Video CDs Break Windows Explorer
clydesnotes.blogspot.com
clydesnotes.blogspot.com
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.
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.
The idea for the feedback hub was good in theory, but making it easily accessible to any user has basically turned it into a black hole which nobody bothers to probably check.
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.
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've seen some nasty things happen with broken NICs/drivers. One side gets nonsense data that the peer didn't send, and has poor behavior as a result.
Maybe add iperf3 to the test case to really get the network working...
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 $40.
Like the red book audio CDs that preceeded them, white book VCDs were a way to make playback a light-weight task on very specialized (maybe even single-purpose) hardware.
That's not necessarily a meaningful goal these days, but our limitations were different back then.
Previous to that, I was doing some process or other on the PC that converted VCDs into a format that could be played on a modded PSX. The quality was terrible and I did it anyway.
When DVD was still a very new and expensive-to-use format, I scored a very cheap SCSI DVD-ROM drive that was a pull from some Sun machine or other. I never did succeed at playing a glitch-free film with it.
Part of that disappointment was due the 3dfx Voodoo 3 card lacking the MPEG 2 decoder that it had, at one point, been advertised to feature. In its place was a mail-in coupon that could be sent in for a software decoder...which never showed up, either.
It was an interesting time in digital video.
It's about as gross as regular Red Book CD audio. Sacrifice error correction for capacity. Errors in either audio or video streams are non-critical (to a point) and can be masked on playback. That's what C1 and C2 error correction does. There used to be copy protections that played silly games with error correction to foil CD audio rippers while not affecting playback on normal players. Think it was called Cactus Data Shield. It was not very effective.
And similar to VCD disks, the *.cda files Windows shows on audio CDs also aren't real.
Indeed:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cactus_Data_Shield
Additionally, I remember from this time (perhaps this was a very German thing) that bands and stars whose CDs used Cactus Data Shield or a similar copy protection system suddely got hated and abandoned by parts of their fanbase.
What was even crazier was how fast DVD burners saw commoditization. The first Pioneer DVD Burner in 2001 launched at something like 1000$, and by 2004 lite-on was selling models for under 75$.
And, for most people, the Lite-On models were fine. I did have one customer that switched back to either Pioneer or Plextor (I can't remember which) because they were doing a -lot- of DVD writing (we're talking 4 burners running at once, that was a fun build to spec out!) and the Lite-On drives kept failing under the extreme use. Lite-On did have a good warranty process, however the downtime cost him enough that one day that he flat out asked what he should buy that was better. The drives we wound up going with were more than double the cost of the Lite-Ons, but he never had to warranty those [0].
[0] - Although, they did get seized in a raid apparently <_<
Go on…
>> they were doing a -lot- of DVD writing
I'll then add that when I helped them with their first 4 burner build, they were so happy that they gifted me with a subtitled copy of Battle Royale before such existed on the open market (they somehow clocked me as a closeted weeb I guess...)
The reason I know about the raid, is they came in one Saturday in a frantic state, asking to build a new basic-as-hell rig to 'get back up and running' after the fact. Showed me the local news article, and yep in the seized goods if you zoomed in you could about make out our shop's case badge. They did have to go with Lite-Ons for that temporary build due to stocking, but did also have me re-order the better drives after the fact.
Have to add, he was a very honest customer with us. By that I mean, he was not one of the 'hagglers' we had to deal with[0], and we got the better drives in quickly, he came in and paid for them, but he did not abuse our return policy and return the Lite-On drives even though he could have [1].
Also wasn't a super frequent customer, but he was overall chill enough that he did have the note in our system of "This guy is cool, hook him up!" even the first time I got to work with him [2]
[0] - Ever have someone try to haggle a used K5 or Pentium chip that was priced at 5$ in 2002? I have.
[1] - One of our other customers that ran an independent computer repair shop, had a habit of buying products from us to complete a repair while ordering the same part from Newegg, and then returning the part Newegg delivered to them once they got it delivered. We only discovered it due to RMA discrepancies. That customer was 50% of the reason we started tracking Serial numbers for certain items, the other 50% being people who abused our return policy to deal with defective creative labs products.
[2] - Life pro tip, do not assign the note of "Customer Stole from us Call police" to yourself as a shitpost, when you go to a store 2 years after you left and the floor staff has rotated it gets a bit weird till they double check with management.
"Five dolla? Good LAWD that's a lotta money! How 'bout I give you a nickel and you let me use your adding machine for five minutes?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yoAVDuE7XY
At least 3 of my coworkers would reference that on a regular basis once a haggler left the store (with or without a purchase...)
They don't care. It works like this for copying over a network (i.e. copying speed goes to 0) but then recovers. They rewrote explorer and now it needs twice the clicks to achieve something. Microsoft at its best.
Eventually I found out what was really happening, thieves somehow got notice of container ships with blank CDs and were breaking into those to steal the CDs. A single container could keep a city fed (and all its modded playstation 1) for years.
nice to see something about this technology again. It was pervasive across SE asia for a little :).
For me, the attraction was the potential of breeching the then-seemingly impenetrable wall between my computer and TVs. I had recently come into the possession of a CD burner (DVD burners were not yet available, at least not cheaply) and when my family picked up a dedicated DVD player that was advertised as also handling VCDs, I saw an opportunity.
The associated software ecosystem was quite flaky, though. I tried burning them with Roxio Toast and Nero among other utilities, but producing VCDs that player would actually play was hit or miss. I burned several coasters and eventually gave up.
Seeing content created on my computer actually play on a TV really felt like a miracle in the 90s.
Credit to HDMI, it finally standardized the IO systems that means PC to TV is trivial nowadays.
I eventually just gave up and watched things on my iMac G5 since its 20" screen wasn't all that much smaller than my CRT TV, and then later in college I upgraded to a 27" Intel iMac which had a nice IPS panel display and was better to watch things on than most flat panel TVs from that era around that size.
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 wonder if this could be escalated to a vulnerability somehow. How privileged is the operation of mounting virtual drives?
I feel like half my job these days is deciding which of the high/critical "security bugs" identified by someone's LLM is worth pushing back on because:
A. It isn't a bug, and just because it found a property with a similar name, perhaps it is an older feature flag and shouldn't be used as a default for customer accounts.
B. If I push back on all of these non-issues, I'll never have any time to get real work done. Of course the logging filters aren't checking and masking SSNs the app doesn't work with SSNs.
I am very glad that stuff all died.
I wonder what they were thinking, whoever designed the VCD.
Don't do this, you might lose data or mess stuff up. Just use task manager to kill explorer.exe before restarting. Or probably you can just kill explorer.exe and then go to File > Run new task, type "explorer" and press OK to start a new instance which should fix everything without restarting.
That doesn't work, the UI just freezes or turns black. IIRC I also tried with taskkill and another method. It doesn't seem killable from within Windows when it's in that borked state.
It has been doing that for at least 2 years.
On VCD's, IDK about Windows, but by extracting the DAT file under Unix you could just get the MPEG stream as if it were a file.
...and despite MS having their own AI, one which many here have said their employees are required to use, and yet bugs like this remain unfixed, is a good example of why AI isn't replacing any developers. Ultimately a human has to care enough to even point the AI at the problem.