do I need a DVD drive?

[tigre77ca]

Hello people.
I was recently told that I need a DVD drive in order to watch VCDs. I thought that the whole point of ofVCDs was to enable people with CDR drives to watch decent quality video.

I burnt a VCD in my iMac G3 600 Mhz and I can watch it no problem but a G3 350 won't read it. (although it will read the original mpg2 file no problem) a 500 Mhz PC won't read it either. An iBook with a DVD drive did no read it. DARN!

What are the basic requirements for a computer to read VCD? Do I need to have some specific plug ins installed?

Also, when I watch the vcd in a TV set, it looks good (although some occasional skipping) but it does not look that great in full-screen mode in any computer I have tried. Is that the way it is suppossed to be?

Thanks!

[Chaoji3791]

Whoever told you you needed a DVD drive to play VCDs was full of BS. VCDs will play in the vast majority of ordinary CD-ROM drives, assuming you have the correct player software.

Can't help you with your Mac-centric problems, unfortunately; I'm a PC user.

C h a o j i

[MaDmiZe]

Most VCD wont play as a VCD in a CDrom drive..... But if you use you media player (i know newer windows media players work) and open the dat file on the VCD then it will play just like any video/mpg/avi would.

[wbaccus]

VCDs won't play at all under OSX without Video Lan Client (freeware) or MacVCDX (shareware). Presumably this is because Apple idiotically removed meta data from files so now the .dat extension on the mpgs throws the system off. In OS9, you can just open the .dat file that contains the mpeg with QuickTime player.

Go to versiontracker.com and search for vlc under OSX to get VideoLan Client. If it works in one machine I can't think of a reason that it wouldn't work in another...