Well, I'm afraid it's worse than a missing codec or needing just another bit of player software. The real issue is that MacOSX still doesn't have the right bits in the cdrom drivers to deal with whitebook compliant VCDs. This has been covered on the forum before. I didn't realize until I went looking for it that it's been well over a year since that thread, and the problem with VCDs is still with us.

I'm not real pleased with Apple's lack of attention for this detail, especially since all the codecs are already there. As I mentioned before, if I use a Windows machine to rip the mpeg files from the VCD, they'll play fine from the HD, or if I just re-burn the file to a normal data cd. I'm also not pleased that the VLC guys claim that it'll play VCD's, when all it'll really do is play VCD files on MacOSX. Of course, if you boot to MacOS9, you can use the QT player to play them, but booting into 9 just to watch a video is more work than it's worth IMO. So, the answer is, no - you cannot play VCD's on MacOS X yet (still). I stand corrected. After your post, I went back and poked at the options available in VLC a bit more.

Can This Be Played On Osx For Mac

Turns out the trick (if you can call it that) is to do an 'Open Disc' - not 'Open File'. However, VLC does seem to have a problem with my -recorded VCD's - it won't play tracks continuously on the disc, although I can manually choose a track to play by choosing the starting point to be Title x. Might be a VCD 1.1 problem, though - I've got the StarWars I on VCD, and it handles it correctly (it's a VCD 2.0 disc). I'll have to copy one of my 1.1 discs to get it to 2.0 and see if it does better with it that way. That'll teach me to RTFM a bit more often.