How to play VCD videos in Debian Linux
A friend of mine gave me a VCD with some coptic Orthodox Christian
exorcism, where there pope was chasing some evil spirits from
possessed muslims who came to the Coptic Orthodox Church in egypt.
The video was made to be in VCD and as you can expect this did not
worked out of the box with Totem and VLC out of the box.
Putting in the VCD video inside my cdrom poped up an error like the
one in the header of the post.
In order to make the video play I had to use the old school and now
a bit obsolete
mplayer.
Hence in order to
play the VCD on Debian Linux I had to
install
mplayer and
w32codecs packages first
e.g.:
debian:~# apt-get update && apt-get install mplayer
w32codecs
Second to play the video from gnome-terminal, I had to switch to
the mounted cdrom location
/media/cdrom0 and launch the
video with mplayer cmd like so:
debian:~$ cd /media/cdrom0/vcd
debian:/media/cdrom0/vcd$ mplayer vcd://2
...
In some cases it might be necessery to play the video with mplayer
command like:
debian:/media/cdrom0/vdd$ mplayer vcd://2
vcd://3
Watching it with mplayer from console has some downsides as I
couldn't make the fast rewind work, but still it's way better than
nothing.
Too bad in Debian Squeeze 6 gmplayer is no longer installable. The
gmplayer can probably be installed if mplayer is compiled
from source, but I'm too lazy to try it out.
I've red also in some forums online that
gxine is capable of
playing the VCD play nice, but I couldn't install it from my
existing Debian repositories so I did not give it a go.