Struggling with playing VCD on GNU/Linux.

Few months back I tried playing a VCD on my linux laptop but I couldn’t play it. I spent some time trying to find out what went wrong. dmesg showed lots of error messages like this.

hdc: command error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdc: command error: error=0x54 { AbortedCommand LastFailedSense=0x05 }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
ATAPI device hdc:
  Error: Illegal request -- (Sense key=0x05)
  Illegal mode for this track or incompatible medium -- (asc=0x64, ascq=0x00)
  The failed "Read 10" packet command was:
  "28 00 00 00 01 3e 00 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 "
end_request: I/O error, dev hdc, sector 1276

Even when I tried to mount cd-rom drive and access the file /media/cdrom/MPEGAV/AVSEQ01.dat, I got following error;

AVSEQ01.DAT: ERROR: cannot read `AVSEQ01.DAT' (Input/output error)

I even tried using dd to copy and create an image of the VCD onto hard disk and loop mount it. But this also lead to input/output error. At that time I was not in a mood to spent more time and find out a solution. I use mplayer for playing media files on my laptop. Today I noticed few things when I ran mplayer command. It displayed the following and hanged.

MPlayer dev-SVN-r19208-3.3.5 (C) 2000-2006 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.86GHz (Family: 6, Model: 13, Stepping: 8)
CPUflags:  MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 SSE SSE2

Playing vcd://.
track 01:  adr=1  ctrl=4  format=2  00:02:00  mode: 1
track 02:  adr=1  ctrl=4  format=2  00:18:74  mode: 1
track 03:  adr=1  ctrl=4  format=2  37:52:32  mode: 1

When I carefully went through those last three lines I could see the length of the 3rd track to be more meaningful. So I tried playing the 3rd track using the following command and it worked. I need to google and find out why exactly I am not able to access this file directly.

$ mplayer vcd://3
or
$ mplayer -vcd 3

Okay! I have to watch this movie now.

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