Preserving VCD's, what is the best format

Question

Our institution preserves DVD's in the ISO format instead of converting to an mpeg2 format. This allows us to maintain the interactivity within the DVD structure and allow playback on a computer. Beacuse VCD's are multi-track like Audio CD's you can't just make an ISO. I have made a few BIN/CUE images of the disc's, but playback is an issue.

Has anyone else found a great way to preserve this content?

Answer 1

BIN/CUE seems like an obvious choice for this type of disc. From your question I understand that access is the main issue. If so, I did manage to access BIN/CUE images of Photo CDs (which have a similar layout as VCDs) with CDEmu (https://cdemu.sourceforge.io). This creates a virtual drive that you can access with any suitable media player (e.g. VLC), just like any ordinary physical drive. If anything this removes any dependency on your media player's to deal with the image format natively.

See also the notes here: https://github.com/KBNLresearch/iromlab/issues/93#issuecomment-499073161

Note that I haven't tested this with any actual VCDs because I've been unable to locate any in our collection.