VCD on PC

[Bobbert]

Uhmm Howdy everyone. I'm probably the newbiest newbie on here.

I wanna get these VCD's on auction but i don't have a VCD player or anything, but I read that you can play them on a computer with a CD-ROM drive?

Is this true and if it is, won't the picture be all blocky? I mean, wouldnt you have to watch it really small to get good quality? If you could watch it full screen, i'm thinking it might be all garbled y'see.

Any help will be appreciated, thanks.

[Mirror_Image]

Well, it is certainly not going to look as good as a DVD, or even an SVCD, but it can look pretty good if it is well done. Many of the "affordable" VCDs that are sold through e-bay, et al. are horrible quality. You can download a sample of a (well-made) VCD and see how it looks to the best judges in the world - no, not other users - your eyeballs.

There are many places to grab samples, this is just one:

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/lelab/video/compare_en.htm

[KingJohn]

I wanna get these VCD's on auction but i don't have a VCD player or anything, but I read that you can play them on a computer with a CD-ROM drive?

You can open the VCD Disk using Explorer, then double click the .dat file inside one of the folders usually "Mpegav" This will play it in Windows Media Player.

Some of the good authoring programs will also put a VCD player on the disk for you. You can also use programs like Power DVD to play them.