How does one play VCD on a Mac... (1 Viewer)

I am not a Mac person, and notice I ask "how" and not "if", I assume that if lowly Windows can play VCD on WMP, the Mac MUST have native software to do it.

I loaned a friend of mine a couple of my VCDs (home made, plays fine on my CyberHome 500 and Windows), but she came back and said she couldn't open the files. I remember under WMP, it has some quirks that it does not open or even offer to open VCD, but one kind of have to do the pull down menu to tell it to open VCD (how incredibly stupid is THAT??). I thought Mac, being promoted as a media savvy platform, HAS to be smarter than that.

I am not sure what exact model this Mac is, but it's definitely a "late" model desktop, as it came with one of them shinny gigantic (20"??) widescreen LCD panels.

Help appreciated, remember, I am not a Mac person, so be explicit, you are talking to a dummy here .

Sorry, no built in VCD player on a modern Mac operating system. Go to http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ and download VLC, it works great.

Any program that will handle MPEG will take it. Just look for a .DAT file that's in the hundreds of MB and drag it in

>>Sorry, no built in VCD player on a modern Mac operating system. Go to http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ and download VLC, it works great. >Any program that will handle MPEG will take it. Just look for a .DAT file that's in the hundreds of MB and drag it in

Did you look in the MPEGAV folder on the disc? I didn't say to open it in media player, just to drag the file in

I've never known anyone that wanted or needed VCD playback on a Mac. Mac users are more interested in watching and creating DVDs.

Apple will often ignore irrelevant technology such as VCD and leave it to 3rd party developers. If you haven't noticed, Apple has been at the forefront in providing free tools for creating video and DVD.

>>Did you look in the MPEGAV folder on the disc? I didn't say to open it in media player, just to drag the file in >I've never known anyone that wanted or needed VCD playback on a Mac. Mac users are more interested in watching and creating DVDs.

Agreed, while Apple does some great things like making DVD burners standard, they, as well as many other companies tend to tell consumers what they want rather than asking the customers

Steve_ch - I work in an organization with probably 3000 or more Macs and there are probably less than 50 external floppy disc drives. The floppy is ridiculously obselete. We have not missed floppy drives as an organization. Macs have always booted off CD and since the iMac, the network connection has been ubiquitous.

Apple moves PC technology forward: wireless, floppyless, USB, DVDR, Firewire. I applaud Apple for not being forever backward compatible.

But this is off topic - I suppose Apple could work VCD into Quicktime if they really felt it compelling enough to waste engineering time on. Instead, they're rightly focusing on current technologies. As Don pointed out, vlc is a decent open source app to download. There is also MacVCD X.

It is so easy to encorporate VCD into AppleDVD. I'd be shocked if it wouldn't play back the DAT file.

For Mac users - in addition to "vlc" mentioned above, I believe "mplayer" (ported from Unix) will do the job as well.

For PC users - try "zoom player". Right click on the program interface, select "OPEN DRIVE", select "D:" or whatever drive your VCD is in. No hoops. I'm pretty sure you can set it to autoplay on disc insert as well.



On the issue of Mac vs. PC, I do video transcoding at work and I am SO THRILLED that we got a PC instead of a Mac. So many of the tools I use to clean up video and convert from DV to MPEG-4 do not even exist on the Mac.