Can anyone tell how to play videos with .bin extension in VLC?
The file came along with another file same name but with extension .cue.
7 Answers
.bin and .cue are fileformats for ISO images. The .bin is the actual data, and the .cue contains info about blocksize etc. The files can be mounted with DaemonTools and others, and appear as a virtual drive in your filesystem.
There are also CD Recording programs that can open these files and burn them to a disc.
EDIT: Nero Burning Rom, Feurio! and CDRWin seem to be able to understand this format and burn it as an image.
2Easy, drag and drop the file onto the VLC Player Window. It will play the file automatically if it contains valid video files. No need to pre-mount it in any tool.
1AS for now (v.2.2.4), VLC Player is not able to play .bin or .cue files that belong to regular audio CD's, which is a shame.
As for DVD-video images and other formats than regular Audio CD, it might work, or it might not. If you're unable to open the file (.bin/.cue) with VLC Player, you need to mount the disc image on to a virtual drive first.
Audio CD's .BIN files are pure PCM raw data. As such, they have no header, no metadata, no compression, no nothing. And, because of that, archivers like 7-Zip, WhateverIsoWhatever and so on doesn't and will never recognise them as archives, because they really are not. For the same reason, media players, like VLC, cannot play them, as they must, at least, know what kind of data is being passed to them.
The elegant solution is to import the .BIN files to a program like Audacity (File - Import - Raw Data... - Signed 16-bits PCM, 2 channel (stereo), 44100 Hz) and, then, export as .WAV. Now, try to do that with tens of .BIN files...
Here is a hacky and much faster solution to "convert" audio .BIN files to .WAV files, so that media players can recognise them: add a valid "generic" .WAV header to every .BIN file.
I use this header (saved as "wav.hed", using HxD free binary editor) for typical 16-bits 44100 Hz stereo PCM audio CD .BIN files:
52 49 46 46 FF FF FF 7F 57 41 56 45 66 6D 74 20 10 00 00 00 01 00 02 00 44 AC 00 00 10 B1 02 00 04 00 10 00 64 61 74 61 00 FF FF 7F
In a Windows (sorry!) command prompt, a command like this would do it:
copy /b wav.hed + trackXX.bin trackXX.wav /b
It works because most media players ignore many of .WAV headers' data, looking only for the essential ones to be able to get the audio stream and play it (header size, bitrate, bits/channel and number of channels), completely ignoring fields like file size and data size, assuming that data is over when they reach EOF. On the sample/example header, file size is set to 0x7fffffff and data size to 0x7fffff00, just in case some weird player actually checks those fields (well, if it would really complain about that, it would probably also conclude that the .WAV file is broken, missing something around 2 GB of stream data...)
Maybe I should stop being lazy and code a proper C program to properly create headers for the .BIN files, possibly picking the proper track names from the .CUE files, and properly generating the corresponding .WAV files, but hacking through them has been enough for me.
1It is a CloneCD image. You should first burn it to CD or find a tool to open the CD image, you can't play it directly with VLC.
Not sure about the .bin files, but the .cue files (as the name implies) provides the player with information on the track name and length. I have used them with .ape audio files and I suppose they will work on any album length audio track (.mp3, .wav, etc) of the same name in the same folder.
Simply drag the .cue file into VLC, or open it from the menu drop down, and the album tracks will be displayed in the play list. The track length, though, will appear as the length of the entire large file, but you can skip tracks forwards, backwards or select any in between just like any CD.
VLC version 3.0.8 can play .cue files associated with audio. Simply open .cue file from the top menu and it will list all separate track sections in a playlist window.
