Thread: be wary of vcds

some of the middle eastern " dvds" sold on ebay are not actually dvds but vcds. The problem with these are that most dvd players do not play them and I had to get a special computer program to play them on my computer. Also the quality is not very good. they tend to freeze up alot. so make sure you are buying a actual dvd and not a vcd.

I've never heard about this before -- what exactly is a VCD?

Video CD. Its when a normal CDR of 700mb has video put onto it as .dat files. Normally they will only play on a computer, but can play on some DVD players.

The total footage adds upto 700mb, so whatevers on it, its going to be low quality considering a DVD is 4.37GB.

Lots of the Arabic performance "dvds" you see on Ebay, are actually only VCDs. Low quality footage, full of logos from various Arabic websites. Sometimes they dont even have the original song and have dubbed something else over the top.

Thanks for the info, I had no idea of what a VCD was!
Patricia

They are soooo frustrating. When I was mid-Masters, one of the recent PhDs had to go to Egypt for some research reason (poor HER!!) and to my delight, returned with a VCD she'd randomly selected for me. It's great - it has Lucy, Dina, Fifi, in good quality footage (recent too), looks like a TV show, live footage of, um, Hanadi I think from memory at AWS (Dr Mo in the audience), plus the usual selection of weird clips from who knows who scattered in there. It's a *treasure*! But because it's a VCD it won't play on most DVD players and it sticks in places.

Originally Posted by zumarrad

But because it's a VCD it won't play on most DVD players and it sticks in places.

If you're having "sticking" problems and the disk is a treasure, COPY IT! CD-R disks have horrible problems with bit-rot. They do NOT last forever.

How might I do that? I don't have a DVD writer on my machines, though I imagine *someone* could do it for me, including some pro service that copies things. I'd love to be able to pull out some of the footage to show. Dina in a classy dress and Lucy being trashtastic - it's like Bizarroworld.

ETA: Also: does anyone know who and what these VCDs are *for*? They're obviously not targeted at English speaking tourists, or any non-Arabic speaking tourist. They're of extremely weird quality, with clips just cutting out in strange places and all manner of footage put together. A friend of mine had some random ones that had crazy 80s Lebanese stuff and stuff that looks like it's from a competition of some kind, and then BAM! Suher Zaki, lovely footage. They're clearly not designed as any kind of show or showcase.

I was kind of wondering if they're perhaps the digital version of Page 3 Stunnas for men in ME countries...

Originally Posted by zumarrad

How might I do that? I don't have a DVD writer on my machines.

A VCD is just a CD, it isn't a dvd at all. So if you have a CD burner, just copying the CD would be better than nothing. You might also be able to copy it to your hard drive, though I've never tried to do that.

There are likely professional places that might do it, but I don't know of any (especially any in other countries). If you know of any computer/video geeks, they might do it just for the challenge. I would.

VCDs are pretty common here in addition to dvd. They are cheaper than dvds so if the movie isn't something I'm desperate to see in high quality, I go for the vcd and watch on my laptop. :) They do deteriorate though. :( Then again, in this humidity...dvd's don't always fare so well either.

VCDs should be easy to just open the folder on them and copy to hard drive. You might find its one big .dat file or several little ones.

There are programs out there that you could use to cut the footage out that you wanted zumarrad