When I was about 10 years old I was getting into the first of many little projects on the family computer. I used NeroVision Express 2 to create a Super Video CD (SVCD) containing a collection of family photos, excessive transitions, obnoxious menus and (unbeknownst to me at the time) inappropriate music choices.
I’ve been sorting through a lot of family photos lately so I came across this old disc and I wanted to access it.
What are SVCD’s anyway?
Super Video CD (SVCD)’s are an improved version of a Video CD (VCD). VCD’s and SVCD’s are an early format for video playback using a standard compact disc (CD) prior to Digital Video Disc (DVD).
Why make a SVCD in 2005 - who knows! But SVCDs could be played back in many DVD players of the era so compatibility wasn’t a major concern.
Initial playback attempts
I popped it into my USB DVD drive connected to my MacBook - no DVD Player popped up so I tried VLC Player through the “Open Disc…” option. All I got from VLC was an error message (I later discovered it does actually play the video content in VLC on Windows but the “Starting Position” “Entry” option needs to be set above 1).
Fortunately NeroVision wrote a bunch of HTML pages to the disc, including the original image files. This was great, as it meant I had backups of the original files (including some I was missing).
However I still wanted to experience the nostalgia of my poor choices from 20 years ago.
I tried to copy all the files off the disc from multiple different computers but this would always freeze or display an error while copying the MPEG or SVCD files off the disc (but the HTML files were always read perfectly).
I attempted to make an image of the disc on my Mac in Disk Utility but this also failed. I even cleaned the disc multiple times but the result remained the same - I believed the disc to be toast.
I decided to give it one last shot - I read about dvdisaster in this Reddit thread. When I attempted to read the disc using dvdisaster in Windows I got a very interesting pattern of read errors:
This seemed far too consistent to be caused by a decaying or scratched CD - I realised I must be doing something wrong…
Understanding how SVCDs work
It turns out the disc is made up of multiple tracks written in different modes - from SVCD on Wikipedia:
The first track is in CD-ROM XA Mode 2, Form 1, and contains metadata about the disc. The other tracks are in Mode 2, Form 2, and contain audio and video multiplexed in a MPEG program stream (MPEG-PS) container.
I came across a tool for Windows called IsoBuster. The free version let me see the data and all the other tracks. There were 7 tracks in total -
- Track 1: Data content (the HTML files and seemingly fake MPEG files) and menu
- Tracks 2 through 7: Video files 1 through 6
Exporting content
Raw Binary Export
IsoBuster let me export the entire disc as a raw binary file (a .bin and .cue file). I right clicked on “Session 1” and selected “Extract Raw Data”.
In theory I could use these files to burn a fresh disc in future.
Interestingly I can open the .bin file in VLC and it’ll play the video tracks perfectly fine - though unfortunately the menu just plays as a video track rather than a working menu. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised - VLC’s wiki page on SVCD says:
SVCDs often do not work in VLC Player. VLC can sometimes play SVCDs using libcdio and libvcdinfo - the features page has more details. For a complete VCD/SVCD which includes menu selections, hot spots and playback control, see xine.
Exporting the MPEG content
There’s another option in IsoBuster which lets you export the tracks as MPEG files - the “Treat as Video ONLY, Extract but FILTER only MPEG video” option.
This gave me a pile of 7 MPEG-2 files which open fine in VLC. I converted these to modern H264 files in Handbrake making it easy to replay whenever I want.
Playing the SVCD in it’s original form
I still wanted to play the SVCD in it’s original form with working menus.
I didn’t find a good options for macOS but in Windows I found CyberLink PowerDVD supports SVCDs but unfortunately this requires creating an account…
Instead, I installed PowerDVD XP 4.0 under Windows XP on my 2008 MacBook for an almost period accurate experience - it works perfectly!
Lessons learned
This was a lesson in having the right tool for the job. My lack of understanding of how SVCDs worked almost led me to believe this SVCD was toast but I was actually just reading it wrong.
It’s nice that there’s still options to play these old discs, but it’s good to have a backup as old CD’s start to deteriorate.