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Video CD FAQ

by Russil Wvong

This list of Frequently Asked Questions is aimed at people on the alt.asian-movies and alt.video.dvd newsgroups. If you're primarily interested in creating your own Video CDs, you probably want to check out the rec.video.desktop newsgroup.

If you have a question about Video CDs that isn't already in the FAQ, I probably don't know the answer! I've set up a Video CD Forum where you can check to see if your question has already been discussed; for information on burning your own VCDs, see www.vcdhelp.com.

Contents:

What's Video CD?

Video CD, or VCD, is a digital movie format. It's basically a primitive version of DVD.

A Video CD is a kind of CD. It looks the same as a music CD or a CD-ROM, except that instead of music or software, it holds movies, using compressed MPEG-1 video. Its resolution is 352x240 (NTSC) or 352x288 (PAL), which is roughly comparable to VHS.

Compared to Video CD, DVD provides much higher resolution (700x480), comparable to laserdisc or even better. DVD movies use MPEG-2 compression, rather than the MPEG-1 compression used by Video CDs. For more information on how MPEG compression works, see the MPEG FAQ by Luigi Filippini. For more information about DVD, see the DVD FAQ by Jim Taylor.

A single VCD disc can only hold about 70 minutes of video, so for a typical movie, you need two discs. You can play VCDs back on a Video CD player connected to a TV, or on a fast PC with a CD-ROM drive. Some DVD players can also play VCDs.

Video CD was introduced by Philips and Sony in 1993. It never caught on in North America, but it became hugely popular in Asia, where most households didn't already have VCRs. In Asia, Video CD players are roughly as common as VCRs in North America: China alone manufactures 2 million VCD players a year.

Prior to the introduction of DVD in 1997, one reason to get VCDs was in order to watch Hong Kong movies. If you're a Hong Kong movie fan in North America (like me), and you don't live in a city with a large Chinese population, it's not so easy to find HK movies locally. But because VCDs are so popular in Asia, almost all HK films released in the last few years are available on VCD: you can easily order them by mail for US $10-20.

Today (March 2000), however, Hong Kong movies are being released on DVD, so I find there isn't so much of a reason to bother with VCD.

The other big advantage of Video CD versus DVD is that it's relatively easy to create your own Video CDs (e.g. from home movies), using a CD-ROM burner. There's a lot of discussion in the Video CD Q&A forum on this topic.

Finally, Video CD is creating a big problem for the movie industry, analogous to the problem that MP3 has created for the music industry: it's very, very easy to create pirate copies of movies using Video CD. When a new movie is released in the theaters, pirates will smuggle in a camcorder and point it at the screen while the movie is playing. Or they make VCD copies from laserdiscs, DVDs, and "screener" copies of movies (sent to video rental stores for previews before they decide to buy movies).

Pirate VCDs sell for $1 or so in places like Hong Kong, Malaysia, or China (since it only costs 5 cents to duplicate a CD). This is currently crippling the Hong Kong movie industry: why pay $5 or $10 to see a movie in the theater when you can get a pirate VCD for $1 and watch it with your friends and family, as many times as you want?

Personally, I dislike piracy and what it's doing to the Hong Kong film industry. I don't buy pirated Video CDs. If you want to know where to get pirated movies, or how to create them yourself, please don't ask here.

Is there a Video CD newsgroup?

No, but there's been some discussion of VCDs on alt.asian-movies and alt.video.dvd. There's also been some discussion of how to make your own VCDs on rec.video.desktop. Your best bet is probably to search Google Groups (formerly DejaNews).

I've also set up a Video CD Forum, using Philip Greenspun's free web services. If you post a question there, other people watching the forum will hopefully be able to answer it.

What's Video CD quality like?

Picture quality when using a VCD player is generally comparable to VHS, but I've never seen a VCD that I thought was better quality than VHS, and I've seen several that were quite a bit worse: if the encoding isn't done well, you can see blockiness in the image.

More specifically, VHS resolution is about 300x360, whereas VCD resolution is 352x240 (NTSC) or 352x288 (PAL). Henrik Herranen has an interesting page comparing the resolution of DVD, laserdisc, broadcast video, VHS, and CD-i which shows what this means in practice.

Comments from Rainer Hofmeister (rhofm@net4you.co.at):

The quality depends on the content of the picture. If there are many details (like in a street scene) or fast movements the data compression affects the quality. You then have an effect like in JPEGs with higher compression. Generally the quality is beneath that of a LD. I have lots of VCDs and I think the quality of the picture is good enough even if you donīt consider the very low price.

CD-i Central maintains a list of video quality ratings for movies released by Philips.

For HK movies, two of the major distributors are Mei Ah Laserdisc and Universe Entertainment. According to Charles Amith (amith@kingsnet.com), Mei Ah VCD quality is typically 8 out of 10, while Universe VCDs are more like 5-6 out of 10.

So what does "5-6 out of 10" mean? Well, I've got a copy of The Bride with White Hair on VCD from Universe. When I play it back on my VCD player, you can see blockiness in the image if you're close to the TV, but it looks fine from a normal viewing distance. A bigger problem is that the subtitles are extremely small, bordering on unreadable (at least on my 20" TV).

Where can I buy VCDs?

Most places that sell VCDs also seem to be selling DVDs.

Through the Internet:

For more VCD sellers, see the Related Links page. I haven't heard anything about them from customers.

Stores in specific cities:

If you're in New York, you should also be able to buy Video CDs in Chinatown. Look for stores that sell music CDs.

If you want to get more information about a movie, see the Hong Kong Movie Database.

For an good overview of Hong Kong movies, see the book Hong Kong Action Cinema, by Bey Logan.

Which DVD players can also play Video CDs?

There's a database of compatibility information at www.vcdhelp.com.

Note that if you want to be able to create your own VCDs and play them on your DVD player, you'll need a DVD player which can read CD-R or CD-RW discs.

If you want to buy a DVD player and be able to watch Hong Kong VCDs on it, be careful. There's two TV standards, NTSC and PAL; NTSC is used in North America, PAL is used in Hong Kong. Hong Kong VCDs are sometimes encoded in PAL format and sometimes in NTSC format -- people in Hong Kong usually have dual-standard TVs.

VCD resolution is 352x288 for PAL and 352x240 for NTSC. Video CD players can handle the PAL-to-NTSC conversion, but most DVD players cannot. If you play a PAL VCD on a Panasonic or RCA DVD player, it will cut off the entire 48 lines off the bottom of the image, which is enough to cut off the subtitles for a Hong Kong movie.

If you play a PAL VCD on the Sony 7000 DVD player, it will cut some lines off the top of the image and some off the bottom (presumably 24 each). This is somewhat better, since the subtitles probably won't be cut off if the movie is letterboxed, but it still doesn't do the PAL-to-NTSC conversion that most VCD players will do. From John Charles:

It varies from disc to disc. Non-scope films usually don't look too bad but the squeezing lops off the top and bottom of the picture, and can wipe out the English subs completely (like on CASINO TYCOON II and THE KIDNAP OF WONG CHAK-FAI) or almost completely (QUEEN OF GAMBLE, DANCING BULL). The Mei Ah version of PROJECT A (a scope film) is so incredibly squeezed, it looks ridiculous; PROJECT A II is a little better.

How do Video CD players compare?

Now that DVDs are widely available, it probably makes more sense to get a DVD player than a Video CD player.

Some Video CD player manufacturers:

How can I play a Video CD on my PC?

I'd recommend getting a DVD-ROM drive and video decoder, such as the Creative Labs Encore DVD kit: it'll play DVDs as well as NTSC Video CDs, and you can send the output to your TV. As far as I can tell, the quality is the same as you'd get with a DVD player.

Alternatively, if you have a fast PC (at least Pentium 120), a CD-ROM drive, and a good video card, you can use a software-only MPEG decoder. There are three that I know of:

 Getting the software running (in either case) can be somewhat tricky. For information about specific video cards and configurations, your best bet is probably to ask on comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.video.

Personally, I much prefer playing Video CDs on my TV. On a lot of PCs (including mine), the full-screen image looks terrible, because the video card doesn't support hardware scaling and filtering, or doesn't support it very well.

Still, with the right video hardware, you can get a decent picture. For a good benchmark, get a demo on the IBM Aptiva, which provides full-screen playback with no blockiness at all.

Note that Hong Kong VCDs invariably have both Cantonese and Mandarin soundtracks, one on the left channel and one on the right channel. If you leave them both on, the audio will sound rather strange (like there's an echo). You need to disable one channel or the other.

If you have Linux, there's a Linux player called MpegTV at http://www.mpegtv.com/download.html. (Information from Tristan Savatier, tristan@mpegtv.com.)

For the Macintosh, there's a player called MacVCD, which supports MacOS X. It's $10.

An earlier note from "Uncle Prawn" (an alt.asian-movies regular), about playing VCDs on PowerMacs:

First off, you need to be running the latest version of Quicktime (2.5) and have Apple's MPEG extension. If you don't have these, they can be downloaded from Apple's website.

For a player, you need to use either Apple's MoviePlayer (version 2.5.1 - also downloadable from Apple) or one of the shareware players. I suggest 'VCD Player', which is available from the 'Info Mac' website or FTP sites.

A further comment from Ivan Drucker (ivanxqz@aol.com):
Power Macintosh users running Mac OS 7.6 or later (or 7.5.x with QuickTime 2.5 plus the QuickTime MPEG extension) can play both Video CD and DV/CD-i (White and Green book) formats with any QuickTime-savvy application, including the supplied MoviePlayer. The software MPEG decoding is handled by QuickTime.
For Amiga people, a comment from Gavin Dodds (Gavin@eagle001.demon.co.uk):
I think I should point out that you can play VCDs on an Amiga CD32 with an FMV add-on. The CD32 will play both green book and white book VCDs.

How can I make my own VCDs?

The www.vcdhelp.com website has a lot of detailed information on how to create your own VCDs. You may also find the FAQ at www.oldskool.org/mpeg to be useful.

Note that I know very little about making VCDs -- I've never tried it myself -- and so sending me e-mail probably won't help you very much! If you're running into a problem, I'd suggest trying the Video CD Forum, and you may also want to check out rec.video.desktop.

If you don't want to spend a lot of time trying to get software and hardware working, there's a new consumer product called the Terapin Digital A/V Recorder that looks very interesting: it's intended to work like a VCR. But it looks like it's only for early adopters at this point. For more user comments, see EdgeReview.

At the other extreme, if you want an open-source Video CD authoring application, check out GNU VCDImager.

My brother Curt started burning VCDs recently (March 2001) using his PC. He sent me a description of the process for the FAQ (thanks, Curt!):

I decided to investigate digital video editing for various reasons:

a. Having lived in a foreign country that used a different broadcast standard from where I grew up, I found it frustrating that I could not view my collection of VHS video tapes.

b. I am also concerned about degradation in quality of my video collection.

After many hours reading the Video CD FAQ, searching the WEB for software encoders and editors and just trying out various things, here is the process that I used to successfully create VCDs:

My system specs:

1. Capture video

Hints - use highest quality capture setting available for your equipment - I used MPEG-2 capture on my ATI All-in-wonder Raedon. I did not have the video/audio sync problems that most AVI captures seem to experience.

[Update: Curt later found out that the Raedon also supports MPEG-1 capture.]

2. Deinterlace and resize

Reasons why this is required - see www.oldskool.org/mpeg/mpegfaq.html.

Use TMPGEnc (shareware) - can be downloaded at www.tmpgenc.com

I used TMPEnc beta 12.a, which can handle MPEG-2 video streams. Later versions (12.b, 12.c, and 12.d have the MPEG-2 capabilities disabled or available for a limited time for evaluation purposes.) [There is a huge discussion of encoders at www.flexion.org - already it appears that TMPEnc beta 12.a is no longer available at www.tmpgenc.com.]

2.1 Click on [Setting]

2.2 On the Video tab, change

2.3 On the Advanced tab, change 2.4 Start. This takes the longest time in the whole process - to encode 30 minutes of video took 8 hours. (Of course, I ran it overnight.)

3. Merge & Cut

TMPGEnc has a simple utility to clip your MPEG files.

4. Pad file

After all of that, your MPEG-1 file will still not be VCD compliant.

5. Burn your VCD.

Your MPEG-1 file(s) are now VCD compliant. However, they must be imaged and burned onto your CD-R/RW media.

Nero 5.0 ($49 download) can perform both functions.

Problems may arise if your DVD player does not read certain media types. You may need to experiment with different brands of CD-R/RW before you find the one that works in your machine.

I recommend burning the final MPEG-1 files themselves onto a CD-R just in case you need them at a later date. (e.g. If you want to convert them to PAL, or edit them further. After all, you spent all of that time encoding them - and it is a lot simpler than trying to convert your VCD back to MPEG-1.)

How are Video CD and CD-i related?

CD-i is an older format ("Green Book") than Video CD ("White Book"). It supports interactive computer games as well as movies.

You can play VCDs on a CD-i player, provided that it has the DV cartridge. But there's about 30 movies released by Philips on CD-i which you can only play on a CD-i player, because they use the "Green Book" standard: you can't play them on a VCD player or on a PC. These CDs are labelled "Digital Video" or "DV".

Peter Chang (pchang@ix.netcom.com) writes that he has been able to play Green Book movies on his PC, using an older version of the XingMPEG player (1.3), but not with the latest version.

Matthew Sparby (matthew@sparby.nu) sent the following information by e-mail:

CDi Videos (Green Book Video) is an older standard than VideoCD. It uses the same MPEG-1 encoding but it uses a different filesystem. The only dedicated hardware that can play these discs is a Philips/Magnavox CDi system with a Digital Video cartridge.

Many people express an interest in being able to play these videos on their PC's. Many older PC's are able to play these discs using software like the Xing MPEG Player or a proprietary player bundled with a hardware MPEG decoder like the Boca Voyager Movie Player. This is usually only possible under Windows 3.1, though, because Windows95 and Windows NT utilize a new 32 bit CD-ROM driver called CDFS which is incompatible with the filesystem type on the Green Book CD's. It is possible to disable the 32 bit CD-ROM driver under Windows95 and install the older MSCDEX driver which will allow you to play the CDi Videos.

Another option is the Creative Labs Encore DVD kit. This kit includes a DVD-ROM drive and a hardware MPEG decoder card and proprietary software. It allows you to play DVD's as well as VideoCD's and CDi Videos on a PC. It also includes TV output capabilities so you can watch all three types of videos on a television set. It's possible that other PC DVD kits give the same capabilities.

For more information about CD-i, see the CD-i FAQ maintained by Jorg Kennis.

Video CD Forum



-- Sick of You (sick@boy.ie), October 14, 2002

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