Ever burn something onto cd, lets say a home video, only to find that it doesn't play back
when you use it again?? If so, read on, otherwise, feel free to check out some other programs.
Especially when using cheap cds found along Spadina, you may run into reading problems for
cds created a long time ago. This may be a physical problem with the cd, or perhaps an error
when burning it. CD Recovery is a simple program that attempts to fix broken files that are
not readable anymore. Especially true of cds containing videos compressed in DIVX, XVID or some
sort of AVI format. Unlike the MPEG file formats, AVI headers store all the information regarding
the file, thus, when a cd drive attempts to read a sector that can not be read, it returns a predue
end of file mark, which conflicts with the file's own header, thus leading to movies that don't play.
In MPEG however, each frame is stored with all the information needed to play it (also true for MPEG-L3s)
and should continue playing after an error. To correct this, CD Recovery, starts by reading the
sectors n at a time, depending on the accuracy specified by the user. It continues reading
until it hits an error, in which it dumps a binary set (default=0) into the space written instead
of the data read. It then continues reading until the end of the file, thus saving a somewhat complete
copy of it onto disk. Although this program works, reading bytes one by one can be extremely tedious
and takes a long time, as such, I would not recommend running this on cds full of information.
While this may seem a little counter intuitive (since you are filling up with non real data),
it was made only to do so, if it works for you, great, if not, make one that does. That's what
CS is all about!
