Strange VCD Disc, Cannot be read on PC

[minchin]

I rent Chinese VCD discs from a local Chinese video rental in the USA. There are times when the disc because scratch and skips during playback on my DVD machine.

What I normally do is to copy it to a CDR using either CloneCD or ISOBuster (following some suggestion on dvdrhelp in repairing VCD).

I just encountered a disc that when played on DVD machines, it play just fine. However, none of my DVD-RW/CDRW/Combo drive will read it. ISOBuster reports that it is blank. CloneCD will just keep waiting for the disc (I assume that it thinks it is blank also and keep waiting for the drive to be ready).

While this is no big deal, (I can also just skip it), out of curiousity, has anyone seen anything like this? I have not heard of the kind of protection on VCD like the Calcutus Shield or the like.....

Any suggestion as how to back it up? (Just for the fun of it....)

Min

[yi_hsun]

I've got no idea, never heard of such VCDs that can't be backed up.

[pranav81]

Can you read the disc in pure DOS environment?


::Pranav::

[minchin]

Well, who said that a pure DVD-ROM/CD-ROM is useless in these days of Combo drives.... Since the disc play fine in all my DVD players.... (cheap DVD players, which are probably all made in China, using DVD-ROM drives), I dig out a pure 'READ-ONLY' drive....and wah lah....

I was finally able to copy the files out using a LiteOn 165H DVD-ROM. Nero says it is an blank media when I tried to do a CD Copy. However, explorer recognize it and present the 'what you want to do with this?' popup. I was able to copy the files off the disc using explorer.

Any 'writable' drive seems to think of the disc as being blank. This is a pressed CD.... I am pretty sure that this disc has some sort of illegal TOC of some sort or some 'illegal' media type field (maybe claim that this is the disc is a CDR).

Could this be one of those disc created using TZLock, CCDLock programs out there?

Anyone knows the steps that a 'writer' goes through when a disc is inserted? how different is it compare to a 'read-only' drive? Is there a tool to analyse the TOC?

Min