Karaoke Contest

[bryant]

There was a post a while back where you can plainly see I didn't have much use or belief in Karaoke contests. But, there is one sponsored by the City of Waterville, Maine in five local bars, then a finals next month for all qualifiers at the local Opera House. he first qualifying bar was my gig last night.
They supplied their own judges, MC, and all I had to do was line up songs and the MC would call them up.
Now my main panic was that there would probably be a high percentage of singer's own discs to import. So before the show would start I would have all these discs to put in and get them outa the way. Didn't like that idea, but actually, I only received two.
Now wouldn't you know it, the first disc that was given to me was a DVD-Karaoke disc. But I didn't know that at first. Kept getting "please load CD" message" in the Shuttle's plextor. I said "C'MON". So I transferred the disc to my backup laptop and opened up the files and saw the vts folder, indicating dvd stuff. Tried to play the DVD track 25 she requested on Windows media, and after about 15 minutes of panic, I got the song up on the screen, but it was the one with vocals. There was a chapter two for song #25, so I tried to get that going, and it said "unknown DVD". That was most likely the song w/o vocals. I assume I probably needed an AC3 codec or something like that. Now keep in mind this was the first singer to go on any minute. Lucky the judges said "Don't worry about it", she'll have to find another song you have. But I carry great pride in the technology I have and like to let people know that I can pretty much do anything with what I have. Now I had to tell this Lady I couldn't as this was some kind of non-standard karaoke disc. I had a JVC triple deck next to me for emergency backup but not hooked up, and didn't want to rewire everything into three screens and then put everything back after the first song, especially after the judges said "Don't even worry about it".
Has anyone had any experience with this sort of thing, and if so, what did YOU do?