Preserving your ancient videos
I have recently switched to an Apple laptop from being a Windows user. I have a large collection of VCD videos and cannot find an app that will play them. Ed Murray For the benefit of anyone under the age of 35, the Video CD format was an early successor to VHS tape. It stored up to 74 minutes of digital video on a CD, at a resolution of 352x288 at 25 frames per second. This is actually worse than VHS, although it doesn’t degrade over time the way that VHS tape does. VCDs basically went extinct as soon as CD-R was invented and anyone could make perfect copies of their VHS tapes.
You could still play VCDs in OS X under Mountain Lion by directly opening the .dat file on the disc in QuickTime Player. But this only works with a directly connected optical drive, you won’t be able to use OS X’s Remote Disc feature to stream the video from another computer’s drive. You might consider converting your VCDs to a DVD‑Video because you can fit around six VCDs on a single-layer DVD-R.
However, even DVD-R is on its way out and it might be simpler to copy the video files off the disc onto a hard disk that you can backup easily. Then, you should be able to play the video files on your Mac using VLC Media Player (free, videolan.org).