Video CD (abbreviated as VCD, also known as Compact Disc Digital Video, abbreviated as CDDV) is a home video format and the first format for distributing films on standard optical discs. The format was widely adopted in nearly all of Asia (except for Japan and South Korea), superseding the VHS and Betamax systems in those regions until DVD-Video became more affordable in the 2000s.

The format is a standard digital data format for storing video on a compact disc. VCD discs/disc images are playable in dedicated VCD players and widely playable in most DVD players, personal computers and some video game consoles with an optical disc drive that is programmed to understand VCD discs.

The Video CD standard was created in 1993

by Sony, Philips, Matsushita and JVC; it is referred to as the White Book standard. The MPEG-1 format was also released that same year.

History

Predecessors

LaserDisc was first available on the market, in Atlanta, Georgia, on December 15, 1978. This disc could hold an hour of analog audio and video (digital audio was added a few years later) on each side. The LaserDisc provided picture quality nearly double the resolution of VHS tape and analog audio quality far superior to cheap mono VHS recorders (although the difference to the more expensive VHS HiFi stereo recorders was minuscule).

Philips later teamed up with Sony to develop a new type of disc, called the compact disc or CD. Introduced in 1982 in Japan (1983 in the U.S. and Europe), the CD is about in diameter, and is single-sided. The format was initially designed to store digitized sound and proved to be a success in the music industry.

In 1987, Philips released CD Video (CD-V), effectively a hybrid format combining analog LaserDisc-compatible video alongside separate audio-only CD-compatible tracks on a 12cm CD-sized disc.

  • Compression: MPEG-1
  • Aspect Ratio: 4:3
  • Resolution:
  • analog NTSC compatible: 352×240 (240p)
  • analog PAL/SECAM compatible: 352×288 (288p)
  • Framerate:
  • analog NTSC compatible : 29.97 or 23.976 frames per second
  • analog PAL/SECAM compatible : 25 frames per second
  • Bitrate: 1,150 kilobits per second (constant bitrate)

Although many DVD video players support playback of VCDs, VCD video is only compatible with the DVD-Video standard if encoded at 29.97 frames per second or 25 frames per second. <!-- This statement refers to the video ONLY. Incompatibilities caused by the 44,100 Hz audio are discussed in the audio section -->

The 352×240 and 352×288 (or SIF) resolutions, when compared to the CCIR 601 specifications (defining the appropriate parameters for digital encoding of NTSC and PAL/SECAM TV signals), are reduced by half in all aspects: height, width, frame-rate, and chrominance.

Audio

Audio specifications

DVCD

DVCD or Double VCD is a method to accommodate longer videos on a CD. A non-standard CD is overburned to include up to 100 minutes of video. However, some CD-ROM drives and players have problems reading these CDs, mostly because the groove spacing is outside specifications and the player's laser servo is unable to track it.

DVI

DVI (Digital Video Interactive) is a compression technique that stored 72 minutes of video on a CD-ROM. In 1998, Intel acquired the technology from RCA's Sarnoff Research Labs. DVI never caught on.

SVCD

Super Video CD is a format intended to be the successor of VCD, offering better quality of image and sound. The format uses MPEG-2 video at 480x480 or 480x576 and supports multiple bitrate and channel options for encoding audio.

Adoption

In North America

Video CDs were unable to gain acceptance as a mainstream format in North America, chiefly because the established VHS format was less expensive, offered comparable video quality, and could be recorded over. However, DVD burners and DVD-Video recorders were available by that time, and equipment and media costs for making DVD-Video fell rapidly. DVD-Video, with its longer run time and much higher quality, quickly overshadowed VCD in areas that could afford it. In addition many early DVD players could not read recordable (CD-R) media, and this limited the compatibility of home-made VCDs.

In Asia

The VCD format was very popular throughout Asia

(except Japan and South Korea) in the late 1990s through the 2000s, with 8 million VCD players sold in China in 1997 alone,

and more than half of all Chinese households owning at least one VCD player by 2005. However, popularity has declined over the years, as the number of Hong Kong factories that produced VCDs dropped from 98 in 1999 to 26 in 2012.

This popularity was due, in part, to most households not already owning VCRs when VCDs were introduced, the low price of the players, their tolerance of high humidity (a notable problem for VHS tapes), easy storage and maintenance, and the lower-cost media.

VCDs are often produced and sold in Asian countries and regions, such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Brunei, Myanmar, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan. In many Asian countries, major Hollywood studios (and Asian home video distributors) have licensed companies to officially produce and distribute the VCDs, such as Intercontinental Video Ltd. of Hong Kong, Sunny Video and Speedy Video in Malaysia, Vision Interprima Pictures in Indonesia, CVD International, APS Intermusic Co. Ltd and Pacific Marketing and Entertainment Group in Thailand, Excel Home Entertainment in India, Berjaya-HVN and InnoForm Media in both Malaysia and Singapore, Scorpio East Entertainment in Singapore, as well as Viva Video, Magnavision Home Video, and C-Interactive Digital Entertainment in the Philippines. Legal Video CDs can often be found in established video stores and major book outlets in most Asian countries. They are typically packaged in jewel cases like commercial CDs, though higher-profile films may be released in keep cases, differentiated by the VCD logo.

In Asia, the use of VCDs as carriers for karaoke music is very common. One channel would feature a mono track with music and singing, another channel a pure instrumental version for karaoke singing. Prior to this, karaoke music was carried on LaserDiscs.

VCD's growth had slowed in areas that could afford DVD-Video, which offered most of the same advantages, as well as better picture quality

(higher resolution with fewer digital compression artifacts) due to its larger storage capacity. However, VCD had simultaneously seen significant growth in emerging economies such as India, Indonesia and most countries in Africa and South America as a low-cost alternative to DVD. As of 2004, the worldwide popularity of VCD was increasing.

Compared with VHS

Overall picture quality is intended to be comparable to VHS video.

Poorly compressed VCD video can sometimes be of lower quality than VHS video, for example exhibiting VCD block artifacts (rather than the analog noise seen in VHS sources), but does not deteriorate further with each use. Producing video CDs involves stripping out high- and low-frequency sounds from the video, resulting in lower audio quality than VHS. Disc playback is also available both natively and as an option on some CD- and DVD-based video game consoles, including the original PlayStation (only on the SCPH-5903 model).

Early software supporting Video CD playback include XingMPEG. Early PC hardware supporting Video CD playback include proprietary VCD decoder card. Later, because the introduction of Pentium II processor which supports MMX extension, and later graphics cards had included video decoding function, the use of VCD decoder card declined.

VLC is a free, open-source media player software which supports VCD on Windows, MacOS, Linux and BSD.

Windows Media Player prior to version 9 does not support playing VCD directly. Windows Vista added native support of VCD along with DVD-Video and can launch the preferred application upon insertion. The disc format is also supported natively by Media Player Classic, VLC Media Player and MPlayer. Discs may include software for playing back VCD on operating systems that do not support it natively, which can be bundled by the authoring software.

QuickTime Player also does not support playing VCD directly, though it can play the .DAT files (stored under \MPEGAV for video and audio data) reliably, and plugins were available.

Direct access playback support is available within Windows XP MCE, Windows Vista and newer (including Windows 10), classic Mac OS, BSD, macOS, and Linux among others, either directly or with updates and compatible software.

Most DVD players are compatible with VCDs, and VCD-only players are available throughout Asia, and online through many shopping sites. Some older Blu-ray and HD-DVD players also retained support, as do CBHD players as well. However, most Blu-ray players, most vehicle audio with DVD/Blu-ray support, Xbox family, and Sony PlayStation family cannot play VCDs because the player software does not have support for MPEG-1 video and audio; the player software lacks the ability to read MPEG-1 stream in DAT files alongside MPEG-1 stream in standard MPEG, AVI, and Matroska files; or the player lacks the ability to read CD-ROM XA discs. Some Laserdisc players that were released in the late 90s support VCD, as does the Sony PS1 model SCPH-5903 marketed in Southeast Asia. The Sega Saturn has an MPEG-1 decoder card, which allows for VCD playback as well as MPEG-1 video on select games. However, it wasn’t released in North America.

Authoring software for VCD and SVCD includes Nero Video for Windows and VCD Imager for Linux.

Footnotes

References

</references>

  • Patent History Video CD Player – published by Philips 2003 (archived 26 August 2007)
  • Patent History Video CD Disc – published by Philips 2003 (archived 30 September 2008)
  • What is a VCD?
  • VCD / SVCD / miniDVD FAQ (archived 26 April 2005)
  • GNU VCDImager - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF), GNU VCDImager - Summary - Open-source project to implement Video CD and Super Video CD authoring on Linux.
  • Source code and revision history of vcdimager