[P1] What type of drive is needed to make vcds?

[George Slusher]

>So only select dvd players will play vcds, right? But all dvd players will 
>play dvd movies right? How can you tell if vcds will play on a dvd player, 
>what do you have to look for? How long of a movie can i put on a vcd vs a 
>dvd? Thanks josh

You really ought to get a book.

MOST (nearly all current models) DVD players will play commercial Video 
CDs. The problem is that "homemade" Video CDs made on some brands of 
CD-Rs may not work on some DVD players--it has to do with the color dye 
they use. (Not the color of the "top" surface.) The way to find out is to 
make a Video CD and try it. The Toast manual suggests copying a 
commercial Vided CD onto CD-R and CD-RW media. (It says that sometimes 
the CD-RW media will work better than CD-R; the only way to find out is 
to try it.) Then, take the disks with you to the video store and try them 
in DVD players to see which ones they work in.

I made a very short Video CD from one of the clips in the iMovie tutorial 
and burned it onto two different brands of CD-Rs. Both of them worked in 
both of my DVD players, which are a couple of years old. 

As to how long, a Video CD holds a bit over an hour of video & audio. 
They are great for archiving an hour-long TV show, but not too good for 
copying movies. One of the more interesting TV capture devices, EyeTV by 
El Gato Software, captures in the compressed format used by Video CDs. 
They say that it takes about 10 MB per minute. The DV (digital video) 
stream used by iMovie and digital camcorders requires a lot more.

George Slusher/Eugene, OR
gslusher at rio.com