Comment by cosmic_cheese
5 hours ago
I too was fascinated by VCDs for a stint during my younger years.
For me, the attraction was the potential of breeching the then-seemingly impenetrable wall between my computer and TVs. I had recently come into the possession of a CD burner (DVD burners were not yet available, at least not cheaply) and when my family picked up a dedicated DVD player that was advertised as also handling VCDs, I saw an opportunity.
The associated software ecosystem was quite flaky, though. I tried burning them with Roxio Toast and Nero among other utilities, but producing VCDs that player would actually play was hit or miss. I burned several coasters and eventually gave up.
Dude you and me both. My parents bought a combo VHS/DVD player that as it turned out could also handle VCDs, and I was able to watch a pirated version of AI with it. Eventually I got hold of a PowerMac 8500 with RCA in/out and really got cooking.
Seeing content created on my computer actually play on a TV really felt like a miracle in the 90s.
In 1997 there was the Pure3D graphics card, it was a 3DFX Voodoo 1 that could do TV output. Of course it could only do it on games as it still needed the 2D pass through for VGA output, but it was neat to see the PC doing what consoles could do.
Credit to HDMI, it finally standardized the IO systems that means PC to TV is trivial nowadays.
They were best sourced form a relevent alt.binaries. groups. Two I recall were Movies and Videos, which had TV show rips.