Is it Possible to make a CD-R that plays like a DVD?

[Coasterkeith]

I am very new to the whole idea of vcd, svcd, xvcd, xsvcd, etc. I recently thought that the only digital video disc that you could make was a dvd - so you had to have a dvd writer. I was obviously very wrong. After I did a little research and spent some time I was enlightened. The question above though has crossed my mind. Can I make a cd with my CD-RW drive that is in the format of a dvd, and hence can play on any dvd player? Unless I am wrong about this I think the only real difference between a dvd disc and a cd-r disc is size. So couldn't I make a dvd quality cd-r, that just holds much less video? Any help would be appreciated. I am a newbie to these boards and this is my first post.

Keith

[HillJack]

If this were possible, there would be no need for S/VCD's. What you're trying to do is make an SVCD; MPEG2 format (same as DVD), just not technically a real DVD.

You put a DVD in a player, it sees its a DVD and does its thing. You put a CD in a DVD player, regardless of whats on the CD, the player will see a CD, not a DVD

Atleast thats how it works with mine (I tried it)

Unless you had one of those play-everything Apex's... An SVCD is about as close as you'll ever get.

[House de Kris]

Well Coasterkeith, what you describe is indeed possible to make. It's called cDVD or miniDVD. The problem is, virtually no DVD player will play it. Last Friday I did actually witness a DVD player play a cDVD I had created. But this has been one out of all DVD players I've ever played with. Conventional net wisdom claims that about 2% of the machines play them. You can check the compatibility list here on this site for more information. Plus, you only get about 15 minutes on one of these discs, so it hardly seems worth it.

[TempleBar]

Actually, this is a lot easier to do than people think. I discovered this recently: you can make a Video CD, of the regular basic kind that you burn on a CD burner, and you can turn the bit rate up to as high as you want! I did this while encoding with TMPGEnc. My DVD layer will play up to 2500 kbits according to the references on this site (look under the SVCD/XSVCD column to see the speed of your player). I got very good results encoding at 2000 kbits, which is almost double the Video CD standard rate. Looking over other players, it seems that most of them support bit rates far higher than mine, some up to 8000 kbits which is DVD speed.

Of course, the higher the bit rate, the less recording time you get on your disk... can't do anything about that.

[Kdiddy]

http://www.vcdhelp.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=77605&highlight=minidvd