How to rip VCD on Linux#

I've been travelling in some countries where some cool music were sold on VCD. Yeah, video CD.

You want the music ? Then you'll get the music video ! Ahah.

But then, 10 years after, what can I do to archive, to keep those little treasures ? Ripping, of course.

Copy those files#

Nop, I've tried to directly copy those files that are on the VCD, I got errors (I'm using Linux Mint 21.1). I've also tried to cat /dev/sr0 > ~/Downloads/VCD-rip/vcd01.iso but I got same errors (cannot read from input bla bla). Then I've tried to dd if=/dev/sr0 of=~/Downloads/VCD-rip/vcd01.iso and I still got those errors ! Using Handbrake ? Errors, again. Damned.

But on the other hand, VLC was able to read the bloody VCD with a vlc vcd:///dev/sr0

Let's rip those files#

Then I found this package : vcdimager. So let's install it :

sudo apt install vcdimager

Now we can now do a :

# go to a working dir somewhere
cd ~/Downloads/

# rip the VCD content to the current dir
vcdxrip -v -p -i /dev/sr0

-v be verbose
-p show progress
-i set source and determine if "bin" image or device

And voilà, the VCD files are being ripped ! That's good !

Extracting audio without recompression#

How about extracting the audio from those ripped music videos ?

You'll need ffmpeg for this, but you know how to install it, right ?

# Extract all audio from the ripped mpg files, from current dir
for file in *.mpg ; do ffmpeg -i "$file" -vn -acodec copy "${file%.*}-audio.mpg"; done

That's it !