I'm using a Fedora 23-like OS (Korora) and recently I got my hands on an old VCD. Korora recognized it as a Video CD all right and Nautilus even gave me an option to play using VLC. But as soon as I clicked the button VLC threw several IO errors as follows:File reading failed:VLC could not read the file (Input/output error).Unidentified codec:VLC could not identify the audio or video codecFile reading failed:VLC could not read the file (Input/output error).File reading failed:VLC could not read the file (Input/output error).Unidentified codec:VLC could not identify the audio or video codecThen I tried copying the entire CD using Create a Partition Image feature of Disks application. Unfortunately, Disks complained that: 99.7% (401.3 MB) of the data on the device CD/DVD Drive  TSSTcorp CDDVDW SU-228HB [AS00] (/dev/sr0) was unreadable and replaced with zeroes in the created disk image file. This typically happens if the medium is scratched or if there is physical damage to the drive.Upon researching this issue I came across a similar issue in a related cross site question Playing VCDs on Ubuntu. This worked for the part that I'm now able to play all sorts of VCDs to my hearts content, but this raises a few questions in my mind.How on earth is VLC able to play the contents of VCD when even the kernel, apparently, cannot read all sectors properly and is just able to show the directory structure?How can I copy such kind of discs? I've tried this on Windows and it works very well. Windows can read all the files it shows in the directory structure. Linux, in general, is only able to show the directory structure.Question 2 is important for me. Most related questions have solutions that just discuss how to play VCD using VLC or MPlayer without giving any info on a way to actually copy the entire partition. Please do not answer this question if your solution is to use vcdxrip or to use VLC's conversion feature. They're ridiculously slow as compared to simple copying that I found on Windows.
Copy files from VCD without conversion to MPEG
linux;fedora;linux kernel