Reading the first half or so made me think, "Wow, they should really fix this."
The second half made me think, "Wow, what a gross format. Really glad we have no use for these anymore!" (Not that they should leave the Explorer crash unfixed, of course).
It's bananas to me that a CD-ROM cost like $400 in 1990s money at one point; then I spent $150 on my first CD burner around 2002, and now you can buy a USB Blu-Ray/DVD/CD recorder drive for under $40.
VCD was in-keeping with the style of the time. General-purpose compute was expensive, so it was avoided.
Like the red book audio CDs that preceeded them, white book VCDs were a way to make playback a light-weight task on very specialized (maybe even single-purpose) hardware.
That's not necessarily a meaningful goal these days, but our limitations were different back then.
Random anecdote: There was Video Cd, but also CD Video. CD video had both an (inner) CD part with audio, as well as a Laserdisc part which would usually contain a music video. Very weird format, but cool to have both analog and digital storage in one medium.
I wanted to get into VCDs when I was a kid and I got a portable CD player that could also play VCDs, but the player was so buggy I just gave up. Maybe now is the time
win10/11 should be able to automagically mount ISO image with double click. There might be a way of isolating exact problem bit and distills it into USB flashable image with arbitrary filename.
From a brief look, an ISO won't capture a video cd. The video data is listed in the iso 9660 filesystem, but it's on a different track. iso files are a single track.
Reading the first half or so made me think, "Wow, they should really fix this."
The second half made me think, "Wow, what a gross format. Really glad we have no use for these anymore!" (Not that they should leave the Explorer crash unfixed, of course).
It's bananas to me that a CD-ROM cost like $400 in 1990s money at one point; then I spent $150 on my first CD burner around 2002, and now you can buy a USB Blu-Ray/DVD/CD recorder drive for under $40.
VCD was in-keeping with the style of the time. General-purpose compute was expensive, so it was avoided.
Like the red book audio CDs that preceeded them, white book VCDs were a way to make playback a light-weight task on very specialized (maybe even single-purpose) hardware.
That's not necessarily a meaningful goal these days, but our limitations were different back then.
Most use of VCD I saw was in karaoke, the low res graphics but decent sound worked fine for that - my karaoke DJ mate had hundreds.
VCD was the home video format of the masses throughout much of Asia in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Random anecdote: There was Video Cd, but also CD Video. CD video had both an (inner) CD part with audio, as well as a Laserdisc part which would usually contain a music video. Very weird format, but cool to have both analog and digital storage in one medium.
I never thought we would talk about VCD's again LOLLL
nice to see something about this technology again. It was pervasive across SE asia for a little :).
I wanted to get into VCDs when I was a kid and I got a portable CD player that could also play VCDs, but the player was so buggy I just gave up. Maybe now is the time
win10/11 should be able to automagically mount ISO image with double click. There might be a way of isolating exact problem bit and distills it into USB flashable image with arbitrary filename.
From a brief look, an ISO won't capture a video cd. The video data is listed in the iso 9660 filesystem, but it's on a different track. iso files are a single track.
Hilarious! Thanks for the research and write-up. I enjoyed the read.