Splitting Audio and Video from VCDs

Reader Didit writes: From a VCD can you separate the video file from the audio file?

VCD, or video CD, is rapidly falling out of favor as a storage medium for video files. All a video CD is is a regular CD with video files written to it; they're a relic of an era that predates writeable DVDs. Most DVD players can play VCD discs, but today that's largely irrelevant: DVD-Rs can hold eight times as much data, minimum, which means longer and better quality movies.

All of this is probably pretty useless if you already have a stack of old VCDs full of videos.

So what to do if you want to edit those VCD files? Unfortunately VCD files are stored in formats with audio and video combined and they can't be separated without using additional software. (In other words you won't find an "audio" folder and a "video" folder.) The good news: Any decent video editor will let you import VCD files, and from there you can sub in a new audio track over the existing video.

In fact, if you just want to dub narration over the existing audio, you can do this right in Windows Movie Maker that every XP computer already has. Just launch Movie Maker, import your video, and click Tools > Narrate Timeline... From there you can record new audio via microphone, add music, or import other audio. (This Microsoft how-to offers more advice.) It isn't as sophisticated as third-party video editors, but it'll work in a pinch. (I've also written about Windows Movie Maker here.) Note however that Movie Maker does not support exporting video in VCD format, so you'll have to use a commercial video editor (Ulead makes a good one) if you want to keep on keepin' on with VCD.