VCD Fullform

VCD stands for Video Compact Disc is Compact Disc (CD) format based on Compact Disc – Read-Only-Memory Extended Architecture (CD-ROM XA). It holds MPEG-1 video data and also provides an interactive environment. It can be played on a VCD player, a CD-i player, some DVD players, and some CD-ROM drives. VCD for the first-ever format for distribution of films on 120 mm optical discs.

Features :

• This disc holds 72-74 minutes of Video and Audio information.
• It has a data transfer rate of 1.44 Mbps.
• The data compression facility is provided by MPEG-1 that compresses the data at ratios of up to 200:1.
• It provides an aspect ratio of 4:3.
• It stores metadata and menu information within ISO 9660 filesystem.
• It has variations include : VCD 2.0, VCD-ROM, VCD-Internet and SuperVCD.
• It provides resolutions : 352×240 and 352×288.
• It provides an audio bitrate of 224 Kbit/s and a video bitrate of 1150 Kbit/s.

Advantages :

• By formatting VCD, redundant information gets eliminated from MPEG-1 data.
• It also provides specialized video authoring capabilities via Compact Disc Interactive (CD-i) runtime application.
• It is a low-cost video format.
• It 2.0 provides interactive playback control (PBC).
• Menus and chapters can be used on a VCD.

Disadvantages

• VCD video is only compatible with the DVD-Video standard which is encoded at 29.97 frames per second or 25 frames per second.
• The use of VCDs made pirating very easy as it does not provide any security measures against unauthorized copying of data.
• VCD does not provide support to backward compatibility with older MPEG-1 formats.
• Subtitles are embedded in the video in VCDs and cannot be removed.
• The image quality of VCDs is not up to the mark due to the compression methods used.