General VCD questions.

Hi, I've read up a whole lot about VCD lately and I just have some general questions/queries.


I will try to refrain from asking annoying question that you have already answered 100s of times.


1. With VCD I notice the audio bitrate of files is 224kbits/s is this comparable to MP3? 224 seems pretty high considering an MP3 @ 128kbits/s is good quality. I guess the compression is different? What is a good trade off to save space? Or do most of you just use the default value.

2. I was hoping to get myself some 99minute CDRs and burn most of my VCDs to one disc using some techniques I have been reading about. Can I adjust the video and audio bitrate freely when encoding to create files that will just fill my CDs? I read that video bitrate is: 1150kbit/s is this fixed to all VCDs? Or can I encode under or over that amount. I will be using a DVD player attached to the tele.

3. How many people use VCD how many use SVCD? I don’t like the idea of having to change CDs over when watching films. Although I would like decent quality and sometimes 352*288 seems alittle blocky; is there trade off?

4. Does XVCD work on most DVD player which support VCD?

5. XVCD looks interesting - the fact that you can you can use a higher res yet use lower bitrates, would I be able to fit a full film on a CD with say a custom resolution of 440*360

6. What the benefits/disadvantages of variable bitrates and constant bitrate?

7. Can anyone recommend a versatile DVD player with on screen display and reasonably priced? I live in the UK and have seen some good acoustic solutions DVD player which look good.

- That’s all I can think of right now any help for the noob is appreciated : ) cheers!!!

Firstly wellcome to the forum. I'll attempt to answer you:-

1. Unfortunately a VCD is locked in at 224 bitrate (anything else and its NOT a VCD.) The MP2 compression is not as good as MP3. My experiance is 224 MP2 is about a 160 or 192 MP3 audio

2. A VCD has datarate fixed at 1150. Anything under is a waste of time, anything over is now not a VCD and no guarentees it will play in any machine.

3. A year or so ago I read somewhere about 70% of encodes were to VCD, 20% to DivX and 10% to SVCD. But with affordable DVD recorders now, I'm sure its changes. It has for me

4. No guarentee an XVCD will work in anyhing other than a PC. Suc it and see.

5. Yes you can defenitely get XVCD's to fit to one CDR with varing results. Check out http://www.kvcd.net/

6. If you encode a movie with VBR, it will be smaller than encoded to CBR but of equal quality. If if the disk size is fixed (a cdr) then you end up with a higher VBR average bitrate than if you used CBR and thus a better quality movie. Thats a general answer for a general question.

7. Cant helh your there, I'm from Australia.