VCD format not popular in North America?

[fmctm1sw]

Sorry, I plagerized (sp?) this from the DVD players section. It refers to a Apex AD-1100W:

Apex seems to have dropped support for VCD on their newer models. I picked up the last box at my Walmart store that had VCD capability. It looked like it was used as a Demo display model. The box had a date of 07/02.

Apex Knowledge Base

Issue Category: DVD Products

Issue:
Why won't my vcd's play?

Answer:
Apex Digital does not support VCD. The added cost for licensing would raise the price per unit to you the consumer. This format is not popular and is seldom used in North America.

Unpopular? I hope not. I have a mess of them laying around. I think they just didn't want to foot the bill for VCD support and are trying to convince folks they don't need (want) it. Isn't VCD part of the DVD "standard?"

[snowmoon]

Not really mpeg-1 is part of the standard, but VCD format patents are help by one of the other biggies. APEX has always been about cost, they shoot for the most inexpensive market segment of players. I would not be suprised if others drop support in the future as well.

VCD's really never did catch on here ( outside of imports and movie warezing ). Americans already had an established video format VHS that was on par or better than VCD.

Don't worry, by the time VCD support vanashes, DVD-R will be as cheap as CD-R and you can move your mpeg-1 VCD bitstreams over to DVD-R.

[MaDmiZe]

I guess that me and fmctm1sw didn't get the memo about VCD's not being popuar here......
I guess when my APEX dies I'll have have to just throw out any (several hundred ) VCD's I've accumulated.

[snowmoon]

All of us on this and a dozend other forums represent a drop in the bucket compared to the J6P that most coperations base their decisions on.

How else do you explain

N' sync?

[MaDmiZe]

OK...excelent point. Snowmoon is now the captain of our debate team.

The N'Sync point requires no further argument : )

[fladavpam]

Thank God the world does not revolve around Apex. I just got a GE DGE100 and it plays anything I throw at it on any media. For 88 bucks at Wal-Mahtz it's a steal! I had never heard of Apex before getting my first DVD player, an AD-660. If Apex wants to go the cheapo route, I say more power to ya! But I think they'll find that they will lose in the long run. I don't think (S)VCD support will be phased out entirely in the US - there will always be a manufacturer who will include VCD support, especially as the market and ease-of-use of VCD creation software increases. If Apex doesn't want to be a part of that, let them be. Go on back to Canada, eh?

[MOVIEGEEK]

Not really mpeg-1 is part of the standard, but VCD format patents are help by one of the other biggies.

Philips had the patent in the mid 90's but let vcd(MPEG-1) format go open source and is free to use however you like.MPEG-2 is patented and a royalty must be paid.
I don't know why Apex would state "added cost for licensing".I think
they want to use DVD-only drives to save money.

[vitualis]

That's an illusion dude.

Philips has always held onto the patents/royalty rights to VCDs and banjazzer in a thread earlier on discovered that they were changing the royalty payment requirements. This is probably why Apex is dropping support for VCD.

The VCD standard (White Book) is definitely not open source and if you want to buy it, it costs a significant amount of money as well as the requirement that you sign a non-disclosure contract with Philips.

The reason that proggies like VCDImager are open source is because most of the work is from the existing free documentation + reverse engineering + trial and error.

Regards.

[epo]

Point is - VCD is not MPEG-1. It is Video Compact Disc utilizing MPEG-1 format. And as for CD, Philips holds all rights and demands all possible and impossible royalties.
But as of being popular ... it is not popular here in Europe either, as good VHS recorder will beat it any day and VHS was allready well established.

[xed]

Both fladavpam and edo make excellent points. The VCD standard uses MPEG-1 but is a separate format and as such can be (and has been) patented separately from the MPEG-1 standard. The VCD format is a specific set of conventions and requirements, significantly larger and more detailed than the MPEG-1 encoding spec alone.
For instance: strict VCD compliance specifies 352 x 240 pixels at a bitrate of 1150. The MPEG-1 encoding format theoretically (and in practice) allows a wide variety of pixel sizes and bitrates -- now, some DVD players support such "non-compliant" VCDs (example: the latest Daewoo models, such as the 5700 and 5800) and pixel sizes as large as 720 x 480 MPEG-1 at bitrates as high at 8 mbits/sec will play back on these DVD players (I know because I've encoded such files in non-compliant VCDs and played 'em back as tests) but strictly speaking such files do not meet the VCD protocol. AFAIK Philips does indeed still own the patent rights for the VCD standard as such.
As far as support for VCD playback on standalone DVD players goes, it is overwhelmingly likely that the VCD community has nothing to worry about. True, Apex may have dropped their VCD support -- but for every Apex there's a Daewoo out there hungry to eat Apex's market share, and the name of hte game nowadays in DVD players is compatibility.
Have you noticed, for example, that since the DVD spec is pretty much delimited within hard boundaries (720 x 480 at bitrates up to 10 mbit/sec and layer II audio rates up to 320 kbit/sec) there's now no way for DVD players to differentiate themselves fromone another EXCEPT by offering more and more compatibility with wider and wider ranges of non-compliant variations on the existing standards?
What this boils down to is that the only real way for a DVD mfr to add value to their player nowadays is to support even more non-standard formats than the other guy. This means that the balance seems to be tipping int he direction of *more* support for more video formats, rather than less support for fewer formats.
Example: a friend of mine has an older Apex, the AD600, and it has serious problems playing back XVCDs. They play, all right, but they play in a jerky freeze-then-motion-then-freeze style. My friend's Apex is about 4 years old. However, someone else I know owns a Daewoo 5700 and it plays back the exact save SXVCDs without any problems at all.
Moreover, the Daewoo will play back DVD-R disks, while the Apex AD-600 won't play 'em at all.
The fact that the Apex AD-600 is older and plays fewer formats suggests that DVD player mfrs are moving in the direction of supporting more formats -- not fewer.
This strongly suggests that the VCD community in the U.S. has little to worry about. In fact, I would venture to predict that it's only a matter of time before DVD mfrs jump on the Divx (MPEG4) bandwagon and offer DVD players which support not only VCD and SVCD and XVCD and XSVCD and DVD-R and DVD+R but *also* Divx-encoded video. After all, we already have an encoder card which does real-time Divx encoding (a significant development -- the first time to my knowledge that a hacked "stnadard" generated completely outside the IEEE and IRE standards committees has found its way into a commercial video product. Are the hackers now ahead of the eletrical engineers and professional video technicians?)
So for ever Apex that jumps off the bandwagon, my guess it that 3 other mfrs will jump on. THe inexorable pressure from simple Darwinian economics is toward DVD players getting your business by supporting more playback formats than the other mfr's player.

[banjazzer]

I think maybe Philips hold the right to make players which plays VCD. Anyhow, somewhere here is the answer: http://www.licensing.philips.com/licensees/database/licensees.html

I understand that the cost to Apex per player was $5, and that this was too much for a format they considered unimportant.

[MOVIEGEEK]

My bad guys,I was refering to MPEG-1 which UC Berkeley helped develop that was open source.
I stand corrected on VCD format.

[fladavpam]

You know,

One way Apex could keep compatibility without the cost is to support the MPEG-1 standard for video (which, according to Moviegeek is open source) like they do with MP3s. Conceivably, Apex owners could use a program like Etymonix Media Raider to convert VCDs to MPEG-1 CDs and play them in their APEX player without being "officially" VCD compliant.