I was thinking the same thing, somewhere across the fields of England Techmoan suddenly feels a fluttering in the pit of his stomach and says "someone just beat me to a new audio format, I can sense it!"
VCD also had a brief boom in south america in the late 90's and early 2000's, where it was marketed as a cheaper alternative to DVD (and just as easy to bootleg). To compensate for the absence of cool features that could be included in DVDs some cheap no-brand VCD players came with gamepads and built-in famiclone hardware that could play NES/Famicom ROMs from CD-R.
@@bertroost1675 For a little while in the early 2000s when I was in college, DVD±R discs and burners were still kinda pricey, so I would share my collection with the college's anime club by ripping my DVDs to VCD. And yeah, two discs per movie was pretty typical, since the VCD format was designed to have the same ~74 minute playtime as audio-CDs.
I grew up seeing movies and docus on VCDs too, up till 2007 when we had our first DVD-capable device. That was also when we had stopped buying media on discs altogether, ironically haha. VCDs seem more prevalent here in SE Asia too, than DVD, which were more expensive.
Mpeg1, audio layer 2 is pretty common, even now. When you listen to streaming audio channels on Dish Network/DirecTV, thats what you are listening. Seen online as .mp2. Mpeg1, audio layer 3, is, you guessed it, the common .mp3 thats everywhere
MPEG is tricky to seek through. There's no structure, just a series of very very short independent audio frames all joined together. Each and every frame could be encoded at any supported bitrate, so knowing how far, in bytes, you would need to seek into a stream of frames to get to a certain time stamp requires processing _every frame_ in between to count the time passed. Because of this, most players don't bother to do accurate seeking. They just process a little of the stream to determine what the average bitrate is, then use that to estimate how far to seek. The "track length" is also just a guess based on this estimation. (Unless the VCD format stores this as metadata. I don't know.) Obviously if the bitrate varies much over the length of the track, the guess could end up being very wrong -- and that definitely happens. It's just that most MPEG encoders tend to be reasonably consistent with VBR streams, and most streams typically are encoded the same throughout (as opposed to being concatenations of different encoded sources that could all be wildly different), so it's usually close enough, and only ends up being off by a few seconds. As to why VLC is having trouble with this... I don't know. Maybe if you wait long enough, it'll catch up and start playing at the seeked position. Maybe it IS trying to do accurate seeking. Or maybe it's looking for something else in the VCD stream that isn't there in this case. (Perhaps VCD usually inserts timestamps that VLC is looking for?)
Wonder why they used layer 2 instead of layer 3 (also known as MP3) because mp3 supports higher qualities. Maybe decoding it was too resource intensive.
I love the Korean language; it is _very_ intuitive, natural, comprehensive, and with an extreme amount of English loan words. For example, I saw a track on Kevin's disc which was labeled "이사야" (isaya) which I assume says "Isaiah", a biblical prophet.
Korean is one of my favourite languages in the entire world. It's ridiculously beautiful. I know someone who got to visit, and the way she talked about the place, I wanted to go! Lol.
I know nothing about your language but I love the look of the characters of Hangul. They're just so aesthetically pleasing, like they were developed by a graphic designer
@@dyscotopia Hangeul characters, particularly the consonants, are designed after highly stylized versions of the shapes your mouth or tongue make while vocalizing them. For example, ㅁ (mieum) makes the 'mmm' sound. when you phonate it, your lips are vaguely rectangular shaped. Another is ㄴ (nieun), which makes the 'nnn' sound. ㄴ depicts your tongue bending to the pallet to phonate it. I cannot speak Korean but a few words or phrases, but I _can_ read Hangeul and a Korean person would understand me, if not often correcting me or laughing at my American accent. I myself would have no idea what I'm saying. My point is, you should try learning Hangeul; it is fun and super easy to learn, waaaay the heck easier than English. Then, if you elect to learn the language, you will have an advantage because you can read and write. Using Roman characters (as I have been providing) is a severe handicap to learning to pronounce words correctly; you should only be using Hangeul to learn Korean.
The reason why VLC recognizes it as a Video CD is because it's essentially half of a Video CD. The Compact Disc Digital Video (Video CD) standard uses MPEG-1 for video and, you guessed it, MPEG-1 layer 2 audio.
Quite similar from the mid 2000's when "MP3 CD players" were popular. I recall ripping CDs to MP3s and then burned my playlist back to a MP3 CD and had something like 6 hours of music on 1 disc in the car I was driving for the first half of college. You could use a lower MP3 bitrate and cram a ton more onto it. I also had a 256MB SanDisk MP3 player that Windows Media Player was able to compact the quality down enough to fit a comfortable several hours onto at a quality I was happy with.
Not really, VCDs are "White Book" standard CDs, so they are basically Data Discs (not Audio Discs) with an ISO 9660-compliant file system (with the Audio/Video stored in .dat files). So in an Audio CD player those would be seen as discs with 1 Track (the data track) and not like Audio CDs. This here is only using the same Audio codec, which is also being used until today for SD digital television and other things - still you would not call Inkel discs "half of digital television" 😉
@@belzebub16 I was explaining it "for dummies" if you get what I'm trying to say. Yes, the Inkel discs are a weird hybrid with Red Book audio structure (one CD track for each music track) but with MPEG-1 layer 2 instead of pcm16le audio data. That's why I called it "half of a Video CD", because VCD is two codecs (video and audio) and Inkel's are only audio. it was an easy way to say it so everybody would understand. Great explaination though!
@@matthewmiller6068 My Mom used to like to listen to audio books. When she'd go on vacation I'd rip them to MP3 CD's for her, that way the whole novel would fit on a single CD, which was very convenient.
Since this is laid out as a VCD, chances are that the tracks are recorded in XA Mode 2 Form 2, which would give you 2324 bytes of payload per sector instead of 2048 (at the expense of the additional layer of error correction CD-ROMs usually have). A 74 minute CD (333000 sectors) could therefore provide ~737 MiB of data.
The first track was typically allowed to be recorded in XA Mode 2 Form 1 with full error correction. While it may not have been strictly forbidden to use this mode for subsequent tracks, it was certainly unusual. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if many Asian players could still handle it.
Inkel is/was reasonably well known in The Netherlands for their (near indestructible) small format mixers. Excellent Phono preamps and all round build quality. My MX-995 is probably as old as I am and still in perfect working condition.
Hah I had an Inkel amp when I lived in Korea - someone threw it out, I found it at the side of the road, paired it with some speakers (someone ALSO threw out a pair, blown though) which I used for 3-4 years after buying and installing new woofers (mid and tweets were fine). I sold it for like $100 when I was leaving the ROK. It worked well for what I was using it for.
When I was a kid back in the 2000s, I actually owned more VCDs than DVDs because they were so popular, cheap and affordable. I am from Philippines by the way and the last VCD I ever bought was back in 2011 which is Cars 2. Unfortunately, I lost that one when I lend it to my cousin to watch.
It's weird -- I've never owned a CD player that didn't mute non-audio data, at least not at the same time where I owned non-audio discs. I remember seeing the warning in the liner notes of CD-ROM or video game discs that you should be careful playing the disc on an audio CD player as it could be very loud and potentially cause damage (due to the loudness.) And every time I ever tried.... nothing. Just silence. Even on CD audio players that I had had before CD-ROM drives were common. They were clearly on top of this potential problem, and then spread the word about it for years after it ceased to be an issue. It got to the point I thought it was nonsense, since every CD player (even my oldest ones) did exactly the same thing, and they couldn't _possibly_ understand what a CD-ROM disc was, could they? ;-) I still think it's odd that players even bother to play tracks that are known to be non-audio. Why bother? Why not just skip them, or refuse to play the disc if there are no audio tracks at all?
I used to always put all my game cds into my cd player because if you skip past the data tracks alot of them used normal cd tracks for music so you can listen to the soundtrack. Just remember to skip the noise blaster!
@@sickregret I tested that with a couple myself, that had their music in regular CD tracks. Though none of my games had music I wanted to listen to much on its own. On the other hand, my brother listened to his _Test Drive: Off Road_ CD-ROM a lot, since its music tracks were several songs from Gravity Kills's first album.
@@AaronOfMpls I used to play SubCulture alot, which is a underwater trading submarine game and it has a really chill soundtrack just on the game cd. I always felt like it was a bonus feature when games had their music in regular cd audio tracks. Especially when cdburner drives were rarer and way more expensive. SubCulture came out in 1997.
Using VCD for audio, of course! Use the format designed for video to hold more audio! Then again, you can do the same with something like VHS, it’s an easy way to store a lot of music. It’s a cool idea, but I can see how the unique hardware would be a big cost factor, especially for the intended use case. Great video!
For VHS indeed Alesis even made a series of digital multi-track recorders on the format. Not to mention D-VHS at it's tail end, storing literally as much as a dual layer BD (yep, 50 GB per tape).
Those are awesome machines, it’s a cool way to use VHS for something other than just video. They can store a lot especially when used efficiently. Definitely something I’d like to find, both for digital audio and D-Theatre/D-VHS. HD video on a cassette is super cool, solid state everything might be efficient but mechanical playback is always fun.
Oh yah, storing PCM audio on videotape was _very much_ a thing! There were special encoders/decoders for it, and it was even used professionally for some things (like getting the encoded digital audio data to the CD pressing plant) before DAT and CD burners and big-enough hard drives came along. Plus, depending on what kind of tape you used, you could fit _hours_ of CD-quality music onto one tape, especially at one of the slower recording speeds. Technology Connections made a video about it a while back -- "Digital audio needed videotape to be possible - and the early days were wild!" (v=xSnrQBfBCzY) (Minor edits after watching the Technology Connections video again.)
Quickest i've been to one of your videos. I love the uploads and have been watching for quite some time, as these niche finds are always super intriguing to me. Keep up the great work man!
It's nice seeing an understated little thing being great at what it does! I appreciate they didn't go out of their way to make a closed down format too. Thanks for showing us this.
There is a long forgotten mp3 CD audiobook standard that never really caught on. Brilliance Audio produced discs using it. They were intended to be played on the Soul DMP-206b disc player to get full use of all the features.
Fun video. I'm surprised TechMoan hasn't covered this format. Maybe he is unaware of it or just couldn't find one at a reasonable price after shipping and other fees.
You can pretty much get away with extreme compression if it's just a voice recording. You can still typically understand what they're saying, even if the compression is ridiculous.
@@cheeseparis1 Variable bit rate. Not sure if this is allowed in VCD (I know absolutely nothing about that format - never used it), but it's a feature of bog-standard MPEG.
@@applescruff1969 Reminds me of AMR. Holly that was... crunchy. If I recall it's basically the file format for the GSM call CODEC. And it was all that phones could record back some 20 years ago...
Great video and a very interesting device which I never knew existed. A nice pre-curser to MP3 audiobook CDs. Digital radio in the UK and Europe uses the DAB standard which was originally based on the MP2 audio codec, I have therefore been very familiar with this audio codec for audio only use since the late 90's. DAB radio has evolved and now many stations have moved to the more efficient HE-AAC v2 codec, with compatible receivers branded as DAB+.
Very interesting. This is a predecessor to DAISY (digital accessible information system), which is a more recent format originally intended to produce books, magazines, newspapers and other longer texts in an audio form. DAISY books were originally distributed on CD or DVD media and still are, though these days are also digitally available. The format consists of audio in MP3 format, and a series of XML files which act as an index and navigational database of the files. Those files are read by a compatible DAISY player, either a standalone machine or a piece of software, and allow the reader to navigate by different 'levels' of granularity depending on the media. I've not used it in years but as a blind person, when I was a teenager I used to consume books almost exclusively through DAISY discs in a standalone player. These days Audible is far more convenient, but DAISy is still used in education, by library services at least here in the UK, and by those who don't use Audible or similar book services for whatever reason.
I had just figured out your RU-vid name ( well the Westlife part anyway) when you actually feature a cameo of the band on CD! 😂 Always appreciate your videos! 🎉🎉🎉
First thing I thought was "maybe it's using a pre-cursor to mp3 or some kind of compressed audio format." I didn't expect to be that close! As for you making this video; Ko Mop Su Ni Da! (One of the few things I remember from taking Tae Kwon Do in my middle school years.) Though I could see the discs and the player being available for checkout at a library, at least if it were available here in the US.
That is actually a pretty cool device. I pretty much figured it would be either VideoCD or a series of MP3 tracks on a regulard CD-ROM from the get-go. And given the popularity of VideoCD in Asia in that era, that format sounded the most likely to me. For regular, single channel audio 64kbps is actually not that bad. It's not hifi standard, but decent enough for this purpose. It does make me wonder however, if one were to author a VideoCD oneself, with only a stereo MPEG 1 layer 2 track and a bitrate more suitable for music, whether it not this device would play it. The audio on VideoCDs was encoded in 224kbps. This means that you could fit just about 198 minutes of stereo audio on a single White Book compliant CD.
Basically that CD is a compressed audio VCD format, no wonder it failed. This is why MP3 CDs were more successful, since there are lots of new CD players that could play MP3 and WMA formats and have multiple hours of music!
@@vwestlife even in 1996, lot of audio manufacturers like Sony and Samsung refused to make that format, they waited years to finally agree on a compressed audio format standard like MP3 which is easy to playback on CD players.
@@Markimark151 The main reason DVD players started supporting MP3 CDs was because people were burning their own mix CDs full of MP3s. This didn't start to happen until around 1999 when Napster became popular. In 1996 not many people had CD burners. They were too expensive. So were blank discs.
Even though I am in no great need of comforting, your videos are immensely comforting for some reason. It's comforting to know that the old testicle sounds anime-ish. Time is a flat circus.
Video CD was an interesting format. When I visited Singapore in 2008 I stopped by the Borders book store and bought a legit copy of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King "Special Extended VCD Edition". I think it was 4 discs. I still have it somewhere...
My cousin in Poland just gave me a bunch of educational software for my own kid (in Polish naturally) and there was quite a bit of VCDs there too. I recall at Empik in the 90s there were quite a bit of VCD media available as well, and my Russian friends would always trade VCD movies with me.
VCD is terrible. The only reason they wanted it was it is so much cheaper to produce a CD or 2 than a VHS tape. SVCD is much better. I have hundreds of movies from the early 2000s in SVCD format. While VCD is worse than VHS, SVCD is very close to DVD, so long as you use a reasonable bitrate. It's 480x480
@@christo930 heh, yeah 4 disc for 1 movie sometimes, 3 disc was standard.. i pulled the numbers strategy on my parents (who loved their cams and silvers dearly) and was able to get a pioneer dvd burner for christmas.. dad said "show me what it can do" i said "give me about 8hrs" XD REPLICA/CENTROPY FTW!
I’ve recently discovered for myself that videocd is recorded with lesser data redundancy than our typical cdrom, same as audio cds are. It means, an mpeg file ripped from it is more than 700mb, but nothing can guarantee that that file would be exactly the same as the one that was recorded
It still has error correction, but it's not as robust, I believe it's similar in efficiency to standard CDA error correction, which for video is good enough.
I would assume the mpeg file will not decode without errors if a vcd has damage beyond what the error correction can handle so it should be obvious. On a TV this would probably just show as a brief skip or glitch in the picture if the damage isn't too big, but something like ffmpeg in verbose mode will throw errors.
It takes a while to realize Back in the day he used a westlife cover (shown at the start of the video) so at least westlife reference was easier to notice
I should mention that SONY did a similar job with ATRAC on portable CD-players. More than 24 CD's (74 minutes) in Hifi Stereo Audio was possible on it and could be made (stored) with special PC software and a standard CD Burner. Sound quality is superb and capable of showing track information. A set of 2 AA batteries would get you more 50 hours of playback. The disc was read for a few seconds, buffered the whole track in memory reducing power consumption to a minimum. They were shockproof and had a digital output (TOSLINK).
That was a very interesting video as always. Since I am a passionate laserdisc collector I have an Inkel demonstration laserdisc that I bought at a flea market in Seoul once. Interestingly the laserdisc was also manufactured by the SKC company.
I acquired something similar to this at work (I'm the IT guy, so I get all the ewaste) that the special education classrooms used for awhile. It was a proprietary Follet branded audio book player that played proprietary audio CDs that couldn't be played on anything else.
The CD has 650 MB when storing regular data, in which case a portion of the data that can be written is used for error correction. Video CD format uses the error correction portion to store data, the downside is that if the disc gets scratched you don't have error correction, and that was deemed fine for a video cd.. it will just jump a few frames or seconds and resume playing. 74 minutes is 74 minutes x 60 seconds x 2 channels x 2 bytes per sample x 44100 samples per second = 783,216,000 bytes or 750-783 MB depending on what you're using (1000 or 1024) . If you divide that big number by 8000 (64 kbit = 8000 bytes) you get 97902 seconds worth of compressed content or a bit more than 27 hours.
Interesting early use of compression using the CD format. I remember buying an MP3 CD player and was blown away by being able to put entire CD boxed sets on a single disc.
Some DVD player models in the initial mass sales phase in the early 2000s in Brazil, I remember seeing the description that some were compatible with "audiobook". Then these DVD players disappeared.
Oh, yes. Video CD was an established format in Southeast Asia. The discs tend to tolerate humidity better then magnetic tape. On Techmoan's channel, he was able to procure Mad Max: Fury Road & San Andreas. Alas, when compared to VHS (SP), Video CD's image and sound quality is noticeably lower than that of an old Video Home System®️ PS: Yes, Japanese were never good with anything that isn't in their native language🙄
I'm not sure about the quality bit. Video? Yeah, I guess that's fair, the horizontal resolution is comparable but VCD has half the vertical resolution - although the image is perfectly stable and without the color smearing typical to VHS. But audio?! MPEG Layer 2 at 224 kbps shall sound excellent. Not far off from VHS Hi-Fi, and certainly much better than plain linear VHS.
@@kFY514 For 1993, VCD is technological marvel. Just too much image artifacts (MPEG-1 video & audio). VHS is still better in that department. As for audio, for non-VHS Hi-Fi, they' about equal. It's just that I had a chance to watch & listen to Hi-Fi recorded VHS, connected to hi-end component home audio. The sound is amazing. Personally, can't tell the difference between this and red book audio (Audio CD).
i remember SKC as the company that made cheap CD-R that were very cheap because they did not have any lacquer over the label side causing the metal layer to flake off within days or weeks.
ahh,, the VCD... it was the top selling home media format in my region (Indonesia) from 96 to 06 because its arguably VHS quality on a disc, so it won't degrade as the humidity level here is insane. plus its much cheaper, always include Indonesian subtitle, easier to copy. the last films released on VCD here is probably Disney movies in 2016 (i have Force Awakens on VCD😂). all movie physical media distribution then shutdown around that time when streaming took over. but i think some labels still produced VCDs for Karaoke to this day
1:48 - That is a BRILLIANT feature. 6:08 - "Holiday" fading into "Broken Wings?" Guess I know what station to listen to if I'm ever in the New Joysey area. 7:19 - Nobody would ever confuse this cover with The Beatles. Not even RU-vid's Content ID system. lol
That is a pretty cool little device. It plays CDs and has a Stereo radio. When I saw this I figured they would be using mp3 as the format at a low bitrate and encoding as an mp3 disc but since you put it into the DVD player which could play mp3 discs and it didn't work. I've extracted audio from MPEG 1 videos back during the limewire days when you could download music videos via VideoPimp and the resulting audio track was an .mp2 file and not .mp3 but winamp played it fine.
14:06 The discrepancy between the 57 and 64kbps are probably due to the fact that Audio and Video CDs have more payload bits than CD ROM. They use a weaker error correction and thus can store more than the 650MiB of data on a CD ROM.
Video CD is an interesting format when it comes to the formatting of the actual disc. Video CD is technically a CD-ROM, but instead of the normal Mode 1 formatting that yields the familiar 650 or 700 MB capacity, it uses XA Mode 2 formatting, which gives about 15% more data capacity at the expense of less robust error correction. That's almost (but not quite) the same data bandwidth that is used for Audio CDs - a 74 minute audio disc will total at about 755 MB when ripped to uncompressed WAV files as opposed to the familiar 650 MB. Mode 2 formattings were also used for Photo CD, CD-i and some CD-based game consoles, like the first PlayStation. Every computer can read such discs, but AFAIR at least on Windows, software needs to use special APIs to access the files stored there, if you just try using Explorer it will glitch out. So you pretty much need special software to rip or copy Video CDs, even though they're not copy protected and what's stored on the disk are basically normal MPG files. This format, as it seems, is basically a normal Video CD, but those MPG files contain an audio track only, with no video. That is an interesting technical choice, but hey, it's as valid as any other. I guess at least _some_ VCD/DVD players will be able to play those discs.
A bit of history, in Asia especially in developed countries most people like VCD even though Laserdisc pretty popular there because it's cheaper than DVD, less storage than Laserdisc, and less hassle than VHS. That's why there is bootleg VCD copied from laserdisc
