HW: cotbs video cd is entertainment from hell

[Rudich, Robert A]

>has anyone bought the visionary release on cd of the video chron ot blck
>sword?and has any one gotten it to work?
>it states on the cover that it can be played on cdi,or on mpeg compatible
>players.i have mpeg,but the disc has no .exe files!
>rj

rj (ex rjPXR5), you have touched on something that makes me want to scream.
  I borrowed a copy (thanks, FoFP) to turn into VHS,  I had at least 3
different approaches before I got it and I was feeling confident.  I even
have access to a Pentium 90 with a composite video and stereo audio output
board.   Nothing I've tried has gotten it to play properly.   You need an
external VMPEG viewer software, nothing but *.dat files in the MPEG
directory (and that file format is an odd one for MPEG).  The best I've been
able to do so far is to get halting play with very blocky video and music
samples at full screen.   The equipment I'm using is not quite cutting edge,
but within spitting distance.   A friend and I got it to play last night,
but only as a small window with an occasional frame loss.   Stretching the
window brought video to a crashing halt, although the music played on.

The mention on the disc of "White Book" standard may be the issue.  My VMEG
viewer says it is "Green Book" and it is fairly recent vintage.   Nobody
uses CD-I it seems and the Video CD files in the *.vcd format have yet to be
recognized by any software.  I've tried laser players that are supposed to
play CD Videos (I think now that the word order is significant too) and the
time display ticks along happy as can be to a dead blue screen and mute
speakers.  But this was before I knew of the disc file structure, so maybe
now I can finagle something.  I also tried an e-mail to the Visionary people
for advice, but they must be in a trance, because no reply.

I'm not the world's greatest technomage, but I'd say I'm at least at the
mean.  I can't believe that somebody would release something for home use
that I can't even figure out a clue as how to work.   I usually give advice
to others.   I've called in some real experts on this, but they haven't
gotten back to me yet.  If I can crack the coded language, I'll let you know
how.   This is becoming a point of honor now.

Rudy