[NBLUG/talk] NBLUG Video

Kyle Rankin kyle at nblug.org
Mon Jan 12 12:39:00 PST 2004


On Mon, Jan 12, 2004 at 12:16:38PM -0800, Eric Eisenhart wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 11, 2004 at 02:02:33PM -0800, E Frank Ball wrote:
> > VCD would be good.  My old Pioneer DVD player from '99 can play
> > VCDs, so I'd think most can.  I don't know if DVD-R will work.
> 
> My old DVD player can also play VCDs, but not *burned* VCDs.  (or burned CDs
> of any kind)  That's because the CD and DVD standards have different laser
> frequencies and burned CDs depend on the frequency being the same (since
> they use dye instead of pits).
> 
> (In other words, I'm voting for DVD-R.)
> 
> Isn't VCD just an ISO09660 CD with some regular MPEG-1 files and a few extra
> bits to make it so the players can find everything?   (in other words, if
> you don't have a specialized player, can't most computers play the files?)
> 
> I definitely agree that for me, it'd be nicer to play it on components that
> output to my television than on a computer.

Yeah VCDs are basically what you said.  In fact, there are tools under
Linux you can use to extract MPEGs from VCDs.  Under Debian the package is
called "vcdimager" and the tool you use is called vcdxrip.  Pretty much all
DVD player software I've seen on Linux and Windows supports VCD playing.

I personally prefer VCDs because CDs are a lot cheaper and more ubiquitous
(Even if you don't have a DVD player, you can still watch a VCD at least on
your computer CDROM drive), plus, although I haven't seen the quality of
these videos yet, I wouldn't think a ton of quality would be lost in MPEG1
on a VCD (and inversely, that you'd actually use all the quality you can
fit on a 4.7Gb DVD.)  But DVD-R would work as long as everyone knew which
DVD standard we are using, so they could bring in the right blank discs :)


-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org



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