FAQs

TEST What's Video CD?

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 (720x480 for NTSC or 720x576 for PAL), 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 Frank Gadegast. For more information on the actual structure of the Video CDs, see this page from the MPlayer documentation (via Guentcho Skordev). 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 -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 or so in places like Hong Kong, Malaysia, or China (since it only costs 5 cents to duplicate a CD). This has been crippling to the Hong Kong movie industry: why pay or to see a movie in the theater when you can get a pirate VCD for 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 me.