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CIA · Nov 1, 2006, 11:36 AM

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, before OSX, around the time NeXT was purchased, & Steve Jobs returned to Apple, I burned a (Data) CD with some Raw DV footage on it. Just old video projects from college shot with one of the first sony DV cams (VX-1000 I think?) Anyway, I just rediscovered this CD, and plopped it my Quad, it mounts fine, and I can open the movies, but they play back all studdery (is that a word?) and fail every time I try to copy them to the HD. The CD is not scratched at all, and I do recall that they used to play fine off the CD back in the day. I tried to export them from quicktime into h.264, but that failed. Tried to make an image of the disc using both Toast 7 and Disk Utility..... Fail. Copy and paste into a new window in quicktime, fail.
Now, If I launch one of the movies, and then play it forward using just the frame advance, the whole movie will play, but only at 1 frame at a time, but all the frames appear to show up. Sometimes it will take a second or two for a frame to load, but it will finally load.
How, oh mighty Mac community, can I save these movies from what appears to be just a degraded burned CD? 100 years of archival storage my

!!

k_munic · Nov 2, 2006, 03:12 AM

a) a cd-r contains ~700MB = 2minutes of "raw dv".. are you sure, it contains dv?
b) a cd can not deliver videodata fast enough=stutter.. drag'n drop cd in Finder to some cozy place on your harddrive...
c) if QT can play it, you should be able to copy it... read b) ...

Jacke · Nov 2, 2006, 06:11 AM

Sort of a long shot, but you could try drag-dropping the disc onto a browser window, which should reveal the files on it, and then option-click on the movie name.

CIA · Nov 2, 2006, 06:13 AM

Originally Posted by k_munic

a) a cd-r contains ~700MB = 2minutes of "raw dv".. are you sure, it contains dv?
b) a cd can not deliver videodata fast enough=stutter.. drag'n drop cd in Finder to some cozy place on your harddrive...
c) if QT can play it, you should be able to copy it... read b) ...

Actually this CD-R pre-dates the 700MB revolution, 650MB ftw!
A:
According to get info from inside quicktime, the format is:
---
DV, 720 x 480 (640 x 480), Millions
16-bit Integer (Big Endian), Stereo, 32.000 kHz
---
As for your "Too-much-to-fit-on-a-CD":
The CD-R contains 614MB of data. Only 4 short movies. The combined runtime for all 4 together is 2min 50seconds.

B:
I'll just let you re-read my original post before I comment on your response here.
oh, wait, thats the problem, you didn't read the whole post. Here, I'll do the work for you:

...and fail every time I try to copy them to the HD

Like I said, if I nudge it one frame at a time, I can see the every frame plays back. But I can't copy it, rip it, re-encode it, image it, nothing.

Uncle Skeleton · Nov 2, 2006, 10:20 AM

Copying the 4 files individually, do they all fail? Or is there just one problem file? If you can see each frame, you could always take a screenshot of them one by one...which sucks but is better than nothing

CIA · Nov 2, 2006, 02:27 PM

Originally Posted by Uncle Skeleton

Copying the 4 files individually, do they all fail? Or is there just one problem file? If you can see each frame, you could always take a screenshot of them one by one...which sucks but is better than nothing

That is a dreaded final option......

And yeah, (when direct copied in the finder) they all fail, some after about 20MB, some after over 100.....

Uncle Skeleton · Nov 2, 2006, 03:54 PM

Always at the same spot for the same file? If not, you should try Jacke's suggestion, because the browser can resume the "download." If so, try VLC's transcode wizard, leaving "encode video" and "encode audio" unchecked. It might be able to repackage the streams and bypass the errors.

DV is a file format designed to be interrupted on demand, so if you copy a partial file, you're halfway there. The Finder erases the partial in this case, but if you copy with something else (like cp from the Terminal) you can at least get that far.

CIA · Nov 2, 2006, 05:40 PM

Sorry, the spot where they fail is random each attempt. Sometimes 80% sometimes only 10%...

hookem2oo7 · Nov 2, 2006, 06:25 PM

the dye in that old cd-r might have already degraded. I have several old CD-Rs of the 2x/4x variety that have been kept in protective sleeves and aren't scratched that still don't read correctly. They did when i first burned them about 8 years ago, but not now.

CIA · Nov 2, 2006, 08:59 PM

Originally Posted by hookem2oo7

the dye in that old cd-r might have already degraded. I have several old CD-Rs of the 2x/4x variety that have been kept in protective sleeves and aren't scratched that still don't read correctly. They did when i first burned them about 8 years ago, but not now.

Yeah... I guess I have some hope since I know I can launch the movies and play them frame-at-a-time and they are intact. I'm looking for a robust copy program that won't "Fail" at the slightest hint of an error. One that will keep hitting the disc untill the data shows up..... I know it's there!

dlefebvre · Nov 3, 2006, 12:57 AM

You can also try on diffenrent computers. Some cd reader are more sensitive than some others. I had CD that my G5 could not read but my Powerbook could.

Uncle Skeleton · Nov 3, 2006, 03:14 AM

Did you try with a browser then?