The UGLIEST DVR on Earth - Terapin CD Audio Video Recorder TeraOptix TX0002 VCD 

just like your avatar, nice!

I hear Darude - Sandstorm when I see it.

@@TheLuizSouza i get flashbacks from the fiat multipla

I know you tried explaining this simply, but SVCD is MPEG2 - that can be played in DVD players (also MPEG2) and even early Blu Rays were MPEG2, but not regular VCD players (MPEG1). Perhaps SVCD is a MPEG 1.5 (???), as it can be played on DVD players and SVCD players but not VCD players (MPEG1.0) as MPEG1 and VCD1.0 was invented by some guys way back in 1988. However VCD 1.1 and VCD 2.0 cd's can be played in any VCD player, correct?

svcds are mepeg1 or, mpeg2 like dvd and blu ray =)

@@enemyofthestatevcdking5982 blu ray is h264 mpeg 4

Wow, this thread even makes MY head hurt. Let's clarify... VCD = MPEG-1 video and (layer 2, aka MP2) audio, at one quarter broadcast resolution (352x240 or x288, claimed to be VHS quality but actually still half of that) and thus half framerate (25 or 30fps), with a locked down bitrate in the official standard that's equivalent to 1x CD speed. Very simple control system, menus are only possible by using its (full resolution!) still image display capability and telling the user to press number buttons. Subtitles have to be burned in. SVCD = MPEG-2 video but still MPEG-1 layer 2 audio, at two thirds resolution (480x480 or x576, roughly equivalent to Laserdisc), full framerate (though interlaced), and a variable bitrate supposedly capped at 2x CD speed (so CBR recordings tend to use the max and need a disc swap every 35-40 minutes). Can't remember its menu/control or subtitle ability, may have been more VCD or more DVD, or somewhere inbetween. Only really related to VCD by the name and the fact of using CDs, but it's more a derivative of DVD than anything else, with the more advanced video coding improving the usable resolution-to-filesize ratio so nearly tripling the rez doesn't mean needing three times the space. DVD = MPEG-2 video and a bunch of different audio options (PCM, MP2, Dolby Digital, DTS etc, though you're meant to include one of the first two to be standards compliant), with various resolution/framerate options (VCD equivalent, that but full height and framerate, full broadcast quality in two versions... but oddly no SVCD as standard). Sophisticated menus and switchable subtitles using a simplistic bitmap overlay system and a programmable virtual machine, plus multiple parallel video and audio streams that can be swapped between thanks to packetised data. Higher capacity disc with a standard data rate roughly equivalent to 8x CD, at which speed you can record just enough material to play something qualifying as a Feature Film (55 minutes), but VBR is a baked in and expected thing. And of course it can be double layer, pushing that out to around 90-100 minutes without needing to downgrade. Blu-Ray = I don't know as much about, but it uses MPEG-4 for the AV, Java for the interactive parts, and an even higher capacity disc. It's not really worth talking about in the same context as it's very different and basically a computer that plays DivX files. Most of these are backwards compatible with the lower standards, though, as SVCD was sort of derived from DVD, not all DVD players can handle SVCD (...and SVCDs naturally can't handle DVD because they can't read the discs, though there is such a thing as "miniDVD" where you write DVD standard data to a CD, and *some* SVCD players can play it... of course it needs to have the right audio codec and a low enough bitrate... even if you only want to play it in a DVD player as it can't spin the lower density disc fast enough to read the data off at DVD speed). A select few will refuse basic standard VCD, and more have trouble with those that use custom settings. XVCD et al = homebrew variations on the first two standards that have been found to work on a reasonable number of players and give better play time and/or higher resolution without losing quality, by using high efficiency encoders and VBR video (my personal record being a more-or-less watchable, if you have a small TV, copy of Spirited Away on a single 8cm mini-CDR...). But rolling through all those would take all night, and they still use the same encoding standards at their core.

@@markpenrice6253 wait vhs is 60 fps? Pal tv should be 25 fps so 60 would be a waste, probably it can be done with deinterlacing but it's not true 60fps

+Faisal Kadal - all true, thanks for your comments. yes, no Karaoke feature on today's bluray players

Actually, the Vocal and Instrumental in Karaoke DVDs are used as audio tracks.

Well played. Some DVD players have a Karaoke function.

Eh, that's maybe a bit of a high boast. MP2 encoder quality is extremely variable. The range I've seen gives quality up to somewhere between 160 and 192k MP3 (at 224kbit MP2) at the very best, with very slow encoding, down to something that struggles to match 112 to 128k MP3 with more commonplace rough-and-ready realtime encoding. Though that's still far better than linear audio on VHS and not far off what you'd get with NICAM or analogue broadcast Dolby Stereo, so it would likely still sound just fine for kareoke purposes... as would having twin-mono tracks, one for Instrumental plus another for duet vocals (handy if you're singing a duet song by yourself). Are you really going to notice the difference between a mono and a stereo tune in a kareoke booth, or particularly if using a portable player with its own built in (usually huge, but mono) speaker? Kinda funny how VCDs sorta became the standard for that purpose even though the separate CD+G standard predated it and was pretty much specifically designed for kareoke... Even in modern hard-drive based instant select kareoke systems which have thousands of tracks to pick from, you see a lot of content that's clearly been transferred from a VCD original... and the video tracks that go along with the lyrics and music are pretty much universally, laughably terrible. Like surely it would have been far more preferable to have a simple CD+G image and colour-filling text plus a proper CD quality (even if still twin-mono) soundtrack, versus the rubbish stock-footage grade video, generally blocked all to hell through a cheap encoder, and the similarly mangled audio tracks?

VicVac i would agree that the VCD does have "insane blockiness". haha

No way, you can make vcd quality near dvd if you know the settings.

Realtime constant-bitrate video encoders in cheap electronics always struggle to make the most of the bandwidth they have available... it's little wonder a domestic VCD recorder suffers from blocking because 1.15mbit for CBR MPEG-1 even at 352x240 30fps is extremely marginal, and commercial producers would have used much more advanced encoding hardware and software that would optimise the stream to within an inch of its life. If you have a suitably flexible player (particularly an SVCD compatible one, so able to run the disc at 2x or more) and make your own discs, you can break the standard somewhat and make an XVCD (or KVCD/KxVCD, after a particular quasi-standard pioneered by some enthusiast whose name I sadly forget), which allows use of VBR encoding (particularly 2-pass, if doing offline encoding on a computer, though "constant quality" can come quite close to that), different encoder quantisation matrices, and sacrificing some audio quality to improve the picture (or indeed the reverse)... all of which can massively improve the encoding quality, and indeed allow you to fit more than 80 minutes on a single disc, even fitting a whole 100+ minute film on without it becoming unwatchable (at least, when encoding a widescreen film as 4:3 letterbox... as that needs less data anyway). Some types even let you alter the resolution, but generally that was more of an SVCD thing, and there wasn't any way to go *lower* rez, only higher. And it was always technically worse than VHS, in the resolution stakes if nothing else - for one thing, it has half the vertical resolution for luminance, and a _quarter_ for chroma - and along with that, it has half the actual field rate, so anything live-recorded rather than coming from a film source will look choppier than the original; essentially, it entirely skips every other interlace field, so you lose half the total video information even before we consider the low H-rez, the colour decimation or the further smearing due to MPEG encoding (thankfully it deals with film sources by having native 24fps support, at least, with onboard telecine 3:2 pullup emulation - otherwise any film recorded on NTSC VCD would be unwatchably jittery). Horizontal resolution is more or less the same, and it's your personal preference as to whether you prefer the somewhat softer analogue sampling of VHS, or the sharper but rather more obvious pixelation of VCD. And of course there's the compression; fitting 80 minutes of video into 800mb of disc space is a challenge with any format, and it only really became a truly practical prospect with MPEG-4... so little wonder that anything with fast action, fine detail, or lots of subtle dark shading is smushed either into a flurry of macroblocks or just a blurry mess with MPEG-1, especially a single-pass, realtime, constant-bitrate encoder. Its one advantage is that it's inherently very low-noise, and doesn't suffer wear over time (at least no more than any other CD), so you don't get the same kind of colour drift, snow and dropouts that you'd experience from an old cassette in a low quality VCR, particularly in NTSC regions. And if you were prepared to spend for decent hardware and software on the encoding side of things (or, in my case, wait until similarly decent freeware/shareware options were available), it was possible to perform minor miracles in terms of upping the general quality, though some material did still cause issues that could only really be solved with a bit of surreptitious pre-filtering (softening the details in scenes which macroblocked, upping the gamma or even black floor in dark scenes which otherwise lost detail...). But in comparison to my decent quality PAL VCRs (4 and 6 head), recording the same source onto new good-quality tapes (via a TV-out card in my PC, vs burning the original file to CD via a heavily tweaked VCD encoder), VCD never did any better than approximately matching tape quality, and particularly if there was anything with subtitles or other finely detailed on-screen text (I used both formats for archiving fansubbed Anime bootlegs off my rather small hard drive in the early noughties, long before I could afford a DVDRW or even DVDROM drive, and just after finally being able to save up for my first standalone DVD _player_ ) the difference was rather stark... The advantage VCD gave me was one of cost and compactness. For the price and space of a single 3- or 4-hour VHS tape I could buy and store several CDs, and indeed usually squeeze two discs the same slim-case ... one with the original DivX file for computer playback, and the other an XVCD conversion to play on a "real" TV through my DVD player. Plus if a friend or family member wanted a copy of anything, it was very quick and easy to run off a duplicate, even with my relatively basic 24x6x4 drive. If you want near-DVD quality, that involves using an MPEG-2 encoder to create an SVCD (480x480 or 480x576, interlaced or full-scan progressive, knocking on the door of SVHS) or XSVCD (544x480 or higher, matching or exceeding Laserdisc), or in some cases a "CVD" (China Video Disc, a competing interim standard - 352x480, the same as DVD's own "half D1" long-play setting mainly used in set-top DVDRs, with the point at which the halved resolution kicked in depending on how much you paid for your recorder... more expensive ones had higher quality encoders that could keep full resolution in 3 and even 4 hour modes, whilst cheaper ones gave up after just 2 hours). By which point you're really gilding the lily somewhat and only really bothering with it because you're ultra-cheap and don't want to spring for the very slight extra cost of a DVDRW and recordable DVDs instead of CDs... (or are living in the mid noughties where there's still a significant price difference between the two - but that situation only persisted for a fairly short period once DVD recording drives started to become popular).

It looks like Thrift store fuller.

+Dan Blundon - don't you miss those days when video played "hard to get"?

Not really. I'll take my 75" home theatre with 5.1 any day. x3 I will admit though, it's a lot of fun to get into these vintage bits, now that I can just play with them. I can still remember back around 1999, agonizing over whether to get a DVD drive or a DIVX drive, because there was still a question mark on those formats. Thankfully I made the right choice. I don't think we ever saw commercial DIVX discs or players in Canada. But some PC stores were convinced they were going to trounce DVD's

But the guardians of the DVD format wouldn't allow Circuit City to put the DVD logo on their DIVX discs, because they weren't covered by their standard.

That probably took up three entire walls of your bedroom.

Sorry, but Beta was nowhere near close to DVD. Beta was actually lower quality than VHS, despite the decades of Beta fanboys trying to argue the opposite. The only Beta mode that might have been marginally better was Beta 1, which even Sony quickly admitted was useless and phased out. Beta II was lower quality than SP VHS, and Beta III was lower than LP.

Not if you copy a Blu Ray onto VCD =)

@@enemyofthestatevcdking5982 It should be fine copied Blu ray contents to VCD since it means you have high quality master. The only problem for VCD is the 352*240 resolution which will look bad on HDTV. So, the best option to watch VCD is by watching it on. SD CRT TV.

Can I buy it?

+SuperRandomForum Ok, I got one so here is a answer to me! Yes any brand CD-R will work on your VCD recorder, 80 minutes or 74. Haven't tested with 90 minutes. You can find 74 minute CD-R discs on ebay if you want, but why? 80 is better.

Thank you, here are the 90 minute cd-r cheap (1 hour, 30 minutes vcd movie =) www.ebay.com/itm/Philips-CD-R-90-Minutes-800MB-40x-Speed-Blank-Recordable-Discs-25-Pack-Spindle/291622214504?epid=1503052833&hash=item43e609db68:g:~JwAAOSwc-tY58g2 - I'm not sure this will work in Terapin recorder because these 90 minute cd-r usually need a PC and software to "overburn" regular files or change settings to get these to work but you can try.

vconqwstify - good purpose for this machine!

Shame that it doesn't even have quality equal to that of Beta. Hopefully you still have them around and can have a second shot at copying them onto DVD, or better yet capturing direct into a PC and encoding to a higher quality format for archiving. EG main level MPG4, constant quality / 2-pass encoding level set somewhere down towards the "placebo" range, max rate of at least 10mbit, resolution 640x480 at a minimum with 60fps interlace (...bad idea to change the vertical rez for an analogue SD source, and not much point going up to 60fps progressive or even switching to 30fps progressive for movies, but it might be of some worth to increase the H-rez and use an anamorphic aspect ratio, and see if a decent encoder can convert 24fps movies back to progressive from their more jittery field-padded 60fps form)... Even with an early 80s analogue format as its source that should still look rather better than VCD.

Yes this works fine in the UK - I've got one

...but why?

Alaincopter I believe you press the NEXT button.

It has to output analogue again because otherwise your TV wouldn't be able to decode the signal. It has to record digitally onto CD because CD is a digital format. So a conversion is necessary between the two. The raw analogue>digital and digital>analogue conversion stage isn't really the problem here, they can be done with far greater quality than human senses have any way to detect; the issue is more the limited storage capacity of CD, that requires very heavy, lossy compression to fit a decent amount of video into, and the rather primitive state of digital video compression algorithms and hardware at the time the VCD standard was finalised in the early 1990s. As demonstrated by experiments such as CD-Video, using a Laserdisc style analogue signal just wouldn't have been practical. CDV needed a high enough linear media speed to record any kind of useful signal that it span the disc at about 4x the normal rate for the laser head position, meaning it had to both use the earliest examples of 2x speed transports _and_ not record any video further in than about halfway through the total recording area (by which point a normal CD will have slowed to about half the speed it started out at, so you get a combined total of 4x). Thus the characteristic combination of about 30 minutes of audio and somewhere south of 10 minutes of video (with a blank buffer space between the two zones equal to another 5+ minutes of audio). It couldn't have just been slowed down because analogue video can't be compressed in the same way as digital - much like VHS and Beta, it literally records the actual signal that goes to the TV (with a bit of heterodyne carrier frequency conversion to better match the media characteristics), and so slowing the media, reducing the available bandwidth, just results in progressively worse horizontal smearing... no change or economising in vertical resolution (at least, not until after the horizontal component is already a useless mess), nor frame/field rate (it remains full-rate interlace), or any 2D reduction in colour resolution (it just reduces horizontally along with the luminance resolution, and below a certain point becomes so useless and unrecognisable that the receiver will just drop back to monochrome), because of the nature of rasterised analogue video... IE it's essentially like a long piece of coloured thread that gets wrapped around the bobbin of your screen, with its length being chopped up in a very regimented way to form individual lines (and thus provide any kind of vertical detail) and individual temporal fields (and thus provided any kind of motion detail). You can stretch the thread out to try and make less of it cover the same area, but the details will only ever get smeared horizontally. So the extension of recording time you can make with analogue is very limited before it starts to become unwatchable. VHS was already near the minimum, and what LP and SLP/EP modes do with that is actually cram the helical-scan tracks up closer to each other on the tape, actually only reducing their length by a relatively minor proportion, so a good quality multihead deck would only show very limited degradation and crosstalk vs SP, and actually had a more destructive effect on the linear audio than anything else; Beta was similar, and employed a similar tactic with B2 and B3 (which is why those recordings still play in a rather funky manner on B1-only decks; the video tracks the head can read are still more or less normal speed, but it completely skips 1 or 2 tracks for every 1 it reads successfully - and the linear audio comes through at 2 or 3x speed). Laserdisc could probably have been extended to play 50% longer at the expense of reducing its perceptual quality closer to that of a very clean SP VHS, or twice as long by making it look a little worse than EP VHS, with similarly compromised audio, as its recording is entirely linear and the tracks are already crammed about as close together as they possibly can be without interference. Which might have meant it would be possible to make an analogue CDV, by running the disc at 2x speed, but you'd still then have had something that would have looked inferior to VHS-EP (though in some cases possibly still better than a poorly encoded VCD), only have a 40 minute runtime max, and still need a special player anyway. Plus this doesn't take into account any effect that the reduced bandwidth might have on the accuracy or stability of the inline synchronisation pulses or colourburst sync that are an integral part of the analogue video signal... reduce the bandwidth too far and the picture might fall apart completely because the TV can no longer reliably sync to it. This is actually the issue that causes a lot of the picture distortion, jumps and dropouts on old videotape - corruption of the recorded sync. If you add a "time base corrector" device to the output line (also known as an image stabiliser, sync stripper, or even just a copy protection remover, because one of the ways macrovision works is to interfere with the sync and colour/black level calibration pulses until they're only just strong enough to be recoverable from a first gen copy, with later generations ending up unwatchable as a result), you'll often find an old, unusably wobbly tape suddenly perks right up, and the actual image part of the signal is still perfectly good once the sync has been artificially boosted, rebuilt and stablised. VCD's compression on the other hand, thanks to the digital conversion of the signal, is more like 50:1, never mind 2:1 or 3:1; 100:1 if we consider it next to VHS and take the vertical resolution decimation as part of it. It samples horizontally at about the same nominal rate as VHS (352 pixels / vertical lines across the active width of a scanline, or about 6.75mhz, with about the centre 320 visible within the bezel of a typical CRT TV), but then treats the captured stream of pixels to a much more comprehensive crash diet than would be at all possible with analogue. For a start, all the "dead air" is done away with - there's no need to record the horizontal or vertical blanking areas or the sync pulses that live within them. The hardware can recreate those just fine, and with much better stability and reliability than could be achieved by recording nearly 16 thousand of them to tape or disc per second of material; all that's needed is a few bytes of header and footer tags on each frame to mark it out from its neighbours and the relevant silicon chips can do the rest. That saves us about 20% right off the bat. Next we drop the vertical resolution, from 480 or 576 interlaced lines to 240 or 288 progressive; depending on the source material and whether it will look OK with a bit of additional motion blur or not, either we sum each line together with one of its neighbours from the successive field, or we just throw half of the fields away completely. There's enough of a mismatch between the vertical and horizontal resolution with VHS or non-decimated VCD formats (such as CVD) that it doesn't actually sharpen up the image as much as you'd expect, so losing half of the lines doesn't create a perceptual 50% image quality loss. It's still noticeably softer, but as the pixels are now much more square, it actually looks a bit more natural to the eye. Like looking through a poorly focussed lens that's completely in-plane to your eye, vs a better focussed one that's somewhat tilted so everything is blurred sideways. The more important effect this has is to halve the apparent frame rate (or properly, field rate); anything originally recorded as 50i or 60i will be noticeably choppier to anyone with sensitive eyes, though it's less obvious if you're seeing the VCD in isolation rather than side by side with (or just after) the original. The rare few things recorded at 25p or 30p will have the same motion smoothness, however, and its effects on films will depend on your region and how well the conversion is treated. In 50hz regions, the film is usually sped up to 25fps anyway, so it should be fine; in 60hz regions, it's very variable. It might be encoded onto the disc as 24fps progressive, much like DVD, in which case the player will spit out fields with the proper 3:2 timing ratio and it won't look any choppier than a VHS or DVD would (still a little more so than 25fps, mind)... or it might be just bodged into 30fps, in which case some interframe motion blur may be applied to smooth out the jitter (creates a bit of an odd effect with fast motion, but is still an improvement), or it could just be left as-is with a whole extra duplicate frame every quarter of a second, with panning and otherwise smooth movements picking up a characteristic 240bpm shake (somewhat familiar in a 300bpm form to anyone who's seen an originally 60fps commercial badly converted for airing on TV in a 50fps region...). In any case, that's saved us another 50% on the original data load. We've already cut the amount of image info down to 40% of what it was in ways that an analogue format would have a lot of trouble recreating (at least, not without much of the same hardware, including some kind of delay line or just a digital frame store to repeat fields with), and without affecting the horizontal resolution any further. This alone would allow maybe an hour with a CDV type disc, but that would still be analogue, noisy, with a somewhat limited dynamic range due to the very narrow track, and prone to dust and other interference. Besides, CD audio recording is actually somewhat coarse compared to laserdisc type video tracks (which is why it's so reliable, for one thing), so in order to fit the digital video data into the same space occupied by digital audio, AND provide some kind of sound on top of that, we have to go much further. First step is decimating the colour in a much better defined way than with analogue (where it's just another signal applied on top of the luma)...

...(and can be rather badly mangled by some formats like VHS which filter it out separately and reduce the H-rez still further)... The original 352-sample data stream has full colour resolution to start with, generally with each sample having 8 bits of luminance, and 8 bits each for the "red" and the "blue" colour components (though it can go up to 10 if you have fancy hardware). When we multiply that up, it's 8448 bits per line, 2027520 or 2433024 bits per frame, and about 60.76 to 60.83 million bits per second. As we only have 1.4112 million bits per second to play with (not counting subcode or error correction), something's gotta give. Luckily, our system can hold about 12 to 18 frames worth of data (usually about 15) in its buffers at a time (which is a fairly weighty 4mbytes, hence why players were originally dead expensive), allowing us to do a lot of fancy manipulation. First we halve the colour resolution both horizontally and vertically; chroma is only recorded for every second pixel, and each line records just red or just blue (...or possibly it starts with either red or blue then alternates per pixel pair... I forget which, but the effect is about the same), with the data being interpolated back to fill the same space when decoded. As our visual sense is rather less sensitive to high resolution colour than brightness, this tends to work just fine, with our brain filling in the gaps and defining the edges of coloured areas by where the brightness changes, rather than the actual hue or saturation. The only time you'll notice the decimation is where areas of strong colour but similar brightness meet (rare with most material other than colour bars, and the most primary hued cartoons), and particularly if there are large areas of a bright primary colour such as deep red, where there can be some distortion or obvious blurring/pixelation (depending on how your decoder handles it). This cuts our data per pixel from 8+8+8 down to effectively 8+4+0, in other words, halving it yet again. So now we're down to 20%, and again this is a reduction it would be rather hard to do with analogue, because the colour signal there is essentially an afterthought which doesn't demand much additional bandwidth - in that realm, the luminance is by far the more important ruling factor. Now the deep magic comes in. First we divide the frames themselves up into groups, either blindly, or preferably using a circuit or algorithm that can detect snap changes of scene and mark them out accordingly. Every 15 frames or so, or sooner if there's a scene change, we make an "index" frame. These are the only ones that can be decoded directly; they get recorded essentially as a heavily compressed JPEG photograph. The entire image is broken up into blocks of 16x16 pixels, and these are encoded not in terms of their actual pixel data, but the frequency components that they represent if the block was considered as a very short audio sample, both horizontally and vertically. Each component is granted a certain number of bits to quantise its intensity with, according to the available number of bits per second and a conversion table, which generally prioritises more bits for low frequencies (so we can represent solid blocks of colour and smooth gradients quite accurately) and fewer for high frequencies (so single-pixel details are more likely to just appear as "present" or "absent" and far less finessed, and are likely to disappear entirely if the scene runs low on bits... but that's fine, as these are the situations were you're less likely to perceive their absence anyway, and the finer details of their presence aren't really important), with the encoding process usually taking multiple passes building up from the lowest to highest frequencies and attempting to distribute bits as evenly as possible at each stage so that it doesn't end up putting all the detail in the top left corner and having nothing in the lower right. All the other frames are referenced as differences succeeding from that index frame or a preceding difference frame ("P" frames), or even as differences from the average of preceding _and_ succeeding difference frames ("B" frames), each of which stages tend to consume rather fewer bits than the higher levels (Bs use less than Ps, Ps use less than Is), but create a lower quality image as a result of the successive addition/subtraction steps, and are entirely useless by themselves. Part of the deeper magic of these frames, and the biggest and most fundamental break from analogue video, as well as the reason why profession encoding stations were so expensive (and consumer level recorders so rubbish, and computer encoding software so slow and heavy on the CPU) is that they don't just encode the difference in colour and brightness of the same pixel from frame to frame, but they can also encode *movement* of particular blocks between frames. Which takes an awful lot of exhaustive analysis comparing each frame with its neighbours to determine which parts have moved, in what direction and how far, and then also the static colour/brightness differences that have to also be encoded to complete the change from one frame to another, and treating all of the above (other than the motion vectors) to a similar round of visual wave frequency encoding. Rebuilding the frames from this data is also rather a job of work (it wasn't practical on computers without dedicated MPEG cards until the late 486 era), but far less so than the analysis. This stage is the crucial one that made VCD possible, and differentiates even MPEG-1 encoding from most other existing codecs (and others that persisted alongside it such as MJPEG and even DV) that only do still-image compression rather than any interframe motion compression. You still have to include regular I-frames to prevent gradual image degradation (you may have seen examples of video corruption or even deliberate "glitch" effects where images become uncannily distorted over time - this is caused by removing, or corrupting the I frames so that only the motion and difference information can be used...), and it's not suitable for use as an editing format, extracting arbitrary single frames or for capturing video that's intended for heavy editing (something like DV is a better bet) as it's difficult to trim and join at a single frame level without having to do lots of additional re-encoding, but it's perfect for final-form delivery as it offers a massive improvement in compression for the same perceptual quality versus those rivals. DV can only offer the deadspace removal, colour decimation and frequency-encoding benefits, and for the same resolution as VCD can only cram down to maybe 6mbit/s before starting to look pretty terrible, though that's still a respectable 10:1 compression ratio. MPEG-1, however, with the benefit of delta encoding and motion compensation, and an I/P/B frame structure tuned for decoders with about 4mbytes of buffer space (with the space not used by raw video data being just enough to fit the encoded version into), can improve on that by better than 5x, still being watchable at less than 1.2mbit/s. Of course, there's an obvious problem here - that compression only works well if there's a limited amount of motion and/or other differences frame-on-frame. It's best suited to fairly sedate material without any flashing imagery, or too much fine detail or sharp lines. Feed it a fast paced action movie, with lots of rapid panning, muzzle flashes from machine gun fire, etc, or even just any kind of detailed animation, and the cracks start to show quite rapidly, as the codec gets overloaded and has to start cutting back on what it encodes in order to not run out of bits. Pixels start getting blurred together and becoming indistinct, making the outlines of drawn objects become mushy and discontinuous, anything that flashes rapidly is just rendered as macroblock squares because there aren't any bits available to encode anything other than the lowest frequencies and starkest changes of intensity, and fast moving objects or full screen camera swings sit somewhere in-between, with details being somewhat smeared and the edges between blocks becoming too obvious (as it's the medium to higher frequencies that are needed to change a flat colour into a gradient and smooth the transition from one block into another) as the priority is given to accurate encoding of movement. And with consumer level equipment the problem is even worse; a general purpose CPU isn't really tuned for this sort of work, so has to run hard and long to process each set of complex changes between frames, but something like the Terapin has it worse because it has to complete the encoding of each 15 frame block within about a half second. Even a really good MPEG hardware solution would have to cut some corners to guarantee completing the job in time for the data to be written to disc from one buffer whilst it started encoding the next block into a second one, and you can see that in the slight blocking sometimes suffered by digital TV broadcasts. A cheap one, that may have to make rolling re-use of the same buffer, will both run slower and have a little less time to do its work, so will have to do a rather simpler and more sparing job of motion compensation searching (usually not detecting anything that's moved more than 1 full block distance) and relying much more on the less efficient delta encoding... thus it ends up running into blocking problems much more often. In any case, we've now got the video down to a size that consumes about 80 to 85% of the available data space... we're gonna need some audio to go along with. We could just reduce the pure digital quality of the soundtrack - cut it down to mono, reduce the bit depth from 16 to 8, and halve the sample rate, that'd do the job, as it's now 12.5% of the size, and with the video leaves just enough space for timecodes, index tags, extra error correction etc...

However, that's going to sound at least as bad as, maybe even worse than a short-play VHS linear audio track, and certainly worse than the "hi-fi" digital ones. It's not really going to cut the mustard as far as sound quality for a CD-based video format. Enter MPEG audio compression... layer-1 ("MP1") had already been in use for some professional sound transmission and recording uses, and was a fairly straightforward, robust implementation of a sort-of-JPEG compression applied to audio... cutting it into various frequency bands and then applying intensity based encoding. But it wasn't super efficient, only managing about 4:1 to maybe 5:1 with acceptable quality, which wouldn't quite be enough. MP3 with its easy 10 to 12:1 compression ratios was still some years away and the techniques required for that upgrade to the technology still a matter of preliminary discussion amongst the experts involved in researching and designing it... plus the computational load just for decoding, never mind encoding, could run close to that of MPEG-1 video itself. Thankfully, MP2 / layer 2 encoding had just pioneered, which added a few early examples of MP3's psychoacoustic masking models, finer grained frequency division, joint-stereo and variable-bitrate-per-separate-stereo-channel modes, and differential allocation of bits per frequency band, prioritising complex sound structures in the lower and midrange bands (and centre stage of the stereo field) by sacrificing encoding bits for the less well percieved higher frequencies, masked-out frequencies close to loud sounds, and far off in the deep left or right stereo areas. It didn't have the full roster, including reduced high frequency resolution, "intensity stereo" or variable frame length, but it was enough to improve the encoding efficiency just enough that FM broadcast quality stereo sound (not truly CD quality, though many sellers probably claimed that - still, as good as most tapes and almost any TV broadcast) could fit into 224 of the remaining ~260 kilobits of bandwidth, and it whilst it could take almost as much computing horsepower to encode at studio quality, it wasn't super taxing to either decode, or to encode at a lower but still acceptable quality. Oddly enough, that's one thing that COULD have been used with analogue recordings, as analogue video plus digital sound (including DTS compressed) was definitely a thing in the Laserdisc age, but it would only have been used to improve the quality or provide surround sound; the amount of space it could have saved by reducing the audio track's demands would have been pretty meaningless without any video compression. Anyway, a pretty super long sprawling explanation, but that's why VCD does a conversion from analogue to digital on the way in, and digital to analogue on the way out. tl;dr version is that CD doesn't actually hold that much data, either in its native digital audio form, or in terms of the space that would be available for recording analogue video, at least with a pre-DVD technology level. You HAVE to digitise the video signal in order to be able to compress it enough that you can get a sensible amount of playing time AND at least "acceptable" video quality (even if not actually "good" ... e.g. the same sort of resolution that a period home computer would produce on a TV screen, which looks perfectly fine on a smaller screen). It's just not doable with an analogue signal; by the time you've added sufficient circuitry to perform the same kind of bending, analysis and re-encoding in the analogue domain, you may as well have just taken the digital route (the signal will be all but digitised anyway), which will also be less noisy and lossy, and probably cheaper to boot. Perhaps with the tighter laser focus and tracking (and higher rotational speed) of DVD, an analogue video format on 12cm disc might have been practical, but by then we already had the MPEG2 digital encoding (as well as Dolby Digital and Linear PCM audio) that would have completely blown any possible analogue rival out of the water thanks to being able to record absolutely broadcast-grade video with almost no discernable encoding distortion, efficiently enough that a full length movie can fit on a single disc along with all kinds of extra content. Plus given how new that physical disc recording tech was (versus the much better established and more manufacturing-fault-tolerant CD), it would have been just as much the use of that which would have contributed to the expense of any Terapin-like system that used DVD-esque discs (which is why it doesn't just record VCD-grade MPEG1 onto DVDRs, which is totally a valid thing to do - it is after all what most set-top DVD recorders do in their longest-play modes)... and if you're at the point of choosing whether to go with the expense of adding a DVD grade transport (and sticking with MPEG1, or trying some kind of Laserdisc-grade analogue video recording), or the expense of adding an MPEG2 codec to your better-than-VCD-but-not-quite-a-full-DVD system... well, history shows that most manufacturers, at least those who had any success, went with the latter, creating the SVCD and CVD formats that record quasi-DVD video onto plain, cheap, easy to read and (re)write CDs and CDR(W)s. Because that way you can still get very good quality for shorter programmes, like individual TV episodes, music video discs or kids cartoon compilations, without it costing you any extra for the media, and longer things like movies can just be broken up like they would be for ad breaks on any commercial TV station (and with about the same frequency)... with anyone really fussy about having to get up to change disc just investing in an autochanger equipped system instead. The other side of the coin is that it's SO much better for mass duplication, in the same way that CD was versus any analogue audio system. Studios very quickly went over to digital mastering even for their analogue formats as soon as it was a practical option (including the early Sony systems that encoded a digital audio stream into a series of black/white pulses within a video signal on VHS) because you could make absolutely identical duplicates without any trouble, include error detection and correction codes that would compensate for wear and damage, and run off essentially unlimited numbers of the same recording without any generational wear or loss of quality in the later tapes and LPs (which is why "first pressings" used to be so valued, and where the very idea of something being "remastered" as being higher quality than a general sale item came from... because, back in the era of fully analogue recording and mastering, they literally _were_ better quality, coming from a less worn-down original master tape or lathe-cut metal disc). And so it is for video too. Analogue recordings produced from a digital master will be much better and more consistent quality. But why bother doing that if you can just do it faster and in a purer form by producing a digital recording for the consumer too? Everybody wins. Consumer gets a higher grade recording on a smaller and cheaper medium. Manufacturer saves loads of money by needing fewer actual masters and spending less factory time to make the product, has fewer returns of faulty recordings, doesn't need to spend as much for materials, packaging, transport or distribution, and can turn a fatter profit off a lower priced item by selling more of it but also with a wider margin.

That was *very* informative to this techie, thank you very much. I knew about some aspects of digital video compression but not all of it; they used some very clever tricks to make it work.

You're entirely welcome, and thanks for the reply. Seems I can still strike lucky with the audience at least once a year ;-)

only computers would read them, that makes them pointless when a flash drive or hdd can store much more

Interesting... timestamp?

DVD and SVCD have exactly the same vertical resolution. 480 for NTSC, 576 for PAL. SVCD horizontal resolution is only 480, NTSC and PAL. Obviously it uses non-square pixels. DVD horizontal resolution is almost always 720 pixels, but there are lower resolutions (both horizontal and vertical) supported. For widescreen, the best way to record a DVD is anamorphic so it uses the full vertical resolution by horizontally squeezing the image to 720 pixels. A player with proper anamorphic playback support will adjust the aspect ratio and generate letterbox bars as needed, based on the TV settings. The lame way to do widescreen DVD is to encoded it unsqueezed to 720 wide by whatever reduced number vertically makes the whole thing fit. Done properly, widescreen TVs can zoom the video to fit. The "What idiot encoded the video?" way to do widescreen DVD is to make it a 4:3 image with the letterbox bars as part of the video. Then you'll most often be stuck with a postage stamp of video with pillarbox bars on the sides.

Eh, even as a fairly cash strapped student, in 2002 I was making VCDs entirely happily using my lashed-together PC, to play on a very low grade budget DVD player that I'd just bought (connected to a 14" portable TV...). To run into any real trouble you'd have had to be using a pretty old and clapped out PC and CD burner, probably without any "BURN-proof" facility and maybe software that was nasty enough (...or just lacking the HDD space to buffer a full 800mb?) to encode and burn on the fly instead of doing them as separate stages. I mean, generally I had to leave the encoding process to run overnight, but the burning part was pretty hassle-free. Set it to 4x, accept that the computer would be out of commission for about the next half hour whilst it first burned than verified the disc (at closer to 24x), and you're done. The Terapin does make the process pretty idiotproof, I guess, and it does away with having to do any kind of actual video capture into a computer (which would have been much more the difficult and error-prone part of the process; my sources were mainly downloads, created by people with better machines...) - but still, can't help thinking that it would have been a more popular and successful thing if it had come out even just two years earlier, if not four. They could have pushed it more easily as a way to convert all your old tapes to digital, for playing on your fancy pants new DVD machine (a fair majority of which are VCD compatible), and got away with it before too many people realised that not only was it only a fraction of DVD quality, it wasn't even entirely up to the job of preserving the fully quality of most tapes either. I feel kinda sorry for anyone who might have transferred old family cinefilms to tape, then binned the reels... and later converted the tapes to VCD using one of these, and binned the tapes. Sure, they saved a load of storage space, but the footage will have suffered a fair bit of generational loss at each stage too. Though DVD wouldn't itself have been an absolutely perfect option (transfer to 1080p Blu-Ray probably the best, especially if a custom framerate like 72p could be used to account for non-24fps recording), it would have done a much better job and still not required waiting around until the HD era to digitally preserve the original slowly-decaying films.

Nah, that seems to use an even more primitive video format... which is probably why you only get ~25 minutes per CD.

I would guess that there probably is. It resides in the vertical blanking signal.

Databits and HTP, I burned a Blu Ray with an "hdmi to s-video converter" onto my Terapin VCD recorder (to later edit boring stuff out of a movie to fit everything on 1 vcd instead of 2 via PC), and when I analyzed the cd in my PC before editing movie (so it fits on 1 disc), I saw no copyright in the vbs, in disc details or when moving film around in film editor. BTW, Blu Ray to VCD = DVD Quality !!! Video, pushed the limited million+ colors of vcd to limit, Sound as mp1 224 kbit (vcd1.1) aka MP3 192kb (or 384 kbit if you are making a vcd2.0 disc) from dolby wav source sounded great. =)

I only wanted to know because I need to make backups of all my DVDs. I don't want to ruin my real DVD copies from playing them a lot. So having a backup to watch the movie over and over would be better. I have tried two digital video stabilizer boxes, they didn't work and I wasted about $60 on them. I have tried quite a few DVD players to see if that was the problem, but it seems I just have the worst luck. I did have a Roxio VHS to DVD capture card (to copy real DVDs to blank DVD-Rs) but it stopped working. I've been through about everything to try bypassing the macrovision, by what +Enemy of The state is saying, I could use a VCD recorder to copy DVDs with no problems? I would be fine using CD-RWs to watch backed up copies of movies I own. (It's for personal use, I wouldn't illegally sell copies to other people, even if I could they would need a VCD player, which I highly doubt they would have one.)

DVD's don't actually have Macrovision on them. What they have is a copy protection bit which can be set (1) or unset (0). When set, the DVD player injects the Macrovision modification into the Vertical Blanking Interval. That's how various players were able to have their firmware hacked to permanently disable Macrovision by either ignoring the copy protection bit or by re-routing the code for a set bit to do the same as an unset bit. IIRC New Zealand (or was it Australia?) banning Macrovision on DVD players sold there helped the firmware hackers a lot because many players sold in NZ were identical to models in other markets (rip firmware from NZ player, flash it to non-NZ PAL player) or part of the code could be copied and pasted into the firmware of another model of the same brand. Or at least would point the way to what to modify in other similar players. What's caused so much headache for the producers of DVDs is that every DVD made must be able to play on every DVD player ever made, all the way back to 1997. While newer players can have updated Macrovision, they can't do anything different to the discs, just that one bit that's on or off. But next to nobody copies DVDs via analog connections. So what they've done time and again is muck with the way the data is structured and arranged on the disc, while still making it playable on any player. A popular early anti-rip hack was to make it look as though multiple copies of the video were on the DVD. Rippers that couldn't see past that would show a DVD-9 disc having a lot more data than it should and attempting a full copy would result in several highly compressed copies of the video to cram it onto a DVD-R, even dual layer. So that wasn't so much copy protection, it was designed to make the copies be really crappy. But in short order the copying software was able to get around that, and every other abuse of the format that's come along. What makes DVD copying possible and easy is the encryption keys are only 40 bits. If the full bit-space of possible keys were used, it still wouldn't be too hard for decently powerful PCs to break. But the DVD developers stupidly assumed there would be at most 40 companies wanting to produce encrypted DVDs - so they only made 40 keys. Then to make the system work, a chip with all 40 keys had to be put into every DVD-player and DVD-ROM drive. It's the worst kept "secret" ever, handed out to millions upon millions of people. Someone found the keys, extracted them from a player or ROM drive, then released them online. It's like a teenager handing out copies of their locked diary to everyone they meet, along with a key, then telling them "You're not allowed to unlock this.".

Are you trying to give me a headache and confuse me completely? I'm joking, I found my mom's old DVD recorder from 2006 and purchased a cheap Apex DVD player with a loop-hole menu. I was able to make a macrovision free DVD-R copy of some movies, it worked out fine and just for fun, I copied some to a 6 hour VHS and it looked okay. This makes it great for backing those DVDs up to my computer's hard drive, so I never lose them to some disc mold/rot years later. Very informative +Gregg Eshelman and appreciate the explanation on how it works. :)

yup

Though there was quite a bit of overhead... you only get about 1.15mbit for video and 224kbit for audio. A full 37k or so went to timing / indexing, error correction and just plain zero-padding.

mspenrice if you didn't look that up, you scare me

No... I did a lot of messing around with this stuff late 90s / early 2000s, and it's not the most complicated or difficult piece of data to keep track of. But I always have to look up the exact sector size (and thus the absolute exact gross data rate) because each of the many different data formats possible on CD have their own slightly different useful-byte-per-sector counts (but the same sector rate at 1x speed - 75 per second). Which is why it's "37k _or so_ " ... it's probably not absolutely correct, but it's close enough. In truth, it'll be _very_ slightly smaller, as that would be the rate with sectors with the exact same payload as Audio CD. VCD doesn't have anywhere near as much error correction as CDROM (which is why an 80 minute CDDA holds 800mb of audio, but a CDROM holds only 700mb), but it does have a *little* more than an audio disc. Something paltry like 24 or 32 bytes per sector when CDROM has more than 300... 1411-ish kilobits, minus (1150+224) = 37kbits. (minus ~28 bytes per sector, x75, x8 bits per byte = ... huh, about 17 kilobits fewer. So maybe it's only 20kbit overhead for VCD in fact... IDK, I'd have to look THAT up.)

Ha! Thank you! I keep a 9V battery operated one in my car.

+Mihai Gradin - Laserdisc for sure!

VCD is based on MPEG-1. It looks just ok on the typical TV of the '90s, but reveals terrible color and resolution when viewed on LCD. This was not too far off from VHS. Quick abrupt changes in the shot (such as a flash or high speed action) tend to break up the picture. These artifacts made it a bit worse than VHS. Laserdisc, however, was slightly better than VHS in every regard but runtime. However, there was never an affordable solution for recording.

+DelilahThePig Pirye DVD's breaks up in pixels to, due to compression. So VCD and pirated DVD's could be compared.

Pirate DVDs often cram more than one film into one disc, though. I've seen some that have like 6 or more different movies on the one single-layer disc. Essentially what they've done is take a bunch of VCD movies and perform the most minimal conversion needed (pretty much just re-muxing the original video and audio streams into a DVD container format) for them to work in a DVD player and slapped them on the disc with a simple menu system probably made by a bit of freeware. Wouldn't be surprised if they even still had a short hesitation in the stream where the original VCDs changed disc. In fact given how most films came on 2 VCDs, and 12 CDs (never mind 16, for those which have like 8 films) simply won't fit into a single layer DVD, and I doubt any pirate would be bothered with the expense and slowdown of dual layer discs, they may even be lower bitrate than actual VCDs, just taking advantage of DVD's inherent variable bitrate to economise on how much space each film takes up. Probably still quarter the normal resolution (half vertical, half horizontal) though, and maybe even MPEG-1 because setting the lowest rez on DVD actually mandates you fall back to that to stay standards compliant... For those that actually only have one movie, in full resolution, it all depends how good a re-encoder they used, and how bothered they were about retaining any kind of quality. I wouldn't expect them to really give much of a shit (who are you going to complain to if your pirate DVD is bad quality?) and just shunt them through whatever software they could find that was able to break the copy protection, using the default settings and probably fastest encoding speed (and then fastest write speed for each of the duplicates from that original converted disc, which means you're more likely to get read errors in the player, meaning dropouts and blocking and colour smearing and ugly motion artefacts...) A more general, well made DVD copy, eg something made for personal use, to put on your own player for the kids to watch without any risk of them ejecting, playing with and ruining the disc when you're not paying attention, should look miles better than a VCD. It's got about 7x the capacity for only 4x the pixels, for a start; though it likely has to hold 7/4s as much content, it also has more efficient compression to see it through, and can use multiple-pass variable bitrate encoding to scavenge surplus bits from low-load scenes (where their removal will make little or even no difference to the final decoded picture) and donate them to the more difficult scenes so that they don't suffer anywhere near as much compression artefacting - the actual maximum bitrate is nearer *9x* that of VCD, so each pixel can, through VBR, potentially have more than twice as much information dedicated to it in each frame, and with the additional features of MPEG2 each bit of information is itself worth more in terms of image quality. They do take quite a lot longer to encode, though, and they're rather more complicated things to engineer. VCDs are very simple beasts, you whiz up a .DAT file with the main AV stream in it, some other files that hold the index information and maybe a nice single-still-frame menu screen (basically saying "press 1 to start", unless you've been really flash and put chapter points in the video and made a second screen that lists off what numbers to press for each key scene), and just dropped that data structure on an otherwise ordinary CDROM simply set for "mode 2/XA" sectoring and with plain 8.3 filenames, and you were done. DVD is a total pain in the ass, even if you use the supposedly idiotproof all in one recording and conversion software packages, and I've never really got on with it. Thankfully by the time I was graduating from messing with bootleg DivX files and converting them to XVCDs, to experimenting with DVD, I had rather more disposable income AND the things I was interested in were finally being sold in western stores, even with professional voice dubbing into a language I could understand, instead of there being the need to either add your own subs or tolerate the rather iffy fansub (or very occasional fandub) job done by more polyglottic enthusiasts... So I could just buy the legit real thing at last instead of having to arse around DIYing it.

The logo was not clear to see the disc spinning in it. There's no way to see the disc spinning inside, unfortunately.

databits thanks

Good point =)

I wouldn't class anything that cost $150 but couldn't load discs properly unless you modified the drawer as "good"... Sounds rather more like junk. Certainly these days when you can get DVD recorders for pocket change at thift stores / goodwills / pawn shops, and DVDRWs that you can record 6 to 10 hours on (depending on your recorder) with quality equal to that of a VCD for less than twice the price of a CDR(W) that won't even hold an hour and a half, the boot is very much on the other foot.

+reviewsfornoobs - cool, thanks for the info!

rupert z Very cool!

That sounds like a rather more useful and attractive machine, really :) DVCD is maybe either a longer playing format (possibly VCD resolution but MPEG2 compression), or one that has a wider bitrate variation because of how PC drives could run faster and the software would be able to buffer much more flexibly (SVCDs were only specified for 2x data rate, and if it went too much below about 0.5x you could risk buffer _under-_ run on the actual hardware which would cause picture breakup, loss of sync, maybe even system crash/lockup, so quiet sections would have to be zero-padded instead) so could give both longer playing time and better quality... maybe using some kind of custom resolution too...?

"VCDs could have taken off if they could have found a way to hold more video on a single disc" Well, essentially what you're thinking of there is DVD. It came along only about 5 or 6 years after the original debut of VCD, but offered both much longer running time AND higher quality... and indeed the ability to trade one off against the other, though that was mostly only taken advantage of by DVD recorders rather than with commercial discs. In the meantime, there were plenty of customised versions of VCD that could be homebrewed, and compatibility varied by player, but really the only things that were ever commercially produced (at least, in any significant number) were VCDs, SVCDs, and to a lesser extent CVDs... because those were the only official standards and therefore the only combination of specs you could use and be sure that any random player would be able to play the whole thing successfully. But I've got enough old CDRs on the shelf with XVCD versions of various films, which played just fine in my DVD player... gathering dust and succumbing to bitrot now, though, as they just look like ass on a 42" LCD, and aren't even really that watchable on the PC even after ripping them to hard drive. I didn't keep any of the original files, of course, and didn't realise at the time that VCD has very minimal error correction, so a lot of the ripped streams have quite a bit of corruption here and there. Thankfully most of them were converted from AVIs that I *have* kept, and more successfully copied back from CDR to hard drive as the capacity of the latter item gradually increased from just a half dozen CDs or so to many hundreds...

Mr Jason Well Such an odd problem.

DVD Recorders were mostly junk until 2007. Suddenly they started actually working then mostly disappeared.

I forgot to say it is a standalone dvd recorder not part of a computer

Hmm, it's an odd thing. I've never known Lite-On *computer* CDRW and DVDRW drives to be anything other than absolutely solid, top quality items. But I've also had to use one of their set top recorders for work purposes ("inheriting" a unit that a previous resident of my post had bought, presumably with his eyes shut and by throwing a dart into a mail-order catalogue, as it didn't even have a good feature set vs contemporary rivals for what we needed to use it for), and it was hideously unreliable, and just got worse as I used it, until eventually it could barely record anything useful on a disc, could no longer erase or title anything - or worse, successfully finalise any of the dozens of not-yet-finalised recordings my predecessor had left hanging - and even had trouble playing prerecorded discs. Googling about for answers, hoping to find some way to repair it or what other models or PC software might be usable to recover the half-broken recordings, I found that basically I was SoL. That entire line of Lite-On recorders were essentially junk, as they had a bad batch of laser diodes installed that wore out extremely fast (though luckily for Lite-On, not quite fast enough for a significant number of machines to die within the warranty period)... and the problem with laser diode rot is that it tends to progress even with the machine turned off and out of use, although it does progress _faster_ if you're using it to play and particularly record discs... so there wasn't any hope of leaving it and hoping it would get better, or even trying to find another one of the same model that was still in operable condition unless it was still brand-new-in-box, never opened, never used. Which as they sold their complete production run and then moved on to other models, which weren't compatible with unfinalised discs from the older ones, wasn't something you were likely to find. I did find some software that could scour the disc for data that looked MPEG-2 compatible and extract it to VOB files for writing to a fresh DVDR, which worked in a rather hokey fashion (never did manage to find a way to split up any stream that was made of several different programmes joined together into its constituent parts, or to title them, add chapter points, etc, so it was no good for making discs that were intended for educational use), and every single matching unit I found on eBay was listed as broken with the same symptoms as the original, so in the end it proved rather more worthwhile just getting a Humax PVR and a much better specced Toshiba DVDR from a couple of pawn shops using departmental petty cash... Set the former to pick up all the programmes that were needed, including repeats of those that the Lite-On failed to record, and then dump them en masse to DVD through the Toshiba, using the DVD recorder's own tuner to record live off-air when needed (IE when 3 programmes of interest were airing simultaneously, as the PVR "only" had 2 tuners onboard). Worked much more smoothly, and it had better recording quality too, especially for longer films or programmes which 2-hour mode wasn't enough for; the Lite-On dropped to half resolution in 3-hour mode, but the Toshiba had full-rez 2.5 and 3 hour settings... I expect the reason yours stopped working for DVDs after you put a DVDRW in is that RWs require a rather higher laser power to write, and particularly erase/rewrite versus plain DVDRs, and even to play them back... and more so in all cases vs just playing a commercial DVD. So a diode that was maybe just about hanging on and operating at the lower intensity needed for playing regular DVDs or DVDRs, maybe even recording single-use DVDRs, just straight up burned out completely when suddenly faced with the more challenging task of writing to a DVDRW. Never knew they could write plain VCDs... I mean, I don't think I ever tried. There didn't seem much point, though I'm sure the less discerning of our tutor customers would have been just as happy with a VCD as a DVDR. I seem to recall it having an *audio* CD recording function - itself a fairly rare thing - which was occasionally useful for quickly transferring some old audio cassette to CD when there wasn't time to fuss about recording it into the computer, trimming the ends, boosting volume and reducing noise etc... guess it figures that they felt they may as well add VCD recording as well. After all, if you don't bother with a menu screen or anything like that, you're more or less just dumping straight MPEG-1 AV data (of the same format as would be used for 6-hour rec mode on DVDR) into a file of a particular name in a particular folder on the disc, and including a few kb worth of index and sundry data along with it. It's a very simple process, barely any more complex than writing an audio disc really, if you've already got the video and compressed-audio encoding hardware on board. (The date you bought yours seems about right to be a model match - it was a fairly well-worn machine when I came to use it, seems it lasted rather better than most of its siblings...)

But yeah, DVD recorders in general, pretty horrible things in my experience. Even that Toshiba one, and a later, otherwise highly desirable Samsung combi DVDR/VHS model that I managed to score from another department that was moving to all-digital recording (of psych student practice sessions, using a 2-way mirror and a rather overly obvious in-room CCTV system... oddly, they didn't bother replacing the cameras), were less than perfect machines. For a start, encoding quality never matched up to what you could get from a PC encoder, and although I know there were some models that could take a digital TV stream and copy it straight to disc inside a VOB container (so long as it was D1 or half-D1 resolution) and combi HDD-PVR/DVDR ones that could do both that trick and higher quality offline re-encoding of streams that were a different resolution (in both cases, giving both better quality and saving disc space vs blindly re-encoding everything to D1 rez at a constant bitrate), that was a trick none of the three more affordable models I used professionally, nor the one I temporarily borrowed from my aunt and uncle when the Lite-On died, could pull off. On top of that, recording could be a somewhat unreliable thing, especially if you dared trying to re-use a rewritable disc. They seemed prone to all kinds of invisible damage, some of it presumably caused by the recorders themselves, and if they actually picked up any significant visible scratches then you may as well bin the disc, because it would invariably glitch out and fail partway through a recording if you tried to reuse it. Or if you used the wrong brand of disc with a slightly less than fantastic recording layer formulation vs what the designers engineered it for, then your recordings would fail or be hard to read in any other player or PC afterwards. Or if the recorder was just feeling mischevious it would throw a random error halfway through recording some extremely important thing that was unlikely to be repeated for at least a few months if not years, for no discernable reason at all. I actually got into the habit of running a VHS deck alongside the DVD recorder just in case the disc recording failed, even during the period where we were supposed to be bulk converting all our over-the-air recorded tapes to DVD and then ripping them to HDD... And even if it seemed to successfully record, there's no guarantee it would then finalise properly, or let you do any of the simple editing that some of the formats offered like splitting and/or joining successive tracks, deleting the unwanted chunks and titling the others... or _actually_ not doing the job despite pretending that it had... Or properly erase a disc so that when you hit record it would, you know... record... Just such a litany of terrible unreliability, even amongst later models, that if they had afflicted any other format would have seen it dead in the water within two years. If VHS had been a fraction as unreliable it would never have taken hold, and either Beta or Video2000 or whatever would have succeeded, or just the idea of home recording would have been stillborn completely. The amount of patience the general public seemed to have for DVD recorders, or maybe just the stubborness of manufacturers to give up on something they obviously saw as a major cash cow, never fails to amaze me. 10+ years without any real improvement to the reliability, usability, or user friendliness, and still they kept on plugging. Oh and of course, the lag. The terrible lagging and delays between you trying to do a thing, and it actually happening. One programme's ended, and you've got another to record on a different disc right after it on another channel... should be simple, right? You even made sure to pre-format the blanks before starting the first recording, so there wouldn't be a 2+ minute (if not 10 minute) delay whilst the machine laboriously went through the process of... whatever the hell a DVD recorder does when it's "formatting" a disc, because I'm sure as hell I don't know what it really needs to do ahead of time... I mean, if you were doing it with VHS, so long as you had two fresh blanks, or even just a couple of used tapes with unwanted recordings on, that were already rewound to the start or to wherever you wanted to record from, it'd be easy. Hit stop, then eject, remove one tape, insert the other, change channel, wait for the announcer to come on saying "up next, (name of the second programme)" and hit record, possibly a couple of times to set a OTR 60-minute timer if you wanted to set-and-forget. Loads of time across the top of the hour between one show finishing and the next one starting, no need to rush. ...not so with your typical DVDR. For some reason it's got to do a minute or more of housekeeping before even acknowledging that the first recording has properly stopped, even without any finalisation. Then you can eject the disc, but only after it's complained at you that the disc isn't finalised, so are you sure? Eject and swap discs. Wait for the general optical disc loading delay, itself several seconds longer than any tape loading sequence. Then it has to read the structure of your... empty, freshly formatted disc. And the menu system that's been preburned onto it. And display the menu. So you have to hit stop again, maybe twice, to get it to go away. Switch back to TV input. Change the channel. Shit, it's already being announced! Hit record in a panic. And wait. And wait. The disc spins up. An icon flashes in the corner of the screen. It's doing... something? Reading the disc again even though it already read it once and it hasn't ejected in between? It's certainly not recording, and the titles are half done... ah, finally, the counter has appeared and is counting up, and we haven't missed _too_ much of the programme (of course, it would be too much bother to include enough buffer memory to save the material lost between pressing record and the laser actually burning something to disc, which it could then catch up by encoding slightly less fastidiously and writing a little faster than normal, wouldn't it). But man, that was stressful, and we still lost part of the show that we shouldn't have... and this is the short version of events. If you haven't got a ready formatted disc good to go, you can kiss goodbye to at least the first couple minutes of the second programme... which is often all the tutors are interested in... oh and of course if you didn't hit the OTR button combination at the point of issuing the record command, instead of at the point it actually started, then it may now be too late. Or maybe that particular system ignored any additional presses of the button _until_ recording started in earnest. In any case, your recording is gonna last longer than an hour... Absolutely unbelievable that they thought a recording system that took any longer than about five seconds, from inserting the media and pressing the record button to it actually recording the incoming signal, was any kind of a good idea. I'm entirely happy for DVD recorders to fall into the dustbin of history. About the only use I'd ever consider for one now is an intermediate transfer format (using the 1-hour extra-high-quality mode) for tape material if, for some reason, it wasn't possible to capture it direct into a PC or other HDD / flash storage using device. (This is why I would have so much preferred to have one of those systems that partnered a HDD PVR with an onboard DVD writer - that's about the best combination, really; it's hard to upgrade a PVR drive, and whatever you put in there is always going to fill up at some point, so it's best to use it for temporary storage and timeshifting; anything you want to keep, you can shuttle off to a DVDR, with full TV quality where the original stream is compatible, and with the surety in any case that you're going to have enough space even on a partly used disc because the system can pre-calculate it, and without any worry about the recording failing halfway or whatever... plus it can likely do a straight copy at 2x speed or faster... so if it does encounter a disc error, it can not only recover from it gracefully, tell you about it and offer the chance to retry on a new disc, but you won't have lost a full two hours from the fault. The PVR side compensates for the DVDRs shortcomings, and vice versa. Annoyingly, my predecessor in the job appeared to have been using one, but must have taken it with him when he left or sold it off before then... there were several finalised discs around bearing the marks of such a system, but no evidence of the actual hardware. As well as a Toshiba machine curiously like that one I later found in and bought (back?) from a nearby pawnshop... However, apart from the quality and speed side of things, using a separate PVR and DVDR, and avoiding live recording as much as humanly possible, worked almost as well...)

javier paredes Lo siento, pero no tengo el monejo de operación en español. :(

me podrias enviar el manual de operacion en ingles por favor. mi correo es jaen071@yahoo.com. thank you..

+Objectville Animated VCD audio track is mp3!!! Or in correct term, mp3 is MPEG-1 Audio Layer III mp2 was also a music format... as well as mp3... and mp4 is called for MPEG-4 Part 14.

There was also SVCD which was a way of recording DVD-level MPEG-2 to a CD-R which could be read by most DVD players. Issue was this tended to run out the buffer on playback as many DVD players weren't expecting such a continuous data rate from the CD stage.

DelilahThePig I digitized a lot of VHS "home" movies to SVCD on my PC before DVD burners got cheap! Almost no one I knew that the format existed!😀

No. Stop that. It's wrong. *Audio-wise:* Pre-VCD videoconferencing and professional broadcast uplinks: MP1 VCD, some DVDs, rather too much digital radio, a lot of digital TV, and 90s era VC: MP2 Internet radio, late 90s to early 2010s digital video, general purpose audio storage, and maybe some videoconferencing too: MP3 Everything MP3 was used for, but from the mid noughties onwards: MP4 In detail: MP1 and MP2 audio ("layer 1" and "layer 2" - named as such because each standard includes and builds upon the earlier ones) are parts of the MPEG-1 standard, with some fairly rare players and software recognising some only quasi official, rather experimental MPEG-2 extensions to MP2. MP3 audio is the third layer of MPEG-1, but also was officially extended somewhat with additional MPEG-2 and 2.5 features, particularly in terms of lower bitrate and sampling frequency modes, which MP1 and (official) MP2 lacked. Before MPEG-2 MP3 you couldn't go under 32khz and about 32kbit mono (or about 64kbit stereo), not that you'd want to reduce the bitrate that far because the quality would suck; that extension halved both the lower frequency and bitrate limits, and re-tuned the codec to deal with the "important" parts of the overall recording now being rather higher up the range. MPEG-2.5 MP3 halved it still further, making it suitable for narrowband voice transmission (including settings as low as 8kbit for low power wireless data links), as well as voice based internet radio and the audio tracks of modem-compatible ultra low bitrate streaming video... finally giving us some kind of realistic alternative to bloody Realmedia. MP4 audio isn't really a proper official designation, much as it's used for filenames and such. It's the colloquial name given to AAC, which is basically the audio part of MPEG-4... and, unlike MP3 which came along a little too late to be included in the DVD standard (MPEG-2 video development sort of outpaced the audio, so it stuck with MP2 and linear PCM, with the option of TV-derived Dolby Digital and Laserdisc-derived DTS as upgraded, surround sound capable encoding options), it is a proper part of the MPEG-4 AV standard. They seem to have dropped the "layer" thing, so it's not "layer 4" or anything like that, it's just MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding. Though thanks to differential codec licensing requirements and the additional encoding load, a lot of MPEG-4 videos, at least in the earlier years, ended up using MP3 audio anyway... *Video-wise:* Pre-VCD, and alongside it for lower powered hardware: non-MPEG-designated codecs like H261 and even earlier, lower numbered ones that I can't remember, as well as scratchy stuff like Intel Indeo, Cinepak, Motion-JPEG, and various weird Quicktime codecs that are thankfully lost to history. VCD, CDi, various computer CDROMs so long as you had a good enough CPU or a dedicated card, early digital video distribution systems, some 90s videoconferencers: MPEG-1 SVCD, CVD, DVD, digital cable, digital broadcast, digital satellite and other distribution systems from late 90s to present day, late 90s/early noughties VC: MPEG-2 Note: _not_ "MP1" or "MP2", or indeed any file extension like that. All MPEG video files, at least in the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 era, are suffixed ".MPG" or ".MPEG". Pure video streams without audio might alternatively be suffixed ".M1V", ".M2V" or other such variants, but never plain MP1/MP2, which are reserved strictly for audio. Confusingly, some other audio only suffixes like M1A/M2A exist, but are rarely used. DivX/XviD branded video encoding on computers and with later compatible DVD players, as well as the encoding used for HDDVD and Blu-Ray, and a million other more modern applications that either MPEG-2 or a contemporary lower-complexity format would previously have been used for: MPEG-4. Which just chucks the rulebook out of the window and lets you call pretty much anything "MP4", though "M4A" is available and seems to be about as frequently used as "AAC" for audio, and of course "M4V" for raw video streams (...and sometimes full AV files, which really screws the scheme up), or even "AVC". ...what? Sorry, what was that? _"What happened to MPEG-3?",_ you ask? *WE DON'T TALK ABOUT MPEG-3. THERE IS NO MPEG-3. IT NEVER HAPPENED.* And the families of its victims would like it very much if things were to _stay_ that way, thank you _very_ much.

I want you to understand and know that this is an ugly design.

You can burn a VIDEO_TS folder onto a CD and it will work in some players.

You can burn any digital data onto a CD. The question is whether you can then do anything useful with it. If you encode SVCD compatible files (which use MPEG2 for their AV compression) and burn them on to a suitably laid out CD, it should play just fine in any CDR(W) compatible (S)VCD player or CDR(W) _and_ (S)VCD compatible DVD player. Though actually you're more likely to have success by making a (lower resolution) CVD compatible disc, as that uses video compliant with one of DVD's intermediate-quality modes. And as irtbmtind89 says, in some cases you can make a "mini DVD" or "CD-DVD" (amongst various other names) by encoding video into a DVD format, but short / low quality enough that it fits within the size limit of CD, and burning that folder onto a regular ROM-style CDR(W). Some players will play it just fine (though you may have to limit the bitrate as they probably won't be able to read data from it at full DVD rate), others will glitch out, and more than a few will just completely ignore it because they're designed to only look for DVD data on a DVD-format disc and won't even conceive of searching for a VIDEO_TS folder whilst their CD laser is turned on. Though they might still be able to play SVCD content, and all but a few should handle VCD just fine. Crazily enough, I've even heard of not only Blu-Ray data being burned to DVD (which is moderately common; the MPG4 encoding means you can fit quite a lot of SD content onto a DVD5, and even a decent amount of HD), but also CDR... think someone was just trying to prove a point, more than anything, but conceptually that's not a million miles away from the old practice of burning "DivX" (an early commercialised MPG4 codec) format AVIs onto CDRs and playing them in later-model DVD players compatible with the standard. At least for movies (whose lower framerate and generally progressive encoding made them use less data and be more amenable to arbitrary resizing), it was actually a pretty good way of getting an entire film onto a single disc with quality somewhere between VCD and DVD (without having to use the somewhat lopsided compromises of CVD or SVCD, or even half-D1 miniDVD, whose horizontal resolutions were a bit too coarse versus the vertical)...

Awww 🥰

Kurisu Yamato It’s basically a half-step toward DVD. They obviously learned a lot that they improved on with the next format. VCD can look okay on an old tube TV, but modern displays really bring out the flaws.

It really was just that, a half-step towards DVD. Spot on there! Indeed, VCD is something you want to best leave with an older TV. I wouldn't even want to try watching one on an HDTV - it would be very much like trying to watch RU-vid in 144P - just not a good time. Even then I think RU-vid is still more capable in that mode, so.. yeah.. it's bad. That charming kind of bad. Haha!

I have an old version of ULead Video Studio that creates VCD's. I have not tried them on the terrapin though.

Try it, I bet it skips. Terapin can only play perfectly what it records. If you are successful, I'd like to know the details =)

What you need to do is record something in the Terapin then analyse it on the PC, using the various freeware/trialware video dissector tools that are available. See what, if any, particular weirdness it builds in that means a standards-compliant PC-burned disc won't work. (In comparison to this, I've got a VCD/SVCD compatible DVD player, that was the absolute cheapest model available when I bought it in 2002, that I had to get VERY weird with in terms of disc characteristics before I found something it _wouldn't_ play properly, and weirder still to make something it rejected outright... essentially going into the further extremes of the deeply custom KSVCD format...)

I bet it absolutely cannot handle variable bit or frame rate.

Very few things can handle variable frame rate, it's a tech with rather limited application. It's only really good for presentation screencaptures, ultra high end gaming monitors, and ultra low bandwidth internet video (eg it was one of the key technologies that made RealVideo practical). DVD players are fixed-framerate machines, and I suspect typical Blu-Ray players are too. Funnily enough, most MPEG video and audio encoding is variable bitrate, to a degree. You can't hit bang on 1,150,000 bits per second, or the per-frame equivalent, absolutely dead-on every single time, same as hitting 224,000 bits per second for the audio. The amount of bits ultimately spent on each video or audio frame does vary slightly, and there's the concept of the "bit bucket" which saves a small amount of buffer space from less demanding sections in order to spend them on more demanding ones without immediately suffering an overflow. It is rather small, however, and the stream is still zero-padded out to maintain an exact average of 1.4112 Mbit/sec audio CD equivalent (after taking VCDs tiny extra error correction into account). What we mean when we talk about VBR versus that "CBR" mode (which is really just a very tightly, but not absolutely, constrained ABR mode), however, is more usually a much more variable rate, whose second-by-second average can change very much from 1150+224, especially downwards, and in players with 2x or faster transports also up. And a bare bones, strict-standards-compliant-only VCD player WILL tend to choke on those, certainly if the overall data rate falls much below 90% of standard for any length of time, or if it goes over 100% at all for more than a second or two. So it'd be pretty much expected that _those_ would fail unless the player claims extended compatibility of some kind (particularly SVCD or (mini)DVD).

@@truesoundchris Yeah, my bad. I was referring to the filming quality. It was all hand held with muffled sound, like someone's home movies. LOL.

And here in Southeast Asia, too!

@@andriealinsangao613 today? or 20 years ago?

@@namesurname4666 As I remember, VCD was a king of home entertainment in Indonesia (one of country in South East Asia) from mid 1990 up to 2004 after that people start to switch to DVD since pirated DVD discs are getting cheaper and cheap Chinese multiregion DVD player flooded the market. The last licensed VCD was realesed here in 2016, and now most of us moved to streaming apps like Netflix, Disney+, Viu, Viki, iQIYI (yes we have Chinese apps also here).

@@faustinuskaryadi6610 ok thanks, since vcd is kinda better or the same but digital equivalent of vhs i wonder why europe didn't use it and asia switched already to digital in 1990

@@namesurname4666 probably because South East Asians were too poor to afford video cassette player (either JVC VHS, Sony Betamax, or Phillips Video 2000) in first place when it was introduced to the market for first time in 1970s so Video cassete was never be dominant format here. I was born in Makassar, Indonesia in 1989 and during my childhood in 1990s the main source for home video in my house is Laserdisc, we used to have Laserdisc rental in my city (surprisingly my city isn't even capital city of Indonesia, but still capital city of my province South Sulawesi), but most the movie that we rented is HK movie descent and some Hollywood movie (I didn't know the Laserdisc is lisenced or pirated one). Later in late 1990s we switched to VCD, the transition was smooth because we just installed mpeg decoder card to our existing Pioneer Laserdisc player (the player already have tray for CD, and can play audio CD out of box). I also heard in 1980s some Japanese anime and Tokusatsu fans rented VHS as their main source for anime and toku like Voltus V or Space Sherif Gavan, but I never experienced it during my childhood in 1990s because our free terrestrial free to air TV already aired many anime and tokusatsu show. We also have betamax player in our house but never used it except for watching my parents wedding ceremony that recorded in Betacam format.