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Video CD and Super Video CD

VCD and SVCD rips play directly from the bin/cue rip — no conversion step. No CSS is ever involved, so nothing beyond the bare .rbf is needed.

Which file to select

Select the rip's data-track .bin from Load Video — usually the one labelled "Track 2". The small Track 1 is the ISO filesystem and does not contain the movie.

Also accepted:

  • Single-file whole-disc .bin images
  • Raw .img files
  • Extracted .DAT files (the MPEGAV/AVSEQ01.DAT from a mounted VCD)

.cue sheets themselves are not selectable — they are text descriptions of the layout, not the data. Pick the .bin the cue refers to.

What happens

The core detects the raw CD sector format by content, strips the sector framing in fabric, and demuxes the MPEG-1 (VCD) or MPEG-2 (SVCD) system stream inside. Audio plays at the correct 44.1 kHz pitch, and seeking, pause and A/V sync all work.

SVCD's 480-wide picture fills the screen on both HDMI and the analog CRT output.

Limitations

VCD support is deliberately basic playback, the reason being: it came almost free. MPEG-1 video and MP2 audio are both DVD-Video-legal formats, so they were implemented to meet the DVD specification rather than for VCDs. Once they existed, playing a VCD needed only the CD sector deblocking and an MPEG-1 system-stream demux on top — so it was added. Nothing beyond that was built:

  • No VCD menus or PBC (playback control). The movie track plays; interactive VCD navigation is not implemented.
  • No segment stills.
  • One .bin per movie track — a multi-track rip needs the movie track selected directly.
  • No CD-DA audio tracks — audio-only tracks on a mixed disc do not play.
  • No 2336-byte-sector images. The common 2352-byte raw format is what is supported.
  • A 23.976-coded film VCD would play fast. This is rare; almost all VCDs are 29.97 or 25 fps.
  • The elapsed and total times are an estimate in linear playback modes, worked out from how fast the file is playing rather than read from a navigation structure. On a VCD it is exact; on a variable-bitrate file it can drift a little through the disc. Chapter numbers are still blank, since there are no chapters to count.