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snailmailman • today at 7:59 PM • 0 replies • view on HN

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.