I remember burning SVCD (Super Video CD) which were encoded in mpeg2 for shows and movies I was recording with my Pinnacle aquisition card. That was a bit before DivX then Xvid codec became popular enough for any DVD player to support it.
SVCD provided a near indistinguishable quality difference with DVDs when using most CRT TVs and had the advantage of being supported by any DVD player dinxe the same video and audio formats were used. You could burn the movie into 2 CDR if you wanted to maximize the quality, 2CDR were still cheaper than 1 DVDR.
> SVCD provided a near indistinguishable quality difference with DVDs when using most CRT TVs
From what I remember, SVCD uses roughly the same MPEG-2 video compression as DVD-Video, but with a much lower maximum bit rate. Even with a movie split onto two CDs, the bitrate was still less than half the bitrate of a professionally mastered DVD. I always found the quality of SVCDs to be noticeably poor.
I’m a little surprised that one of the supposed advantages of Laserdisc over tape is resistance to humidity. Wasn’t delamination/corrosion (LaserRot) a not-uncommon problem for LD? I’m guessing humidity issues (particularly mold) were much more pronounced with tape.
One of my neatest Beijing finds was an usually eloquent huckster (i.e. not a country bumpkin) leading me through maze of alleys and hallways to a VCD shop that repackaged discs into really nice matching spines and covers. Kind of like criterion collection / Nintendo switch games. Like analogue custom plex art - they had service where you can colorize your collection.
The first time I traveled outside the western part of the world, I was (naively or not) surprised by the sheer amount of bootleg tapes sold in regular stores. Same with DVD when that time came around.
Back in the 90s Singapore was such a big market for this that it acted as the major driver for motivating globally synchronized releases. i.e. for Reader's Digest magazine* in the US in 1995 if you did not release it on the same day in Singapore it would be easily available in pirated form within days, removing any ability to make money in that market for the legitimate product.
In UK pubs circa 2000 it was notorious that certain people would approach your table to sell you bootleg DVDs, and that if you indulged them you'd then get access to their "special" selection.
In Thailand in the ‘90s, there were street vendors selling every dvd and cd you could think of, all bootlegs, complete with copied artwork and packaging. It was completely out in the open.
Even in the States, there were computer swap meets in my town, and VCDs were everywhere in the 90s at them. I remember the first time I saw one, and asked where the VCR was, but realized it looked different than a VHS would look. I had no idea at the time, but I would later go to work for a company that started with making interactive CDs, VCDS, and eventually DVDs. Not sure the bootleg market had anything to do with it, but I was at least knowledgeable about the format when asked in job interview. So evidence of one, bootlegging isn't all bad!
Yeah, some of the best places to get bootlegs even into the 2000s were swap meets and other small businesses. It wasn’t until decently later (and even then) that torrents and trackers would have a similar breadth. Everything had the BIG releases, but the swap meets had also sorts of strange things you’d never heard of.
I'm pretty sure they're still popular outside of the western world. At least for some things. eBay is filled with bootleg DVDs of Anime, TV shows, etc. There is no official Simpsons Season 21+ DVDs for example and yet they are not very hard to find...
Copy protection for physical media was so rudimentary back then. VHS tapes literally just have a piece of plastic you could break off that acted as copy protection. Everyone had CRT's so no one was a quality freak either, really.
It’s a shame the evolution to DVD and later Blu-ray went with the VCD/CD size rather than Laserdisc sized discs. It was the right call for the time, that makes them much easier to transport and store and allowed the players to double as CD players and let game consoles double as blu-ray/HDDVD players. All huge perks to encourage adoption.
But now that we are entering a world where physical media is largely an enthusiast past-time I think something laserdisc sized is much better suited for appealing to geeky collectors as a “trophy” or collectible item. It’s more pleasing to flip through them, the size of the sleeve ends up functioning as a display poster. Commentary about “warmth” aside, it’s the same reason music nerds have revived vinyl, with even half the vinyl market consisting of people who don’t even own turntables and just listen to the music off the included digital download codes that come with the records. Plus, the sheer size would mean you can encode a LOT onto this hypothetical next-gen laserdisc before having to resort to compression and exotic layering tricks to increase data density like they do with these 8k Atmos releases now.
I have a possibly mass produced bootleg SVCD of Star Wars in a folding jewel case, but it has some nice printed paper finishes and a retail box, so I guess it could be legit. I can't remember offhand if it's the whole trilogy or just the first movie. I think it's from the same era as the VHS and Laserdisc THX editions, pre-CGI re-release. It's from Malaysia iirc. It turned up at the computer repair shop I used to work at, and no one remembered from where, and no one wanted it, so I claimed it the same way I got my new-in-box new old stock Slackware 6.1/2 I think it was.
You can buy a vhs cleaner that accepts some alcohol and then fast forwards and rewinds through the tape. The alcohol would soak into a sponge bit and wipe the tape.
At the VHS dub house I worked, each of the recorders would be taken down once a month to have all of the rollers, head drum, and other parts of the tape path that made contact with the tape cleaned by hand by the engineering department. In the head end where the masters were played, we'd do the same thing on the master playback equipment at the beginning of each shift and possibly more frequently if the masters were of less quality or really old. The 1" machines were easy to clean, but the cassette formats were more difficult in having to pull the units out of the racks, remove the cover, blah blah.
At least this is my recollection. <shivers/> the really bad ol' days
An important part of using a head cleaning tape was to use play mode, not FF or RW. Only play (or record) modes would have the tape wrapped around the head while FF/RW would disengage the tape completely from the head. This is done to save head wear, and to help prevent magnetizing the head.
(Except on examples like this weird, late-model Sony deck I have: On it, the tape is always engaged with the head from the time it is inserted to the time it is ejected. And the head itself is "self-cleaning.")
The same reason you may need to clean anything. A tape may get dirty any number of ways. It's a physical object that can get dust and dirt inside if it's ever exposed to a dirty environment. And you don't want to put a dirty tape into a player.
It's interesting that LaserDiscs were popular. They were quite niche in the West so I imagine they must have been expensive to produce. Who even made the machines?
I had a Panasonic writer at work for doing vis. there was (I think) an rs232 interface, I wrapped it up in library an made a network api, so I don't remember. the cool thing was from a vis perspective that you could record a single frame at a time. we had everything hooked up to a rs232 controller analog matrix switch that did rs-170. so with that an an rs-170 -> svideo encoder you could put a record-frame call in your animation loop.
the lab I was working at had an internal cable-tv network (which also ran ethernet on some of the channels), so we got a channel and hooked that to the output of the switch.
so you could get live visualization outputs from your office, or route them to the recorder to store your frames, and play them back at a smooth 30fps interleaved whenever you wanted.
I think they existed for (doubtless very expensive) niche professional purposes though formats were probably different. But not for consumers. Have a stack of lasdiscs in my garage which I sort of hate to just chuck but probably will someday.
A decade or so ago, we got rid of a huge collection of about 350 laserdics - a guy drove from two states over to pick them up for his small towns community center where they would play movies for the town.
One of the frustrations about things like that is that you pretty much know someone would want them but I'm pretty much not going to go to the effort of connecting with that someone.
We call the local public library and ask if they know anyone who would be interested in x-x media we are getting rid of.
They always panic slightly thinking we're trying to give it to them (most libraries are inundated with out of date materials people donate), and are happy to give us names and numbers of churches and elderly centers who might take them.
Brings back memories of VHS copies of bootleg and other questionable content (Pr0n) being sold in certain shops in Singapore (if you know where to find them) in 80s.
Loved this, such a good reminder that for a lot of us in SE Asia, VCDs weren’t just a format, they were basically the bridge between VHS bootlegs and early DVDs. Karaoke, bootlegs, family movies… it was all mixed in.
What’s interesting is how much the timing of official releases shaped all this. If you had to wait months for a cinema run or home video, the “street version” was too tempting to pass up.
VCD were a format that put compressed video and sound onto a standard CD. That is where Mp3s sort of come from. The VCD actually used MPEG1layer2 for sound, but layer 3 came along and computer enthusiasts used that for audio in the mid 1990s. SVCDs came out in the later 90s They used the MPEG2 like Dvds and were often spread over multiple discs. DIVX came from a Microsoft program that had MPEG4 inside of the software, this and the wrapper AVI came together for the first internet distribution focused format. There was a Chinese DVD player and some mainstream ones that supported VCD and SVCD and later avis. There was an active scene modding certain Phillips DVD players in the early 2000s.
You left out the DIVX pushed by Circuit City with the DRM crap limiting the number of plays. I never truly looked into the format, but I once heard that the format would use IPB long-GOP encoding, but left out the B-frames and used in their place the code that made it locking. It's demise couldn't come fast enough. I seem to recall it needing a phone cable to work as well, but the wiki page does not mention that, but does mention something implying connectivity "The player's Security Module, which had an internal Real-Time Clock, ceased to allow DIVX functions after 30 days without a connection to the central system."[0]
DIVX/XVID is ambiguous, it is a video format and separately a crappy DRM ecosystem from defunct Circuit City. The format DIVX would compress a full length movie to about 700MB (a CD capacity), where VCD MPEG-1 only got 75-80 minutes. LaserDisc owners were already trying to solve the disc-change interruption problem with premium two sided players. The format was also better to watch, in that the compression artifacts were less obvious. But the Rights Holders at the time, like for music, were more concerned with piracy, even though everything they did would make the consumer experience worse and drive more piracy. DIVX the DRM is a great example of an anti-consumer consumer format, and environmentally wasteful too as the plastic disc became "spent" after 30 days.
As I thought I reall should had specified what I meant DivX ;) 3.11 and the later derivatives. No restrictions and from a some year - even a built-in support in the hardware CD/DVD VCRs
What's the usage of the word 'factoid' when its use is clearly to just say 'fact'; considering the word 'factoid' actually means something that looks like a fact, but is – in fact – false? The fact that it should mean 'false fact' but may be used as 'true fact', makes the opening of this piece rather confusing.
I remember burning SVCD (Super Video CD) which were encoded in mpeg2 for shows and movies I was recording with my Pinnacle aquisition card. That was a bit before DivX then Xvid codec became popular enough for any DVD player to support it.
SVCD provided a near indistinguishable quality difference with DVDs when using most CRT TVs and had the advantage of being supported by any DVD player dinxe the same video and audio formats were used. You could burn the movie into 2 CDR if you wanted to maximize the quality, 2CDR were still cheaper than 1 DVDR.
> SVCD provided a near indistinguishable quality difference with DVDs when using most CRT TVs
From what I remember, SVCD uses roughly the same MPEG-2 video compression as DVD-Video, but with a much lower maximum bit rate. Even with a movie split onto two CDs, the bitrate was still less than half the bitrate of a professionally mastered DVD. I always found the quality of SVCDs to be noticeably poor.
On an high end LCD monitor the diffrence was very visible but on an average CRT TV in didn't make a huge difference.
I’m a little surprised that one of the supposed advantages of Laserdisc over tape is resistance to humidity. Wasn’t delamination/corrosion (LaserRot) a not-uncommon problem for LD? I’m guessing humidity issues (particularly mold) were much more pronounced with tape.
> Wasn’t delamination/corrosion (LaserRot) a not-uncommon problem for LD?
It comes down to the glue (and distribution of said glue) used to bond the sides at the pressing plant.
> It’s wild to me to think people can simply move overseas and interstate now and watch the same intertube programming, but that’s a different post.
This is still not easy without piracy, at least for liveTV.
Not easy, but not hard either. Same for the physical media. It just takes different ways/methods of skirting the same rules.
One of my neatest Beijing finds was an usually eloquent huckster (i.e. not a country bumpkin) leading me through maze of alleys and hallways to a VCD shop that repackaged discs into really nice matching spines and covers. Kind of like criterion collection / Nintendo switch games. Like analogue custom plex art - they had service where you can colorize your collection.
Were bootlegs popular?
The first time I traveled outside the western part of the world, I was (naively or not) surprised by the sheer amount of bootleg tapes sold in regular stores. Same with DVD when that time came around.
Bootlegging of everything is a huge business.
Back in the 90s Singapore was such a big market for this that it acted as the major driver for motivating globally synchronized releases. i.e. for Reader's Digest magazine* in the US in 1995 if you did not release it on the same day in Singapore it would be easily available in pirated form within days, removing any ability to make money in that market for the legitimate product.
In UK pubs circa 2000 it was notorious that certain people would approach your table to sell you bootleg DVDs, and that if you indulged them you'd then get access to their "special" selection.
* And yes, that example is totally serious.
https://youtube.com/shorts/EodajlNi0k4
In Thailand in the ‘90s, there were street vendors selling every dvd and cd you could think of, all bootlegs, complete with copied artwork and packaging. It was completely out in the open.
same in Mexico. i remember buying a ton of nu-metal CDs from street vendors on vacation as a kid.
Even in the States, there were computer swap meets in my town, and VCDs were everywhere in the 90s at them. I remember the first time I saw one, and asked where the VCR was, but realized it looked different than a VHS would look. I had no idea at the time, but I would later go to work for a company that started with making interactive CDs, VCDS, and eventually DVDs. Not sure the bootleg market had anything to do with it, but I was at least knowledgeable about the format when asked in job interview. So evidence of one, bootlegging isn't all bad!
Yeah, some of the best places to get bootlegs even into the 2000s were swap meets and other small businesses. It wasn’t until decently later (and even then) that torrents and trackers would have a similar breadth. Everything had the BIG releases, but the swap meets had also sorts of strange things you’d never heard of.
Bootlegging was massive in Malaysia. Whole floors of some of the high-rise malls in Johor Bahru were VCD shops.
Rainbow Centre in Karachi was a highlight of my childhood.
I'm pretty sure they're still popular outside of the western world. At least for some things. eBay is filled with bootleg DVDs of Anime, TV shows, etc. There is no official Simpsons Season 21+ DVDs for example and yet they are not very hard to find...
Copy protection for physical media was so rudimentary back then. VHS tapes literally just have a piece of plastic you could break off that acted as copy protection. Everyone had CRT's so no one was a quality freak either, really.
> VHS tapes literally just have a piece of plastic you could break off
I think that made the tapes read-only.
VHS copy protection was mostly some flavour of Macrovision (at least in Canada).
Very popular. Even Seinfeld got caught up in it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Kicks
My friend that lived in Iran said you basically would have a guy that goes around and basically opens his trunk and offers bootlegs.
Sometimes they’d disappear for a while and you’d have to work with your existing collection or find a new guy.
But that was pre ubiquitous-ish high speed internet.
TFA
It’s a shame the evolution to DVD and later Blu-ray went with the VCD/CD size rather than Laserdisc sized discs. It was the right call for the time, that makes them much easier to transport and store and allowed the players to double as CD players and let game consoles double as blu-ray/HDDVD players. All huge perks to encourage adoption.
But now that we are entering a world where physical media is largely an enthusiast past-time I think something laserdisc sized is much better suited for appealing to geeky collectors as a “trophy” or collectible item. It’s more pleasing to flip through them, the size of the sleeve ends up functioning as a display poster. Commentary about “warmth” aside, it’s the same reason music nerds have revived vinyl, with even half the vinyl market consisting of people who don’t even own turntables and just listen to the music off the included digital download codes that come with the records. Plus, the sheer size would mean you can encode a LOT onto this hypothetical next-gen laserdisc before having to resort to compression and exotic layering tricks to increase data density like they do with these 8k Atmos releases now.
Funnily enough, the article spent a paragraph explaining the initialism and acronym, only to refer to VCD as an acronym later.
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I have a possibly mass produced bootleg SVCD of Star Wars in a folding jewel case, but it has some nice printed paper finishes and a retail box, so I guess it could be legit. I can't remember offhand if it's the whole trilogy or just the first movie. I think it's from the same era as the VHS and Laserdisc THX editions, pre-CGI re-release. It's from Malaysia iirc. It turned up at the computer repair shop I used to work at, and no one remembered from where, and no one wanted it, so I claimed it the same way I got my new-in-box new old stock Slackware 6.1/2 I think it was.
You can buy a vhs cleaner that accepts some alcohol and then fast forwards and rewinds through the tape. The alcohol would soak into a sponge bit and wipe the tape.
At least this is my recollection.
At the VHS dub house I worked, each of the recorders would be taken down once a month to have all of the rollers, head drum, and other parts of the tape path that made contact with the tape cleaned by hand by the engineering department. In the head end where the masters were played, we'd do the same thing on the master playback equipment at the beginning of each shift and possibly more frequently if the masters were of less quality or really old. The 1" machines were easy to clean, but the cassette formats were more difficult in having to pull the units out of the racks, remove the cover, blah blah.
At least this is my recollection. <shivers/> the really bad ol' days
Memory partially valid.
An important part of using a head cleaning tape was to use play mode, not FF or RW. Only play (or record) modes would have the tape wrapped around the head while FF/RW would disengage the tape completely from the head. This is done to save head wear, and to help prevent magnetizing the head.
(Except on examples like this weird, late-model Sony deck I have: On it, the tape is always engaged with the head from the time it is inserted to the time it is ejected. And the head itself is "self-cleaning.")
They are talking about a winder that cleans a tape, not a tape that cleans a player.
I guess I see that now. I didn't have any idea that such a thing existed.
Why would someone want to clean a VHS tape? It's full of data, and it's deliberately lubricated.
The same reason you may need to clean anything. A tape may get dirty any number of ways. It's a physical object that can get dust and dirt inside if it's ever exposed to a dirty environment. And you don't want to put a dirty tape into a player.
Memory unlocked, incredible. I just clearly remembered doing this to re-record some stuff.
It's interesting that LaserDiscs were popular. They were quite niche in the West so I imagine they must have been expensive to produce. Who even made the machines?
Pioneer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc_player
Did they make writers?
I had a Panasonic writer at work for doing vis. there was (I think) an rs232 interface, I wrapped it up in library an made a network api, so I don't remember. the cool thing was from a vis perspective that you could record a single frame at a time. we had everything hooked up to a rs232 controller analog matrix switch that did rs-170. so with that an an rs-170 -> svideo encoder you could put a record-frame call in your animation loop.
the lab I was working at had an internal cable-tv network (which also ran ethernet on some of the channels), so we got a channel and hooked that to the output of the switch.
so you could get live visualization outputs from your office, or route them to the recorder to store your frames, and play them back at a smooth 30fps interleaved whenever you wanted.
Those writers used different media (and it's in caddies) which can't be read by a normal LD player.
I think they existed for (doubtless very expensive) niche professional purposes though formats were probably different. But not for consumers. Have a stack of lasdiscs in my garage which I sort of hate to just chuck but probably will someday.
A decade or so ago, we got rid of a huge collection of about 350 laserdics - a guy drove from two states over to pick them up for his small towns community center where they would play movies for the town.
One of the frustrations about things like that is that you pretty much know someone would want them but I'm pretty much not going to go to the effort of connecting with that someone.
We call the local public library and ask if they know anyone who would be interested in x-x media we are getting rid of.
They always panic slightly thinking we're trying to give it to them (most libraries are inundated with out of date materials people donate), and are happy to give us names and numbers of churches and elderly centers who might take them.
It's not a ton of work and worth it overall.
My local library does have an annual book and media sale but pretty sure they wouldn't want laserdiscs.
I'll take them from you, pay for shipping
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Criterion Collection. nuff said
Brings back memories of VHS copies of bootleg and other questionable content (Pr0n) being sold in certain shops in Singapore (if you know where to find them) in 80s.
Loved this, such a good reminder that for a lot of us in SE Asia, VCDs weren’t just a format, they were basically the bridge between VHS bootlegs and early DVDs. Karaoke, bootlegs, family movies… it was all mixed in.
What’s interesting is how much the timing of official releases shaped all this. If you had to wait months for a cinema run or home video, the “street version” was too tempting to pass up.
> the bridge between VHS bootlegs and early DVDs
What about DivX/XviD?
What about DivX/XviD?
VCDs had broad hardware support, and were more mainstream.
I used to travel around Southeast Asia a bit, and whenever I was in Hong Kong, I'd load up on VCD movies at mainstream stores like HMV.
I still have VCD copies of The Incredibles and On Her Majesty's Secret Service I bought at HMV.
VCD were a format that put compressed video and sound onto a standard CD. That is where Mp3s sort of come from. The VCD actually used MPEG1layer2 for sound, but layer 3 came along and computer enthusiasts used that for audio in the mid 1990s. SVCDs came out in the later 90s They used the MPEG2 like Dvds and were often spread over multiple discs. DIVX came from a Microsoft program that had MPEG4 inside of the software, this and the wrapper AVI came together for the first internet distribution focused format. There was a Chinese DVD player and some mainstream ones that supported VCD and SVCD and later avis. There was an active scene modding certain Phillips DVD players in the early 2000s.
You left out the DIVX pushed by Circuit City with the DRM crap limiting the number of plays. I never truly looked into the format, but I once heard that the format would use IPB long-GOP encoding, but left out the B-frames and used in their place the code that made it locking. It's demise couldn't come fast enough. I seem to recall it needing a phone cable to work as well, but the wiki page does not mention that, but does mention something implying connectivity "The player's Security Module, which had an internal Real-Time Clock, ceased to allow DIVX functions after 30 days without a connection to the central system."[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX
DIVX/XVID is ambiguous, it is a video format and separately a crappy DRM ecosystem from defunct Circuit City. The format DIVX would compress a full length movie to about 700MB (a CD capacity), where VCD MPEG-1 only got 75-80 minutes. LaserDisc owners were already trying to solve the disc-change interruption problem with premium two sided players. The format was also better to watch, in that the compression artifacts were less obvious. But the Rights Holders at the time, like for music, were more concerned with piracy, even though everything they did would make the consumer experience worse and drive more piracy. DIVX the DRM is a great example of an anti-consumer consumer format, and environmentally wasteful too as the plastic disc became "spent" after 30 days.
Don't forget the discs that had the special coating on them so that they would become unplayable after 30 days.
Why pay to watch unskippable warnings about piracy when you could pirate and never see such crap?
As I thought I reall should had specified what I meant DivX ;) 3.11 and the later derivatives. No restrictions and from a some year - even a built-in support in the hardware CD/DVD VCRs
What's the usage of the word 'factoid' when its use is clearly to just say 'fact'; considering the word 'factoid' actually means something that looks like a fact, but is – in fact – false? The fact that it should mean 'false fact' but may be used as 'true fact', makes the opening of this piece rather confusing.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid
I was only familiar with the second definition -
- a briefly stated and usually trivial fact
I was only familiar with the first for a long time, until I realised that other people were using it in the same manner as literally.
What's the usage of the word 'factoid' when its use is clearly to just say 'fact'
What's the use of the word "usage" when its use is clearly to just say "use?"
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