VCD, SVCD and DVD û Quality, Capacity and Media Types

VCD: VCD, simply put, is a high density optical storage medium. It looks the same as a music CD, though it mostly holds movies, using compressed MPEG-1 video. It has the capacity to hold up to 74/80 minutes on a 650MB/700MB CDs respectively, of video along with stereo quality sound. VCDs are stored on CD-R, making them one of the least expensive storage media and compatible with a wide array of devices. You can play VCDs on most DVD players and PCs with Windows Media Player. You can use any burning software such as Nero to burn the VCD format to CD-R. It is also possible to add simple menus, and photo album/slide shows with background audio. These features make it a good low cost choice for video authoring.

SVCD: SVCD stands for Super Video CD. It bridges the quality gap between the traditional VCD and the DVD. The quality of a SVCD is better than a VCD because of higher resolution and the fact that it stores MPEG-2 Video, though it also depends on how much data you choose to store - less data per CD generally means higher quality. Like VCD, it is stored on a CD-R. The typical running time of an SVCD disc (with full resolution and quality) is about 35-45 minutes. It can be played on most standalone DVD Players and on PCs with a DVD-ROM or CD-ROM drive with the help of Windows Media Player and an MPEG 2 decoder. MPEG-2 decoders are not pre installed on Windows. You need to download and install an MPEG 2 decoder such as Elecard on your PC to view SVCD and MPEG 2 videos.

DVD: DVD stands for Digital Video Disc. A DVD-R can store up to 8 hours of very high quality DVD-Video encoded in MPEG-2 format. DVD files can be burned on DVDûR s to play the video with standalone DVD players. If you plan to play your DVD on a PC, then you need an MPEG-2 decoder such as Elecard. If such a decoder is not installed, Windows Media player will give an error saying that it was unable to find a codec to play the file. DVDs have a fixed pre defined dimension. If you play them on your PC, they may seem to be stretched; however, the Video should look fine on your DVD player. If you intend to burn your videos to DVDûR s, the dimensions should be compliant with the dimensions listed in the table below.

Understanding DVD media can be puzzling at times. Basically, there are four common DVD types on the basis of file size:

DVD 5:- Also called as Single Sided Single layered, having a capacity of ~4.7 GB.

DVD 10:- Also called as Double Sided Single layered, having a capacity of ~8.75GB.

DVD 9:- Also called as Single Sided Dual layered, having a capacity of ~7.95 GB.

DVD 18:- Also called as Double Sided Dual layered, having a capacity of ~17.95GB.

TECHNICAL INFORMATION: