Comment by xp84
6 hours ago
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 $40.
VCD was in-keeping with the style of the time. General-purpose compute was expensive, so it was avoided.
Like the red book audio CDs that preceeded them, white book VCDs were a way to make playback a light-weight task on very specialized (maybe even single-purpose) hardware.
That's not necessarily a meaningful goal these days, but our limitations were different back then.
These were big in the late 90s going into the early 00s. And there were also SVCDs which were MPEG2 video insead of MPEG1. There were a few brands of DVD players that supported them, APEX was the 90s one form China and then Phillips had some models that played lots of formats including avi files. The avi files often used a testing mpg4 video codec in the microsoft video player that got extracted and became the standard and grew into Divx and later Xvid.
Oh yes. I stepped through most of those, including the region-hackable Apex and a plays-anything Phillips.
Previous to that, I was doing some process or other on the PC that converted VCDs into a format that could be played on a modded PSX. The quality was terrible and I did it anyway.
When DVD was still a very new and expensive-to-use format, I scored a very cheap SCSI DVD-ROM drive that was a pull from some Sun machine or other. I never did succeed at playing a glitch-free film with it.
Part of that disappointment was due the 3dfx Voodoo 3 card lacking the MPEG 2 decoder that it had, at one point, been advertised to feature. In its place was a mail-in coupon that could be sent in for a software decoder...which never showed up, either.
It was an interesting time in digital video.
2002 was about when the whole market got disrupted by Lite-on, ironically. I was working in retail at the time and recall how their models just kept dropping from the 100-150ish range down to 50-75$ (and just kept going lower.)
What was even crazier was how fast DVD burners saw commoditization. The first Pioneer DVD Burner in 2001 launched at something like 1000$, and by 2004 lite-on was selling models for under 75$.
And, for most people, the Lite-On models were fine. I did have one customer that switched back to either Pioneer or Plextor (I can't remember which) because they were doing a -lot- of DVD writing (we're talking 4 burners running at once, that was a fun build to spec out!) and the Lite-On drives kept failing under the extreme use. Lite-On did have a good warranty process, however the downtime cost him enough that one day that he flat out asked what he should buy that was better. The drives we wound up going with were more than double the cost of the Lite-Ons, but he never had to warranty those [0].
[0] - Although, they did get seized in a raid apparently <_<
>Wow, what a gross format.
It's about as gross as regular Red Book CD audio. Sacrifice error correction for capacity. Errors in either audio or video streams are non-critical (to a point) and can be masked on playback. That's what C1 and C2 error correction does. There used to be copy protections that played silly games with error correction to foil CD audio rippers while not affecting playback on normal players. Think it was called Cactus Data Shield. It was not very effective.
And similar to VCD disks, the *.cda files Windows shows on audio CDs also aren't real.
> it was called Cactus Data Shield.
Indeed:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cactus_Data_Shield
Additionally, I remember from this time (perhaps this was a very German thing) that bands and stars whose CDs used Cactus Data Shield or a similar copy protection system suddely got hated and abandoned by parts of their fanbase.