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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Video CD: Cheaper version of DVD? In some ways, yes


July 21, 2002


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, The Post-Standard

   A few months ago I edited a family video and put the finished movie onto a disk. I played it on my DVD player immediately. I was hooked. The picture quality was good, and the sound quality was even better.
   You probably think I'm going to tell you about making a DVD. Not so.
   I made a different kind of video disk. I've made many more since then, and I've become a huge fan of this kind of video recording. You might be, too, if you had a chance to try it out.
   What kind of video disk is this? It's a video CD (VCD).
   A video CD is a CD that has video with a sound track. The sound can be either monaural (one track) or stereo. The video isn't as good as what you get from a DVD, and it's a little shy of VHS tape quality. But it's good enough for home videos in most cases. You can get up to an hour of video and audio on one CD.
   Most people in North America probably have never heard of video CDs, yet VCDs are immensely popular in Japan and in parts of Europe. I've been told that video stores in those parts of the world even sell commercially made VCDs featuring releases of popular TV shows and even feature films.
   Many of the latest DVD players will handle video CDs easily. If you have a DVD player, check the manual (or go to the manufacturer's Web site) to see if it's rated to play VCDs. If you don't have a DVD player, you probably be able to play any VCD on your Windows, Mac or Linux computer. The playback software is often free.
   If you're a video fan, this might sound like heaven. But it gets better.
   You don't need any fancy hardware to make a VCD. If you have a CD burner and modern CD-creation software, you should be able to make your own VCDs.
   I use Toast Titanium from Roxio to make VCDs on my Mac OS X computer. Roxio's CD-burning software for Windows, Easy CD Creator, has the same capabilities. (Roxio used to be known as Adaptec, and some software stores still carry these products with the Adaptec name.)
   To make a VCD, you start with a digital video file -- an MPEG video, for example, if you're using Windows, or a QuickTime movie on a Mac -- and you let your CD-burning software turn it into a video CD. If you want to get fancy, you can make chapters and introductory screens just as you'd find on a DVD.
   My Mac, running the current Unix-based Mac operating system, OS X, is a dream for VCD creation, since the computer was designed to edit digital video, and I can make a VCD from one of my digital camcorder tapes in about an hour.
   But my Windows 2000 PC has a big advantage over my Mac for VCD projects. It has an ATI All in Wonder Pro graphics card that will record video and audio from a live source or from a VCR. I just tell the ATI software to capture incoming video and audio in VCD format, then feed that to my CD burner later.
   Because VCDs can't be erased and don't deteriorate in normal use the way tapes can, they're ideal for archival storage. I'm starting to copy my collection of Point 'n' Click TV shows, made when I was one of the hosts, from video tape to VCD, and I'm also about to begin a more serious project of converting my collection of family videos to permanent storage on video disks. I'll be converting some of those old tapes to DVD -- my Mac has a DVD burner -- but the rest will be stored on VCDs.
   Even though DVDs have better video quality than VCD, some of my oldest VHS tapes don't gain much when they're turned into DVDs; they're just not that good. The cost of blank DVDs is a factor, too. Blank recordable DVDs don't cost as much as they used to, selling for as little as $1.05 (one source: www.meritline.com), but you can get 100 blank recordable CDs (also from Meritline) for $12, less than one-eighth the cost of the cheapest blank DVDs.
   You'll find a lot of help on the Web if you want to try making VCDs. One of the best places to start is the Video Guys site, at www.videoguys.com/jump.htm.