A Windows Update Made Video CDs Crash Explorer
Video CDs Break Windows Explorer
Since early 2023, copying Video CD files in Windows Explorer can freeze the transfer and leave Explorer in a broken state that only a hard reboot fixes. The bug appeared with KB5023706 for Windows 11 and KB5025221 for Windows 10, and Microsoft has not responded to a Feedback Hub report from late 2025. VCDs are not standard ISO 9660 discs, so dedicated tools like VCDGear or bin+cue imaging are safer.
A bug that affects system stability is still somewhat urgent, I think.
- tripflag
I've had luck ripping VCDs on Linux with vcdxrip -v -p -i /dev/sr0
Alternatively, first creating a bin+cue on windows with imgburn (ISO won't do!) and then vcdxrip -v -p -b the.bin -c the.cue
Having been such a popular format in Asia, a rich assortment of VCDs keep showing up at flea-markets in Norway; both original productions sold as VCDs, as well as "silvers", that is, exceptionally poor-quality pirated movies, often amusingly so. A popular example is "Star Wars: Backstroke of the West", with subtitles machine-translated from english to chinese, and then back to english.
VCDs, like DVDs, tend to have multiple audio tracks with different languages, even though the format doesn't actually support that technically. Take "yangtze three gorges" for example; a Chinese nature documentary with perfectly cheesy intros and outros. There was three "audio tracks"; the original Chinese, plus English and Japanese dubs. VCD only allows for a single audio track, so you find Chinese in the left channel, and English on the right. Televisions sold in Asia would have a toggle-switch on the remote to select one of the two audio channels to duplicate to both speakers.
Of course, having two dubs, the Japanese dub was made by having another copy of the whole video file, except with Chinese+Japanese.
- snailmailman
I ran into this bug myself recently when trying to digitize a family collection of old CDs. Lots of family photos and videos, that were backed up in a mix of file formats and disc formats. I used Linux for most of the process after figuring out that windows fully locks up and becomes unusable with video CDs.
I ended up simply skipping most of the video CDs because the format is simply awful. In my case most of them were slideshows of family photos, and in every case I was able the find the same photos in a better format on other CDs.
Additionally with a good third of the video CDs, they were essentially unreadable. I assume due to lack of error correction. The whole process I did was surprisingly lossy. I ended with a too-large stack of CDs that I got little to no data off of. Two disks were seemingly identical and I got different sets of corruption on each. A puzzle for me to reassemble some other time.
- operation_moose
I've had a fairly similar issue recently:
Something related to directly copying a file from inside a zip file on the c: drive to a network samba drive. The file will copy to about 40%, transfer drops to 0 kb/s, the .zip file gets corrupted, and I have to restart Windows to exit the file transfer.
Not 100% repeatable and I'm not sure how many of those specific details are required to trigger it. Extracting the .zip file before copying does seem to prevent it though, which is as far as I've gotten debugging it.
- xp84
Reading the first half or so made me think, "Wow, they should really fix this."
The second half made me think, "Wow, what a gross format. Really glad we have no use for these anymore!" (Not that they should leave the Explorer crash unfixed, of course).
It's bananas to me that a CD-ROM cost like $400 in 1990s money at one point; then I spent $150 on my first CD burner around 2002, and now you can buy a USB Blu-Ray/DVD/CD recorder drive for under $40.
- happyPersonR
I never thought we would talk about VCD's again LOLLL
nice to see something about this technology again. It was pervasive across SE asia for a little :).