Forum Archive Home -> Authoring (VCD/SVCD) -> Isnt VCD obsolete?
Isnt VCD obsolete? | ||||
| omega_weapon posted 2008 Feb 19 11:36 | ||||
| No offense, but, is there still people that makes VCDs? why dont turn into DVD, nowadays its just as cheap as it was vcd on its time. | ||||
| classfour posted 2008 Feb 19 11:45 | ||||
| India, mostly.
I still have some - don't play them much, portable won't play them. | ||||
| Video Head posted 2008 Feb 19 11:52 | ||||
| http://forum.videohelp.com/topic345713.html | ||||
| Cole posted 2008 Feb 19 11:54 | ||||
| I used to make VCD-DVDs up until recently where I could get a whole TV series (recorded off-air) on one/two DVDs. This was to have until the TV series came out on DVD; back in the day it was about a year before a TV release came out in the UK.
However, I got burned on one series (Sea Of Souls series 3) where I put the series on a DVD in VCD size BUT the DVD release never appeared. Thus, I have had to keep it. I haven't made any VCD-DVDs for about two years now because of that. | ||||
| Noahtuck posted 2008 Feb 19 12:29 | ||||
As far as i'm concerned, it was obsolete the day dvd burners became available at retail, and definately became obsolete years ago....
There are still people here in the U.S. that seem to want to still make VCD's instead of spending a whole $30.00 for an excellent DVD Burner & quality dvdr media is availible on a regular basis for .25 cents a disc... beats me why, i never could figure that out.... | ||||
| jman98 posted 2008 Feb 19 12:52 | ||||
| If you wait a long time, eventually some store like Office Max will put Verbatim media on sale. Otherwise you will easily pay 45 cents a disc or much more. I can easily get Verbatim CD-Rs for about 22 cents a disc. Sometimes I have made VCDs from short, low quality sources. I've made a few from crap on YouTube that is 320x240 and very low resolution stuff. Yes, I guess I could put 30 minutes on a 45 cent DVD blank and use very high bit rates to have an excellent copy of a crappy source or I could just put it in VCD where the discs are 22 cents each and it still looks like crap but I don't waste a DVD disc on it.
VCD always has its haters. The format has flaws for sure and it's not better than DVD, but if you don't understand why someone might want to use it, then nothing I could say would make any sense to you. | ||||
| JohnnyMalaria posted 2008 Feb 19 14:18 | ||||
| Not if you still use it. | ||||
| pijetro posted 2008 Feb 19 14:46 | ||||
| Hats off to all the people who layed down the foundation of freeware and development...
Especially the authouring stuff... I got into VCD's before DVD burners became affordable. I'm looking forward to the next generation of trailblazers who get us past the DVD software, and into the serious BD freeware...Good luck.. | ||||
| Video Head posted 2008 Feb 19 15:36 | ||||
Too true...VCR's are obsolete, but in reading posts here some are still looking for good ones... | ||||
| edDV posted 2008 Feb 19 15:47 | ||||
| I still find VCD MPeg1 is the most basic and convertible recording format if all you want is to cap talking heads with adequate audio without maxing your hard drive.
I often cap TV to VCD (MPeg1) for talk shows so I can hear what they say and play back without recode. Edit is easy if I want to keep it. Video quality is a lesser concern. VCD still does have a place for capture but if I want to save it, I compress to WMV or divx. | ||||
| yoda313 posted 2008 Feb 19 18:00 | ||||
Exactly. Just because it isn't mainstream doesn't mean it doesn't have its uses. Somebody in another post was saying they record to vcd so they can transfer to their portable video player. | ||||
| SatStorm posted 2008 Feb 19 18:11 | ||||
| VCDs no, rarelly, but mpeg 1 encoded on VCD specifics I do more now that before!
I convert various stuff on mpeg 1 and burn them on DVD-Rs with simply authoring. Those ones plays everywhere and I can have with me 16 hours of video/audio on just 2 discs! Very handy if you think of. Quality wise, not so bad if you watch them on 14-25" CRT screens. I also do occasionally VCDs with music videos. | ||||
| lordsmurf posted 2008 Feb 19 18:17 | ||||
| VCD was always obsolete.
DVD and/or MPEG-4 do everything, but better (compression, size, quality, etc) | ||||
| classfour posted 2008 Feb 19 20:20 | ||||
| I know for certain that I won't take the time to reencode DVD quality video down to VCD specs. I did make the attempt a few years back just to see the results: The Green Mile, fit on 3 VCDs, quality was actually very good considering the bitrate. Took about 8 or 9 hours on a 2.4 GHZ machine. I haven't done another.
If I did have to do one: I'd capture it as an Mpeg1. | ||||
| SmokieStover posted 2008 Feb 19 21:04 | ||||
| I have a relative who on occassion will request copies of home movies that can be played both on a set-top DVD player and on an old 95 upgraded to 98SE PC (Pentium 133 mhz with almost no ram). I encode or re-encode to VCD. Makes her happy and they are good enough to watch.
I also make VCD's using the extras found when converting VHS movies to DVD via a PVR 250. Capping directly to VCD yields poor results, so I cap the whole in mpg2 and re-encode the extras to VCD. Not much quality lost when working with VHS nor much re-encoding time required for their extras. Still using VHS EP as my preferred method of time and place shifting. | ||||
| thecoalman posted 2008 Feb 19 22:26 | ||||
:lol: Yea but it's more like looking for good gun to shoot the horse so you know it gets done right. These people aren't looking for good VCR's to watch VHS, they are looking for them to kill it. | ||||
| Video Head posted 2008 Feb 19 23:02 | ||||
Yes, the people looking for these units do have a focused agenda. I guess it would be more likened to 1967 Mustangs. They are obsolete. But some, like myself, still use them. | ||||
| tomlee59 posted 2008 Feb 20 16:54 | ||||
| They are definitely still useful. As edDV mentioned, they work across many different platforms. For many educational purposes, you don't need high-def, and VCDs fit the bill well. And if you happen to have a large extended family spread all over the globe (like I do), with many still using less than state-of-the-art gear, movies on VCD are often the only viable option. | ||||
| pepegot1 posted 2008 Feb 20 18:58 | ||||
| Just convert VCDs to DVDs. I did that with TDA and VCDgear. Now all is DVD | ||||
| soflawill posted 2008 Feb 20 20:17 | ||||
| That reminds me-got three shelves filled with vcds'. Haven't looked at them in ages. What is a boy to do? | ||||
| usually_quiet posted 2008 Feb 21 16:32 | ||||
| I never used VCD’s, but I considered getting a Terrapin VCD recorder four years ago, before I bought a DVD recorder. If I had bought one, and it still worked, I suppose I would still be using it. I kept my VCR and continue to use it when there are two shows on at the same time that I want to record.
I am certain that a fair number of people would prefer to use a VCR for everything. My parents, for example, who are not stupid or eccentric, merely elderly. If they could still rent videotapes, they would never have bought a new TV with an integrated DVD player. Recently, I donated some gently used Disney videotapes to my local library, and they were thrilled to get them, so there is still some demand for VCR's and tapes. Learning how to use any new device is difficult for some people. When I tried to teach my parents how to use their new TV/DVD player, the manual was too complicated, and they could not remember what to do after I showed them. I ended up typing simplified instructions for using it, with arrows pointing to the correct buttons on a drawing of the their remote control at every step. I am pretty sure they will be referring to it for a long time. If their current VCR dies, you can bet they will buy another one, if they can, rather than a DVD recorder or a DVR. | ||||
| mrcoolekin posted 2008 Feb 21 19:15 | ||||
| Nope, a lot of Asian countries still use them. As for creating them, I still do just cause I think it's fun. Plus it's low cost still. | ||||
| edDV posted 2008 Feb 21 19:19 | ||||
| VCD is most universal and playable but far from highest quality. | ||||
| tomlee59 posted 2008 Feb 22 02:54 | ||||
Indeed -- no one would choose VCD for its quality. It would be for some other reason, like the universal playability you cite, or its low cost, or its ability to be played on old computers that don't have the horsepower to handle DVDs. Or the ability to cram >6.5 hours of material on a single DVD (perfect for long flights). Definitely not HD, but it has its place. | ||||
| UltraVCDDVD posted 2008 Mar 16 20:51 | ||||
| There are RARE things that can only be found on VCD. They are STILL in use in China. They're not obsolete yet. | ||||
| RabidDog posted 2008 Mar 17 00:22 | ||||
| Dont forget Tajikistan either... | ||||
| SatStorm posted 2008 Mar 17 05:15 | ||||
| Mpeg 1 also has a new "life" on chinapods/ mp3 players with video playback, card readers with TV Out, cell phones, HDD with TV out, etc. And if I remember correct, mpeg1 has no royalties, so it is an "open" format that mpeg2 must be backward compatible. So, I think that mpeg 1 gonna stick with us for a long - long time.
I found a great new use of mpeg1 the last months: Fast and dirty batch convert of grabbed music videos to mpeg 1 through Super, then store them on a USB memory Stick and use it on my cheapo "china"pod. A 3.30 video, converts to mpeg1 on less than 20 sec on my C2D. I watch those videos on the move, on the Gym, while I'm waiting on meetings, etc. VCD is another issue: Between 1999-2004, VCD was the basic alternative to convert analogue to digital. Million of home users converted their analogue archives (mostly VHS tapes) to VCD. The won't convert them again, most of them don't kept the original material. Even today, on some countries, VCD remains the only affordable choice to do this thing. But overall, after 2004, I believe all switched to DVD one way or other. But the old archives remained. So the format. | ||||
| wcb4 posted 2008 Oct 17 14:23 | ||||
I will admit that a DVD is still better, and some of the VCDs that I purchased back in the day (yes, I bought some, like the original Star Wars trilogy before they were release on DVD) are truly craptacular, however.......... I have also encoded a few myself, back when DVD writers will still over $100 and blank discs were will $2+ that I would say were truly remarkable. I no longer use the VCDs per se, but the mpg files themselves still reside on one of my hard drives, and is still accessible on my television vi my Hauppage Media MVP. My encodes of the Toy Story movies, the original Ice Age, and the first few Harry Potter Movies are top notch. When they are on my 42' television, very few people have ever noticed that they are not the DVDs playing. Say what you want about VCD mpg files, but they scale up better than anything else. I can play 352x240 divx files on my television as well, and even at the same bitrate, when scaled up to actually show on the TV,they do not look as good (this is not to say higher bitrate, higher res files don't look better, the DiVX files I generally DL do not look as good on television as my personally encoded VCD mpg files. Because I can get good results, I have made DVDs that contain all three of the original Indian Jones Movies, the Back to the Future movies, the Matrix Movies, etc for my Dad. All I do is encode the audio at 48000/384 (the dvd standard instead of the VCD spec) and I'm gold. You pop in one DVD and can watch a whole trilogy beginning to end without interruption I'm not going to get rid of my DVDs, or my DVD recorder (iLoDVDR04... I love it) and I will not likely go back to VCDs, but I download those files from the internet archive and transfer then right to DVDs all the time. The format itself is extremely widely supported, and as long as it is, it will still have its uses. | ||||
| MOVIEGEEK posted 2008 Oct 17 17:55 | ||||
| VCD became obsolete in the US when DVD writers dropped below $100US.
When I bought my first capturecard I converted my VHS collection to VCD and it looked ok on my 27" CRT.When I bought my HDTV I recaptured my VHS collection to full D1 specs and authored DVD's,it was painstaking but worth it.Moral of the story:VCD's are fine for small screens. | ||||
| tomlee59 posted 2008 Oct 17 18:51 | ||||
I quite agree. Those in industrialized nations often have a narrow, parochial view of the world, and forget that not everyone has the latest hardware. I have many friends from China and India, where VCDs are still prevalent. Certainly VCDs are on the decline, but they have by no means disappeared. I have a large collection of VCDs, some with content that has never been released on DVD, or others that aren't worth paying again for to get the DVD version. So, for me, VCDs are not completely obsolete. And as you point out, with proper care in encoding, VCDs can look surprisingly good (certainly much better than some of the embarrassingly poor product found on the street). I also like the fact that I can play VCDs on very old PCs and Macs. | ||||
| DereX888 posted 2008 Oct 17 20:33 | ||||
| VHS was "obsolete" (in the way you mean it) the day SVHS came out and yet it still lived and reigned years later.
Wax drums are obsolete. Old records using weird RPMs and materials are obsolete. Some old reel films are obsolete (the ones using non-standard reels). For those you need to go to museum to find working device supporting their "formats". But for LPs, VHS, Cassette tapes, VCDs, LDs, Beta, MDs, DATs, etc etc you can still easily find devices capable of playing them. Yes, all those are examples of outdated technology, no doubt, but all are far from being obsolete yet. Any technology is obsolete when there are no devices to use it, so no - obviously VCD is not obsolete yet, and won't be in many years ahead, specially that any dvd player *can* play VCDs (except for garbage ones and many S*ny junk). | ||||
| lordsmurf posted 2008 Oct 18 02:59 | ||||
| I stick to my original answer: It was always obsolete. | ||||
| mpack posted 2008 Oct 18 05:30 | ||||
I agree. It was an attempt at video on a spinner that didn't quite work because the capacity just wasn't there. The low capacity meant that quality wasn't much better (if better at all) than VHS, but unlike VHS you couldn't have an entire movie on a single tape/disk. It was obvious to anyone who played with VCD that you really needed something with maybe ten times the capacity: and when DVD appeared, it was obvious that this was what we'd been waiting for. Notice that I'm talking about VCD specifically: MPEG1 is not obsolete, just as CDs are not! | ||||
| raffie posted 2008 Oct 18 05:53 | ||||
| I used to capture a lot off of TV and all that stuff was outputted to VCD. AT the time it certainly had stuff going for it: good compatibility & cheap to make. Then I bought a (1x lol) DVD burner in 2001 i think. First crack of the VCD format, however I still used it. Then DVD players started to have DivX compatibility, wich was for me the point where VCD became obsolete.
As others have said, MPEG-4 has the better compression, DVD-Rs have more capacity, and seeing compatibility with standalone players isnt an issue anymore I would definately say it is obsolete, and has been for years ;) | ||||
| p_l posted 2008 Oct 18 06:59 | ||||
| VCD is like your high school sweetheart; yes, you've long since moved on, but there'll always be a soft spot in your heart for her. | ||||
| turk690 posted 2008 Oct 18 09:25 | ||||
| Scarcely anyone has mentioned that the one great flaw of VCD is that it uses half-resolution video. A full 480/576-line frame is composed of two 240/288-line interlaced fields. A normal PAL or NTSC camera or capture device will capture these two UNIQUE fields to compose that frame. But, to encode for MPEG-1 VCD, depending on who or what encoded, either one field is dropped, or both fields are averaged to create another field (different from the two), or treatment depends frame to frame on whether there is much motion or not and what type. All of these result in just one unique 240 or 288-line field (VCD frame?) which the VCD player REPEATS TWICE to get back the normal 480/576-line frame for your TV display. Some people do NOT understand that in this, there is just ONE unique field, where VHS, DVD, & other unbastardized video have TWO. This practice results in horrible jagged edges, especially if the picture has many slanted lines in it. It may not look apparent on a TV 20" or below screensize, but in anything above 25" it's obvious. That the low 1.4mb/s bitrate for CD playback has to be accomodated is one reason for this.
This is why, in this respect, IMHO VHS is better because the two unique fields are retained (although any visual gains brought by this is probably negated by VHS' lower horizontal resolution). VHS and DVD (uh, and LaserDisc) are designed to and do encapsulate the normal PAL or NTSC standards in their manifestations. VCD simply IS NOT & DID NOT. What prompted me to come to this is so many years back, on creating my first VCDs, they appeared more "jagged" compared with the VHS tapes they were created from. When I gleaned all the info and finally came to understand it, I stopped short, tossed the wretched VCDs & just waited for the first reasonable-cost DVD-writer (Sony DRU-500A). It's worthwhile to note that the half-resolution issue was laid to rest by the adoption of full-vertical resolution MPEG-2 for SVCD (although DVD has bulldozed it a short while later). | ||||
| tomlee59 posted 2008 Oct 18 11:07 | ||||
That's because it's widely acknowledged that VCD is a low-quality standard. No need to beat a dead horse. VCD makes many concessions in order to squeeze 80 minutes onto a CD. It's the video equivalent of a dog walking on its two hind legs. It doesn't do it well, but you find it remarkable (or at least amusing), nonetheless. :) | ||||
| Midzuki posted 2008 Oct 18 12:37 | ||||
That "line-doubling" trick can be the general rule for the "standard-compliant" standalone VCD players, but I allow myself to doubt the rule also applies to the most-recent models of DVD players. My 4 year-old LG properly resizes any MPG-video encoded in non-standard vertical resolutions, which makes me wonder why it would not behave so when it receives a "true" VCD in its tray. :? \\\ | ||||
| jman98 posted 2008 Oct 18 12:51 | ||||
Can someone go back in time and prevent that dumbass wcb4 from replying to this ancient thread almost 7 months (!!!) after the last post? Posts like this really aren't helping matters. Look people - all of you that posted after wcb4 have just basically been saying the same stuff that's already been said. Is this thread now going to have 100+ posts in it because nobody will stop saying the same stuff over and over again? Reply if you will, but for me this thread is closed. Any points that needed to be said were said back in February. | ||||
| turk690 posted 2008 Oct 18 14:35 | ||||
| to Midzuki & jman98, not to beat a dead horse, but line doubling is NOT a trick where VCD is concerned but is in fact a requirement that the player has to perform. Even the most recent DVD players will do this and has to do it if a VCD is inserted. Normal DVDs have both unique fields present and so the player DOES NOT have to do it, unless there is a progressive display option and that IS chosen. But that's another story.
to tomlee59, VHS is also a low-quality standard but should NOT (as some people are wont to do and yak away claiming one looks better than the other) be compared with VCD, in the sense that VHS has full vertical resolution (480/576, two fields) where VCD has half (240/288, one field). | ||||
| Midzuki posted 2008 Oct 18 14:55 | ||||
Until some actual expert like Mr. Cornucopia gets around and confirms or infirms what I said, ... :roll: | ||||
| tomlee59 posted 2008 Oct 18 16:38 | ||||
As I didn't compare VCD to VHS, I'm a little puzzled as to why you bring this up. You can always widen any comparison to find things that are better and worse than (or orthogonal to) the thing you're discussing. Yes, VCD is worse than DVD, but it's better than a sharp stick in the eye. It's a true statement, but it has little to do with the thread topic re: obsolescence. I'm with jman98 -- this thread has long outlived any useful purpose (if it ever had one). Perhaps the mods would formally acknowledge that truth by locking this thread? | ||||
| ntscuser posted 2008 Oct 18 19:58 | ||||
| I don't even understand this thread? I was one those who had to burn VCD in the early days due to a lack of hardware and software but *if* I needed to burn to CD-R instead of DVDR today I'd simply make an XviD recording instead. | ||||
| wcb4 posted 2008 Oct 18 20:27 | ||||
| jman98. if this post does not interest you, please move on, I, for one would be happy not to hear more from someone so rude as to insult someone they know nothing about. I noticed this thread because it pertained to something I was thinking about today, as I was looking at a bunch of MPEG-1 files on my hard drive, trying to decide weather it was time to delete them. They were the original VCD files I mentioned in my post.
Judging from the number of responses after mine, the thread may have been dormant but was still of interest to some of us, and many after you made thoughtful intelligent contributions to the thread. I would have thought that someone who had been a member as long as you have would have realized by now that you don't HAVE to read the threads that don't interest you. In case that bit of data missed you, you may not consider yourself informed. You can feel free to move on. | ||||
| mpack posted 2008 Oct 19 06:13 | ||||
Comparing VHS with VCD is perfectly legitimate, as they were directly competing technologies for a while. Besides which, when VCD was being promoted it was said by it's promoters to have a quality about the same as VHS. Naturally people have tended to examine that claim ever since. In fact I personally believe that VHS was better, at least in a pristine commercial transfer from film (and a new tape). Analog noise (salt and pepper, chroma) was of course absent from the VCD version, but the block artefacts caused by low bitrate MPEG1 were very noticeable, even in professional transfers. | ||||
| wcb4 posted 2008 Oct 19 16:02 | ||||
I bought dozens of "professionally" created VCDs back in the day, when some of the movies I wanted were not available on DVD (original Star Wars Trilogy, Indiana Jones and Back to the Future Movies for example) and they ranged in quality, but even the best commercially produced VCDs that I bought never quite reached the level of the ones I encoded myself. This could quite possibly be because I was starting from a DVD source and they were not (because if they were, I would have bought the original DVD instead of a VCD) but as I said, several of the VCDs I have made of show for the kids (admittedly, these are generally cartoon) have been mistaken while playing for the DVD. I would pull up the VCD file on the MediaMVP and start is playing and after it played for a while I would generally hear (from the adults) "How did you get your DVDs all on one menu like that?" and I would explain that they were all on my computer in the basement, then I would generally be asked something along the lines of "How do you store that many DVDs on your computer. When I say that its not a DVD, It usually elicits something along the lines of "Sure looks like it" I don't make VCDs anymore. I have a DVD burner in the computer and I have a stand-alone DVD recorder withouth Macrovision, and I buy blank DVDs in bulk, but I do still use the format (or a variant thereof) to put a lot of stuff on DVDs. The DVD player in the minivan remembers where you are, so I convert the kids dvds and video tapes into VCD format, I get about 16 hours (yes, 16) on a single dual layer DVD. That is an entire series of Transformers. The kids don't mind, and even if brought into the house so they can continue watching on the TV in the family room (admittedly only 37 inches) I don't find them objectionable. |
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