problem is. The issue, of course, it trying to get this support ticket to land in front of an engineer at MS in the first place.

win10/11 should be able to automagically mount ISO image with double click. There might be a way of isolating exact problem bit and distills it into USB flashable image with arbitrary filename.