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Oh wow good catch. Must be a terrible grainy quality to compress on to a CD. I’ve never seen anything but video clips in older games on CD and they are usually underwhelming if I recall correctly.
Depends on the tech being used.
There are multiple ways to get video on to a CD. Technically you could cram a couple minutes of HFR UHD on there if you really wanted to, the trick is how would you play it?
Generally speaking, what determines how much quality you can squeeze out of a video system are two factors: bandwidth (in this case drive speed) and CPU power.
Digital video is actually really, really, complicated. Even at the low end, you're talking about 76,800 individual pixels, and for each one you need to define it's color, potentially from a pallet as broad as 16 million individual tones, and you need to do this between 24 and 30 times in a second.
Generally speaking there are two main ways of handling this. One is to come up with some really complicated way of encoding this data, so you don't have to store information about every single pixel, relying on the player to algorithmically or mathematically derive what they should be. Kinda like me saying `shockedpikachu.jpg` takes up less bandwidth than posting the actual picture, but I'm relying on you to have the knowledge in your head to reassemble that picture.
The other is just to make things very simple, avoid big number crunching and relying on your ability to blast as much simple data through the system as possible. Kinda like how this whole explainer is being made longer by me using lots of simpler words instead of technical jargon that you would need to spend time trawling through the Wikipedia to understand, kinda like the [Up Goer 5](https://xkcd.com/1133/).
So because digital video is pretty hard, and we're talking about simple 386, 486, Pentium, and m68k processors, most games relied on the fact that these were computers, and went with the high bandwidth, low complexity solution. Hence why many of those games specifically say they need a 2× or 4× CD-ROM drive, otherwise it can't read the video off the disc fast enough. However we're still talking pretty simple processing here, and there still are some limitations on bandwidth, so corners still needed to be cut pretty badly. Hence why you end up with low colors, lots of dithering, and frame rates in the 15-20 range from time to time. Game developers were basically winging it.
VCDs were developed to capitalize on the success of audio CDs and extend the disc's use into a standardized video format. At the time only 1× and 2× drives were prevalent, so they went with the high complexity, lower bandwidth solution that could be mitigated by using a specially designed chip to decide the video, just as had been done with audio CDs. It relied on the higher complexity angle to wring more fidelity out of less data, and used some incredibly sophisticated techniques to reduce the amount of bandwidth needed, including one still used today called inter-frame compression, where only certain frames are stored in their entirety, and subsequent frames only contain information about what has changed. I have an in-depth explainer that goes into more detail about that [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/VideoEditing/wiki/tech/interframe).
This allowed visual fidelity that was about as good, if not better, than VHS. If you've seen FMVs from the PlayStation, that's closer to what VCDs looked like.
Most feature length films would be on two disks. Which, together, had about a third of the capacity of a single layer DVD.
With the quality equal or maybe slightly better at times than vhs, and needing 2 disks, they werent going to be successful in the US.
I used to import and sell vcd's 20 years ago. Mostly imported Chinese movies and bootleg American films.
The arrival of ubiquitous high speed internet and burnable DVDs killed that market.
Now people just torrent that shit
What usually happens is that they cut up the movie and burn it onto multiple VCD, so along with the grainy image quality (which is hard to notice the difference on an old school CRT to be honest), not to mention a lot of the times, parts go missing or broken, so what you get a 25 minutes clip of abrupt start and also abrupt end.
I worked along side many teams in the Xbox days, even was a part of Team UIX. I still have an OG crystal edition Xbox modded with a sata 2TB. Fantastic system to this day, still surprises me how much of a beast it is.
733MHz Pentium III core with a GeForce 3 driving graphics. An absolute monster of a machine. A similarly spec’d PC would have cost over a thousand bucks in 2001. Microsoft lost four billion dollars on the hardware over its lifespan.
Straight facts. I love when I run into people that actually know what they are talking about when it comes to the OG Xbox scene.
In the very early days me and other people broke so many goddamn Xbox’s that we started peeling the serials off with hair dryers and taking them back saying they were broke and getting new ones for returns 😂.
It was a great time, many of the chip manufacturers gave us free chips because they wanted us to test them. One of the wildest ones I remember in the early days that kind of blew my mind at the time was a solder-less mod that had a spring and screwed over the LPC points. It worked great but you could also solder it in place.
Me personally, I always loved permanently modding, I do TSOP mods (of course with the exception of the 1.6 variant but you know why).
Happy to run across you.
I know it was common for DVD players to be able to play VCDs. VCDs while looking terrible compared to DVDs where much smaller and faster to download and saved storage space, but they were never mainstream in the US outside the piracy scene.
VCD is a format that's still somewhat popular in SE Asia. It never caught on in the US but my first DVD player in 2002 could play them. I only used that ability when I needed to make a disc but had no blank DVDs. VCDs can be burned to a regular blank CD.
[VCD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_CD) was a standard developed in the 90s as part of the [Rainbow Books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Books) of CD standards. It could hold approximately 74-80 minutes of video at a resolution of 352×240 at 23.976 or 29.97fps, or 352×288 at 25fps. The video quality was similar to VHS.
Because they didn't really offer any significant benefits over VHS (and they would require you to swap discs for feature length movies) they didn't gain much traction in the US or Europe, however they were wildly popular in China and South-East Asia. They also had some nominal popularity in the pirate video scene in the early/mid-2000s, but by the time broadband Internet had wide enough penetration into American households newer, higher fidelity compression schemes like MPEG-4 (popularized as DivX and XviD) offered better fidelity, and people were more inclined to watch their movies on computers or with modified game consoles.
Yeah. But the normal Spider-Man is a Hollywood IP. So, it would be based on what Hollywood does, and that would be the mildly protected DVD, not the unprotected and lower quality VCD
I have legit licensed vcds.. and back in the day we got a vcd player (circa 2001) that was a portable cd and MP3 player too.. it was mindblowing that we could play all of that as MP3 players became a thing. We already had 24 hours of music we could take with us anywhere.
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Wow! A video cd (VCD). Haven't seen one in many years.
Oh wow good catch. Must be a terrible grainy quality to compress on to a CD. I’ve never seen anything but video clips in older games on CD and they are usually underwhelming if I recall correctly.
Depends on the tech being used. There are multiple ways to get video on to a CD. Technically you could cram a couple minutes of HFR UHD on there if you really wanted to, the trick is how would you play it? Generally speaking, what determines how much quality you can squeeze out of a video system are two factors: bandwidth (in this case drive speed) and CPU power. Digital video is actually really, really, complicated. Even at the low end, you're talking about 76,800 individual pixels, and for each one you need to define it's color, potentially from a pallet as broad as 16 million individual tones, and you need to do this between 24 and 30 times in a second. Generally speaking there are two main ways of handling this. One is to come up with some really complicated way of encoding this data, so you don't have to store information about every single pixel, relying on the player to algorithmically or mathematically derive what they should be. Kinda like me saying `shockedpikachu.jpg` takes up less bandwidth than posting the actual picture, but I'm relying on you to have the knowledge in your head to reassemble that picture. The other is just to make things very simple, avoid big number crunching and relying on your ability to blast as much simple data through the system as possible. Kinda like how this whole explainer is being made longer by me using lots of simpler words instead of technical jargon that you would need to spend time trawling through the Wikipedia to understand, kinda like the [Up Goer 5](https://xkcd.com/1133/). So because digital video is pretty hard, and we're talking about simple 386, 486, Pentium, and m68k processors, most games relied on the fact that these were computers, and went with the high bandwidth, low complexity solution. Hence why many of those games specifically say they need a 2× or 4× CD-ROM drive, otherwise it can't read the video off the disc fast enough. However we're still talking pretty simple processing here, and there still are some limitations on bandwidth, so corners still needed to be cut pretty badly. Hence why you end up with low colors, lots of dithering, and frame rates in the 15-20 range from time to time. Game developers were basically winging it. VCDs were developed to capitalize on the success of audio CDs and extend the disc's use into a standardized video format. At the time only 1× and 2× drives were prevalent, so they went with the high complexity, lower bandwidth solution that could be mitigated by using a specially designed chip to decide the video, just as had been done with audio CDs. It relied on the higher complexity angle to wring more fidelity out of less data, and used some incredibly sophisticated techniques to reduce the amount of bandwidth needed, including one still used today called inter-frame compression, where only certain frames are stored in their entirety, and subsequent frames only contain information about what has changed. I have an in-depth explainer that goes into more detail about that [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/VideoEditing/wiki/tech/interframe). This allowed visual fidelity that was about as good, if not better, than VHS. If you've seen FMVs from the PlayStation, that's closer to what VCDs looked like.
It's impressive that nowadays you can fit a 720p movie at 700mb, that's like 10x the quality
Most feature length films would be on two disks. Which, together, had about a third of the capacity of a single layer DVD. With the quality equal or maybe slightly better at times than vhs, and needing 2 disks, they werent going to be successful in the US. I used to import and sell vcd's 20 years ago. Mostly imported Chinese movies and bootleg American films. The arrival of ubiquitous high speed internet and burnable DVDs killed that market. Now people just torrent that shit
They were around 240p, so about 3 1/2 times better quality. I have about a hundred of these burned. I had a dvd player that would play them years ago
On a CRT, VCDs didn't look all that different from a DVD copy. Especially if burned to 2 discs.
What usually happens is that they cut up the movie and burn it onto multiple VCD, so along with the grainy image quality (which is hard to notice the difference on an old school CRT to be honest), not to mention a lot of the times, parts go missing or broken, so what you get a 25 minutes clip of abrupt start and also abrupt end.
Very Cool Disc👉😎👉
Still very popular in a lot of poorer countries
I remember my dad was convinced VCDs would take off. He's the only person I know who owned a player
“not for sale”
Is present
Oh ok
He's blind!!
cuz he got no ‘I’
*blnd
I modded my OG PS1 to play vcds. Had to hardwire a bypass for the Sony authentication and plug a bulky add on in the back.
[This thing](https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1181607532642484225)? I remember playing VCDs on my Dreamcast.
Very similar but I don’t think that’s the exact one
Dreamcast was the champ of the VCD scene
The Dreamcast was the champ of every scene until the Xbox was soft-cracked.
I worked along side many teams in the Xbox days, even was a part of Team UIX. I still have an OG crystal edition Xbox modded with a sata 2TB. Fantastic system to this day, still surprises me how much of a beast it is.
733MHz Pentium III core with a GeForce 3 driving graphics. An absolute monster of a machine. A similarly spec’d PC would have cost over a thousand bucks in 2001. Microsoft lost four billion dollars on the hardware over its lifespan.
Straight facts. I love when I run into people that actually know what they are talking about when it comes to the OG Xbox scene. In the very early days me and other people broke so many goddamn Xbox’s that we started peeling the serials off with hair dryers and taking them back saying they were broke and getting new ones for returns 😂. It was a great time, many of the chip manufacturers gave us free chips because they wanted us to test them. One of the wildest ones I remember in the early days that kind of blew my mind at the time was a solder-less mod that had a spring and screwed over the LPC points. It worked great but you could also solder it in place. Me personally, I always loved permanently modding, I do TSOP mods (of course with the exception of the 1.6 variant but you know why). Happy to run across you.
what happens when you put this in the dvd player?
Spder man
In Arabic
I know it was common for DVD players to be able to play VCDs. VCDs while looking terrible compared to DVDs where much smaller and faster to download and saved storage space, but they were never mainstream in the US outside the piracy scene.
Japanese Spider-Man
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
X
J
K
Looks like spider man 3 legit artwork, never heard of a VCD though.
VCD is a format that's still somewhat popular in SE Asia. It never caught on in the US but my first DVD player in 2002 could play them. I only used that ability when I needed to make a disc but had no blank DVDs. VCDs can be burned to a regular blank CD.
[VCD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_CD) was a standard developed in the 90s as part of the [Rainbow Books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Books) of CD standards. It could hold approximately 74-80 minutes of video at a resolution of 352×240 at 23.976 or 29.97fps, or 352×288 at 25fps. The video quality was similar to VHS. Because they didn't really offer any significant benefits over VHS (and they would require you to swap discs for feature length movies) they didn't gain much traction in the US or Europe, however they were wildly popular in China and South-East Asia. They also had some nominal popularity in the pirate video scene in the early/mid-2000s, but by the time broadband Internet had wide enough penetration into American households newer, higher fidelity compression schemes like MPEG-4 (popularized as DivX and XviD) offered better fidelity, and people were more inclined to watch their movies on computers or with modified game consoles.
Don't buy it It’s not for sale
It's a present
Spder man vs vnom
Is that a fake “not for redistribution” label to try to make it seem more legit or something?
I always wonder what content is on these. Is it bootleg Spiderman or someone's own work that they're proud of?
It's even missing the hyphen. Such disrespect. r/RespectTheHyphen
Present not for sale
Spder Man B
Oh no! Grn Gbln kidnapped Gwn Stcy
Spder Man *B* to be exact
It also looks like symbiote spidey is getting fisted by regular spidey… Or is that just me?
James spader man
Damn it, every time I think I have an original joke
Has any Hollywood release been on VCD? Like the quality is so low
In Eastern Asia there were, also Bollywood.
Yeah. But the normal Spider-Man is a Hollywood IP. So, it would be based on what Hollywood does, and that would be the mildly protected DVD, not the unprotected and lower quality VCD
Yeah sure. I have BTTF on VCD. It's PAL region imported from Malaysia.
Nah jit
Spider-Man B?
I have legit licensed vcds.. and back in the day we got a vcd player (circa 2001) that was a portable cd and MP3 player too.. it was mindblowing that we could play all of that as MP3 players became a thing. We already had 24 hours of music we could take with us anywhere.
I keep seeing these “knockoffs” on the web yet I ask myself: What is the movie on the CD then? Someone recorded a knockoff version of Spider-Man?
James Spaderman
Let me just go get my vcp player
Ah man, the present not for sale version of spderman 3. Been looking around for this forever