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How can I recover QuickTime movies from old CD's?

Help! I have come across OLD, I mean old precious memories stored onto CD's n DVD R's. All done on Apple Macs going back to early 2000's and up. How can I recover QuickTime movies and old photos? I am running OS Monterey 12.7.6. I still can open some in QT but then I try to save to desktop so I can maybe upload onto external HD?



[Re-Titled by Moderator]

iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 12.7

Posted on Oct 26, 2024 12:16 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 26, 2024 1:18 PM

There's no magic that will fix faulty hardware.

Try them on another computer or try a different optical drive.


7 replies

Oct 26, 2024 1:39 PM in response to Mtfotonut

The OP says that they can still open some stuff in QuickTime - which implies that the Mac is reading at least some of the discs.


That said, a Mac might reject old discs for reasons other than faulty hardware, or defective discs.


If I remember other threads in this forum correctly,

  • Apple removed all support for the HFS (no "+") filesystem in Catalina.
  • Versions of macOS since then will refuse to read CDs formatted using the HFS filesystem.
  • In the old days, there was the option to format a CD using two filesystems, so it would be readable both on Macs and on PCs. Although recent versions of macOS could read the "PC" filesystem, when they see that the HFS one is present, they refuse to read the disc at all.
  • This leads to the conclusion that old "hybrid" Mac CDs might be readable on Windows PCs – but not on modern Macs!


DVDs have a standard filesystem (UDF) meant for use on DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, and DVD-ROM discs. Therefore, it seems more likely that you'd run into this problem with old CDs, than with old DVDs.

How can I recover QuickTime movies from old CD's?

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