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This article appeared in the August 2001 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
Sometimes the whole computer industry, especially including Apple, go for a home run when most of their customers would be just as happy with a bunt single. The example that's been bothering me for the last year or so is the Video CD, or VCD for short. Apple's big push over the last year has been for desktop DVDs with the expensive SuperDrive, and they seem to be missing the boat on VCDs.
A VCD is an ordinary compact disk that can contain about an hour's worth of video with a resolution just a little bit lower than standard VHS tape. Video CD was introduced by Philips and Sony in 1993, and, unfortunately, never caught on in North America, but it became a huge success 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 two million VCD players every year and there may be as many as 40 million in use throughout Asia. In fact, if you're a fan of Hong Kong action movies or Japanese anime, it's easy to find Web sites that will sell you either in VCD format.
Until recently, it was almost impossible to find a standalone VCD player in the United States. But the spectacular number of DVD players sold over the last couple of years has changed all that. Chances are good that the DVD player you got last Christmas will also play VCDs.
The video on a VCD is compressed using the MPEG-1 standard, and is at an NTSC resolution of 352x240. This is much lower than a DVD, which uses MPEG-2 compression at a resolution of 700x480. But, almost all TV we watch is only at NTSC resolution, and most TVs can't even show higher resolutions than NTSC, so VCD gives a perfectly acceptable picture; it's about the same resolution you've been watching all your life.
Since a VCD is just an ordinary compact disk, given a CD-RW drive and a little software, you can make one yourself.
The easiest software for making VCDs is the new Toast 5 Titanium from Roxio (www.roxio.com). Toast 5 Titanium can automatically convert digital video into VCDs in several different ways. It includes a plugin for iMovie that allows you to burn your movie to Video CD directly from iMovie 2.0.1 or newer. In addition, any QuickTime movie can be used to create a Video CD by simply dragging it onto Toast's Video CD format window.
This solves an annoying problem. About a year ago, I got a Sony TRV-320 digital8 camcorder and started editing my home movies with iMovie. Connecting the camcorder to my G4 to read the originals and write the edited masterpieces back to tape is effortless. My ten-year-old daughter is an expert at it, and has used iMovie to edit several school projects. But, once the masterpiece is back in the camcorder, the nuisance shows up: how do we watch it on TV?
The way we used to do it was to blindly reach in behind the VCR and eventually plug wires from the camcorder into the VCR's audio and video inputs. Then the camcorder output was copied onto a VHS tape so it would be easier to watch next time.
These days, we tell iMovie to output the edited movie to Toast and Toast burns the movie onto a CD-R. The resulting VCD is easier to store and cheaper to make than the older VHS copies. And it sure beats Apple's solution of buying a top-of-the-line Mac with a SuperDrive and burning onto blank DVDs at $10 per blank. Of course, I also keep a high-resolution digital8 copy in anticipation of the time when I'll want a higher resolution on my TV screen.
You can even watch the VCD on your Mac using the shareware program MacVCD (www.mireth.com/MacVCD.html) or the free program FreeVCD (www.cs.ucla.edu/~nathanst/freevcd/).
Toast makes VCD creation easy, but things could be improved.
There are several competing improved VCD standards that give higher video quality and other DVD-like features to the VCD. The most common of these is the Super VCD format, known as SVCD by the acronym unimpaired. SVCD is an enhancement to Video CD that was developed by a Chinese government-backed committee of manufacturers and researchers, partly to sidestep DVD technology royalties and partly to create pressure for lower DVD player and disc prices in China. The final SVCD spec, set by the China National Committee of Recording Standards, was announced in September 1998, and has been endorded by several Western manufacturers, most notably Phillips.
SVCD can deliver a picture with more than twice the resolution of the previous VCD standard, and uses MPEG-2 video encoding, like DVDs, to reduce motion artifacts. Of course, the improved resolution reduces the running-time from 70 minutes to about 40 minutes. Many DVD players can play SVCD disks.
SVCD disks can also support other DVD-like features, such as menus and subtitles.
It is not easy to create SVCD disks with Toast, or any other low-end CD-writing program for the Mac. The main problem is the lack of an inexpensive MPEG-2 encoder for QuickTime. There are high-quality MPEG-2 encoders available with expensive products such as Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro, but none easily available for the rest of us. It's possible to get around this, if you can use Linux or Virtual PC. Several recipes exist on the Web (www169.pair.com/lukifer/svcd/tutorial.html).
As a postscript to the above, let me finish by writing a few words about VCDs on DVD players.
About eighteen months ago I decided to buy a DVD player, and chose the Apex 600A because it was relatively inexpensive and can play standard CDs and MP3s in addition to DVDs. I was surprised when I got it home to see that it can also play VCDs. That's when I first started thinking about burning VCDs.
Last fall I burned by first VCDs--using my Linux machine, not my Mac, because I hadn't yet gotten a CD-RW drive for the Mac. The VCD played perfectly on the Mac and sort of played on the Apex 600A--except that the sound lagged the picture by about a second.
Apex answered my e-mail about the problem by saying that there were no fixes for the problem. This turned out to be a flat out open-faced lie. A bit of Web surfing brought up a wealth of information on the 600A, including a list of ROM upgrades and version numbers for them. (They also give a plethora of hacks for turning off region codes and copy protection.) A newer ROM was the fix for my problem, and I learned how to get one from the hacking pages. Two of the best pages on the 600A are www.dvd-wizards.com/darrenk/ and hometown.aol.com/apex600a/Links.html.
As this little story shows, not all the DVD players are created equal. If you're buying a new DVD player and want to make sure it will play all the extra formats like MP3, VCD and SVCD, there is an extensive list of players and features at www.vcdhelper.com/dvdplayers.php. Included is owner feedback on many of the players.
Macworld New York was held July 18-20, and Byron Songer, Apple Systems Engineer, K-12 for Kentucky, will report on the conference during the August 28 LCN meeting and bring us news of the latest and greatest from Apple Computer.
The Louisville Computer Society meets on the fourth Tuesday of the month from 7:00-9:00 P.M. at Pitt Academy, 4605 Poplar Level Road, at the intersection of Poplar Level Road and Gilmore Lane. Everyone is welcome to attend. For more information, on the Web go to www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.
The LCS also sponsors an e-mail discussion list devoted to Macintosh topics. To join, send e-mail containing only the words "subscribe macgroup" to majordomo@erdos.math.louisville.edu.
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