Recently I purchased some old Tamil Movie VCDs, I wanted to copy them to my PC so that I can carry them in my Zune player or to my Digital Media Centre in my house. When I tried to play one of them, it played very well on my DVD player but not on my PC (Windows Media Player or VLC Player). On PC they played only with Nero Showtime software. After some digging, I learned these are VCDs that have been written with 800MB of data – more data than normal 700MB CDs, and many applications may have difficulty in reading them. I tried copying them using XCopy/Windows Explorer/Robocopy and all of them failed. I found a free software IMGBurn from the authors of DVD Decrypter that allows copying & recording of many types of CD/DVD images to Hard Disk & recordable media.
I used Imgburn’s “Read” option to read the contents from the VCD and copy it to my hard-disk. By default, it copies the file as *.bin, but you can rename it to *.mpg, after which Nero Showtime can play it. You can also create an image of the disc into ISO files for backup purposes. Once copied I imported the files to Adobe Premiere Elements to convert them into WMV format which created the entire 1.6GB Movie to a 1.2GB WMV file (if you want to use the movie with iPod/iTunes use the export to MPEG4 option.
Disclaimer: I have given the above suggestion only for legal usage of content that you have purchased and have a right in your country for making backups.