Playing VCD[.dat] in linux

Solution 1:

As Wil has mentioned, your chances of playing a VCD .dat file by double clicking on it seems pretty low, unless you change the default behaviour of your GUI file manager.

Here's a few random suggestions …

Suggestion 1 - Have you considered creating a desktop shortcut to gxine (or VLC) and then dropping the VCD .dat onto the shortcut?

Suggestion 2 - Assuming that the VCD track to play is always track 1 (which may or may not be true), create a shell script (make sure the script executable) with your gxine command

#!/bin/bash
gxine vcd://1

Create a desktop shortcut to your shell script. Double click on the shell script to start gxine. Of course, this will only work if the VCD track is always track 1.

Suggestion 2a - In response to cdb's comment, here's a suggestion for a bash shell script which will extract the track number from the VCD .dat filename and then invoke gxine. This script as a whole is untested, but the perl regular expression has had superficial testing.

#!/bin/bash

VCD_FILENAME=${1}
if [ "${VCD_FILENAME}" == "" ]
then
    echo "${0}: missing input VCD filename"
    exit 1
fi

TRACK_NUMBER=`echo ${VCD_FILENAME} | perl -ne 'print $1 if m/AVSEQ(\d+)\.DAT$/;'`
if [ "${TRACK_NUMBER}" == "" ]
then
    echo "${0}: cannot extract track number from input filename"
    exit 2
fi

gxine vcd://${TRACK_NUMBER}
exit $?

You'd probably want to improve the error checking to make the script much more robust. I'd expect that there are alternatives to using perl to extract the track number from the VCD .dat filename.

Suggestion 3 - You could convert your VCD to another format and then use your favourite video player. HandBrake, mplayer/mencoder and/or VLC may be able to do the conversion for you. You'll need to confirm.

I must admit that I do not understand your reluctance to use the command line. The command line is the most powerful tool that you'll ever use on your Linux machine.

Solution 2:

Have you tried VLC Player?

The only problem is, .DAT file is an extention used by quite a few items so setting anything as the default may cause problems in the future.

However, VLC can play VCD files just fine.