Fair use 1, Copy Protection 0

Last night I brought a set of dance VCD videos, and was shocked and pissed to find out that they were all copy protected. They used the trick of adding an extra error track (clearly visible when you look at the disc surface) and causing the to disc to be unreadable by computer. I haven't tried playing it on my VCD player console, but already furious to realize that without the PC being able to read it, I couldn't rip it and put the videos in my Pocket PC to watch on the road.

When the going gets tough the tough gets going. So I spent a whole darn night trying to use Alchol 120% to see if I could find any trick to resolve the problem. NO luck. I basically spent a whole night in frustration (plus watching the new episode of Simpsons, Family Guy and American Dad along the way).

This morning I did some more research and found this discussion. Inspired by the discussion, I tried IsoBuster Pro 1.9.1 and shockingly found out that I can recover 100% of the video, and thus totally awesome. There are certain tidbits that worth mentioning though:

- Make sure that each time you "extract" files form a new VCD, you start by first close and then open the application. Otherwise the application may store the previously setting and thus created some fragmented and messed up result files.
- The successfully rate of extracting data/file depends on the DVD Recorder. For instance, the DVD Recorder on my desktop (NEC brand) has a few files failed extracting, but I tried the same disc on other recorders and they had 100% extract rate.
- I used the setting which extract the data filter my MPEG. I didn't try the other setting, and since it worked, I didn't really care about trying the others.