Video CD

~ the obituary ~

Video CD was specified in 1993 by Sony, Philips, Matsushita and JVC, and the document is called the White Book because everything in that family of standards is named after the color of its binder. The timing was not a coincidence: MPEG-1 was finalized the same year, and the whole format is really just an answer to one question, which was what you could do with digital video if the only disc you were allowed to use was the compact disc that already existed.

The answer was about 74 minutes of 352 by 240 video at 1,150 kilobits per second, with audio at 224. That is not much. It is roughly VHS if the tape is new and the deck is good, and visibly worse than VHS if you are looking for it. Version 2.0 added on screen menus and the karaoke features that turned out to matter more commercially than the movies did.

Philips had already failed at this once. CD Video, the gold disc from 1987, needed a LaserDisc player almost nobody owned. Video CD was the lesson learned: use the player everyone already has, accept whatever quality that buys you, and price the disc like a music album rather than a piece of home cinema.

Those twenty years overlap almost exactly with my own CD burning period and the disc still never turned up in my life. Turkey did not become a VCD market. What happened here instead was the same idea arriving with no standard behind it: a codec and a stack of blanks. The cheap movie in Turkey was a DivX file on a CD-R with the subtitle track downloaded separately from somewhere else, which is why a Turkish subtitle site ended up being an institution. VCD solved the problem with a licensed format and a player you bought. We solved it with software and no license at all.

~ the case file ~

~ what was actually on the disc ~

Open a VCD on a computer and you find a MPEGAV folder with files called AVSEQ01.DAT, which are MPEG program streams with the extension changed. That single decision is most of why the format spread the way it did. Anything that could read a CD could read the files, and anything that could decode MPEG-1 could play them, so a VCD was pirateable with a CD burner years before DVD ripping was a thing an ordinary person could do.

It also explains the two disc feature film, which is the detail everyone who used the format remembers. Seventy four minutes is not a movie. So you got Disc 1 and Disc 2, the break landed wherever the running time said it landed rather than where the story wanted it, and getting up halfway through was simply part of watching a film.

~ the china years ~

China is where this format lived. It arrived in a market with no established home video standard to displace, at a moment when a player could be built cheaply by domestic manufacturers, and it went vertical. Eight million players sold in 1997 alone. By 2005 more than half of Chinese households owned one. The same pattern repeated across Southeast Asia and later in India, always for the same reason: the hardware was cheap and the discs were cheaper.

Super Video CD came in 1998, MPEG-2 on the same disc, developed with Chinese government backing specifically because DVD carried licensing terms that Chinese manufacturers did not want to pay. It was a better format and it never escaped its origin as a negotiating position. Karaoke did better than either of them. A VCD could put the vocal on one audio channel and the instrumental on the other, so the disc was a music video and a karaoke track at the same time, and for a decade that was the format's real business.

~ the funny part ~

What killed VCD is that DVD players kept playing VCDs. Every cheap DVD deck sold in Asia read the older discs, so upgrading cost you nothing and your shelf still worked. There was never a moment where anyone had to choose. The format was allowed to keep functioning right up until nobody was pressing it, which is a gentler death than most formats get and a much quieter one.

There is no announcement to point at. The number that comes closest is Hong Kong's VCD factory count, which fell from 98 in 1999 to 26 by 2012. Major studios were still putting discs out at the very end: Yash Raj Films released Jab Tak Hai Jaan on VCD alongside DVD and Blu-ray on 3 January 2013, a 2012 blockbuster shipping on a 1993 format because in some markets that was still the version people could afford. After that the pressing stops mattering.

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