Years ago, for the purpose of protecting some very expensive VCD disks, I converted them into .nrg files useing Nero Burning Rom. I thought I could burn them to new blank CD disks if old ones were scratched.
Today, I wanna watch the videos on those VCD disks, but found no VCD players at all, even a laptop with a DVD drive.
On Linux, gcdemu can mount .nrg but I can not find the way to access the files.
On Mac, no way to mount .nrg files by default. Daemon Tools for Mac can do this, but it ask me to enable "System Extension", should reboot then do some complex things. I do not wanna risk anything on Mac, so I head to Windows.
Pitfall 1: did not find any perfect way to convert .nrg to .iso.
.iso is more universal, can be mounted directly in any OS by default. But a .nrg that is converted from a CD/VCD, can not be converted to a valid .iso.
AnyToIso does not help. nrg2iso (CLI) on Mac does not help. Some one suggested dd command does not help.
Pitfall 2: Handbrake can not convert the videos in .nrg perfectly.
Yes, Handbrake can open .nrg and can convert out something, but no, the result is bad.
Pitfall 3: coping files from virtual DVD drive to hard disk crashes Windows 11.
Both latest version Daemon Tools Lite and Alcohol 52% (or Alcohol 120%) can mount .nrg. I can open the virtual DVD and see all files in it, mostly .dat files. Since I wanna convert .dat files to .mp4 for portability, but copying them out to anywhere on hard disk, Downloads folder or anywhere, caused Explorer crashed. The only way is to hard reset.
I do the same thing in a Windows 7 guest OS in VMware, works well.
Pitfall 4: VLC can not play back .nrg well.
Mounted .nrg, try to play it like a real VCD disk, I used VLC first. The play back is not smooth.
Windows Media Player did a good job.
By the way, free edition Alcohol 120%/52% contains Adware, do not use it if you mind.
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