No, this post isn't due to the recent hive pump. I retrieved these files pre-pump and one of my friends DMed me today to say that I really need to start posting again, so, here we are.
My dad has a rather large CD collection when I was younger (still has them all) and I remember one in particular - Les Rythmes Digitales Extended Single for Jaques Your Body. When you put it in your computer it would magically play a music video through some flash player app, and I wanted to relive this, so here we go on a quest for nostalgia...
So, after seeing this censored video again and again, I decided to do something about it. I went to Amazon and bought a USB DVD drive and a copy of the CD. Both these items arrived a few days later, and I found 4 tracks when I put it into my PC, but it was only being recognised as an audio CD.
After much confusion, I looked through the case and noticed a distinct lack of mentioning the music video - turns out there is two copies of this disk, and extended one (with the video) and the regular one (which I had bought, without the video)
So back to ebay I went, where I picked up a copy of the 6-track edition for a rather reasonable £3.49 including shipping.
When this arrived, I clearly saw the fact that it contained the video marked on it, so I knew I was getting somewhere. I plugged it in, read it, "Audio CD" again...
At first I was expecting some weird flash quirk to mean I could just play this audio CD and somehow flash would interpret it and be able to get a video out of one of the tracks or something, but nope (or at least none of the modern flash solutions like ruffle could understand it). After searching and searching I decided to reach out to reddit for help, creating a post asking how to get a flash file off of an audio cd in r/flash.
Shortly after I reached the wikipedia page for the Enhanced CD thanks to some old forum posts linking my searching to a format. Suddenly, new found hope for the recovery of this video in all its glory. Tried a bunch of reading programs and none of them could handle it. Even tried command line reading, but that told me all the other sections were corrupt and just kept ripping the audio CD, even when pointing it to other "sessions" on the disk.
I did however notice that the article mentioned it being nonstandard and not supported everywhere, and of course these disks are basically unheard of today. This lead me to think about older DVD drives that may still read the disk in the right way. Fortunately, my dad kept one from going to the skip which was a Samsung USB DVD reader/writer from 2008. The CD was published in 2005 so I was hoping they'd be close enough, and, you betcha! Had to switch to windows as Linux really didn't like the disk, but it opened an exe on my desktop... and it worked! I thought since it was flash it wouldn't work anymore, but it is completely packaged with Macromedia Flash Player 7 (Yes, before adobe) as an exe.
I copied this EXE to my disk and then went back to linux. I wanted to see if the EXE would run on linux (with WINE) and, yes indeed it did.
Of course, viewing it in the corner of my desktop wasn't my ideal view, so I decided to pull exe2swf.exe from an archived website (thanks archive.org :)), ran it on linux and got 3 swf files - One for the settings menu, one blank one, and finally the actual file with the music video after picking the .exe file I had grabbed from the disk.
Now I had a sweet sweet .swf file, I could use my favourite flash emulator, ruffle, to enjoy the video in full screen.
And you best believe I loved every second of it.
Want to relive it as well? Obviously I can't just give you it here, but you can experience it by downloading the .swf or .exe from archive.org and using the ruffle web demo to play it in your browser.
One less piece of lost media for the pile (and now I know how it worked),
Stay classy,
~ CA