VCD Media

[edsmith77]

Good Morning,
Just for clarification and learning, I found the following. "Almost all DVD players will play VCDs. But Some don`t play CDRs, some of the reasons can be...."
Does this mean that VCDs are not encoded on CDRs? If so, then what media is being used?

Thanks,
Ed

[solarfox]

Many commercially-available VideoCD's are pressed, just like a standard audio CD. These types can be read in a DVD player, even if it doesn't support CD-R media, since they were made by the same process that audio CD's and commercial DVD's were made by.

[snowmoon]

Commercial VCD, just like commercial Audio CD's are pressed out of aluminmum ( sp? ). These pressed CD's have a extremly high refectivity rate ( is there anything a mirror won't reflect? ).

CD-R use a dye substance that changes it's reflection properties when hit with a powerful enough laser. CD-RW's are similar, but use a diffrent mechanism that can change back and forth ( hense RW ).

Single layered DVD's are pressed like audio cd's, but dual layered disks are two different platters glued together, the bottom of which reflects at a diffrent wavelength. So, and this is the important part, the lasers required to read dual layer DVD's do not work well reading the DYE's found on most cd-r or cd-rw disks. The Manufactureres have to go out of their way to put a second laser on the head to read those disks. Since commercial VCD's are the same materal as commercial music and commercial single layered DVD's the manufacturers don't have to do anything special in the hardware to be able to read those disks.

Hope that clears things up for you.