Unlike Ubuntu Edgy and LTS Dapper, Ubuntu Feisty does neither mount nor does it automatically run VCD. I know Video CDs are not preffered due to advent of DVD and the future is with HD-DVD and Blue Ray disks. However VCDs are still in and though have lower quality, they are still used everywhere. Whenever I tried playing in totem it told me to insert the CD into the drive!

After hours of searching in Google and Ubuntuforums, I hardly found any solution. One of the solutions asked to use Mplayer. I knew it might work. But I wanted a better alternative solution. Yes, Mplayer is simply great, but I did not want to install it since it comes with its own codecs and I wanted to use codecs like gstreamer or xine.

I felt, I should try mounting the CD manually because it did not detect the VCD at all. So I went to terminal:

sudo mkdir /mnt/cdrom
sudo mount -a /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

and yes it did mount and when I viewed the VCD mount folder using nautilus, I could access and well as copy the VCDs file to my hard disk.
I though I fixed it but NO. The totem’s menu to run VCD was greyed and neither any other option worked.
Agitated I tried to run it in terminal:

totem vcd://

But I was greeted with the following error:

and I finally umounted the VCD but didn’t eject it.

sudo umount /dev/cdrom

So I finally felt I should try xine and gxine which I had used in the past in Dapper and they hardly posed any Problems. So I went to Applications->Add/Remove…, did a search for xine, selected xine (codecs), and gxine.
I went to Applications->Sound & Video->gxine.

In gxine I went to File->VCD, however gxine hung and I had to force quit it.
Then I though again, ran gxine. This time I ran to File->VCD0 and lo, it managed to run the VCD. I ran it in fullscreen and enjoyed the movie.

This was quite a pain. I hope the problems would be fixed by next update else an average user … well she won’t be able to use VCDs at all.