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Using Video CDs For Education
Phil Shapiro writes: "Video CDs offer one of the lowest-cost ways of distributing training and instruction. They can be duplicated much faster than VHS videotapes, the media is much cheaper and the postage costs are much cheaper. Learn how and why we ought to be exploring the educational potential of this new media."
"Video CDs offer one of the lowest-cost ways of distributing training and instruction. They can be duplicated much faster than VHS videotapes, the media is much cheaper and the postage costs are much cheaper."
can you say "pirated" - thats the main reason VCDs seem to have existed in Asian countries for YEARS now. They get used for anything that can be seen on TV, whether it be movies, TV, karaoke or educational productions. Standalone VCD players are even cheaper than the cost of 2-3 original DVDs. Perhaps with the acceptance of DVD players in western countries that also play VCDs, western educators are finally aware of techniques what asian countries have known and used for years.
How much functionality do the VideoCD 2.0 and 3.0 standards give the developer? Is it still just simple menus and chapters? If anything more than this was needed, then you are back to having to use multimedia CDs in a computer.
Anyone know where I can get "Afterschool Chinese" on VCD?
- HeXa
The author of this article has some good technical points. Yes, VCDs are much easier to deal with on older and less expensive hardware. However, he is neglecting a critical issue : where will one get the content in the first place? Although there are thousands upon thousands of active open source projects out there, only a handful have good free written documentation, much less freely available video tutorials! And while there are a handful of oustanding science and mathematics video series ("The Mechanical Universe", "Cosmos", "By the Numbers"), they are almost always owned by the university or broadcast station which produced them.
So, if you are going to distribute video content, either you are going to have to purchase it, or produce it yourself. It doesn't take much to do a quick-and-dirty video shoot with your vidcam in your bedroom with poor lighting and sound, but to really put together an outstanding series like "The Mechanical Universe" takes a lot of time and effort by a lot of talented people. And if you are going to go to all the bother of mass-distributing your video, it absolutely behooves you to do an outstanding job.
So the question remains... where is all this great video content going to come from?
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
While this may be a good thing for education you've got to remember a few things. Not all dvds play vcds and not all people are willing to just go out and get one that will. At least in the US copying of VCDs has already been associated with "pirating".
As for using in schools. I attend what could be considered as a very well off school system. Very good when it comes to technology too. Each high school has 5 dvd players on cart. While every room has VCRs. New schools are still opening with VCRs. Why are they not buying DVDs? Well.. I can see a few reasons. Not all educational stuff that it used has been switched to dvd. I can guess a lot of it won't be just because of how old it is. Like that video from the 70s that I had to watch in Sex Ed with the talking STD. Yes I'm sure they are going to get to turning that into DVD sometime soon. Another reason would be cost. You can buy cheap dvds for under $100, but they aren't very good DVDs most of the time either.
Teachers in school already have enough trouble opperating VCRs they have owner themselves for 10 years. I can't see a switching to an optical disk technology in schools for another 10 years or so due to still high cost (for many school systems) and because of incompetence.
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One great thing about VCD is that they work in standard DVD players (NTSC and PAL VCD discs only work in players for the respective formats, of course; a limitation not seen on computers).
Bzzzzzzt... and bzzzzzzt!
When I was DVD player shopping (not less than a year ago), I came upon a few DVD players that specifically said they would NOT play VCDs (a Sanyo, IIRC). BTW, my Apex and Daewoo DVD players play both PAL and NTSC VCDs without a hitch. There is a button on the remote labeled P/N that will switch the output. You can also set the output to NTSC only in the setup; the conversion is done dynamically in the DVD player!! (You may lose a few horiz lines when watching PAL VCDs tho, they are chopped off due to the format differences.) That's the bonus about those "cheapo" Chinese brands... they play everything under the sun, CDRs, MP3s, and let you disable Macrovision to boot!
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
A lot of newer DVD players don't do CD-Rs either, mostly by design (for example, you can only do burned VCDs on the extreme high-end Sony DVD players; Sony could trivially add the correct laser mechanism to all models, but they don't want to).
Your best bet are those cheap non-mainstream players like Apex, which do DVD, VCD, CD-R, CD, MP3 and MPEG-over-iso9660.
No - DVD media format should not be supported over VCD simply because it suits someone's recordable DVD agenda. That's an absurd notion. VCD is cheaper, and if the application is suitable, then VCD is the right choice.
.... yet.
Incidentally, living in Singapore, I regularly purchase original movies from local stores in VCD format. It is perfectly acceptable format in general, and the per unit price is about US$5 if you look around, plus you avoid the ridiculous hassles of VHS - tape life, rewinding, bulky size, head alignment, retensioning (it's 2002, wtf???) etc.
Incidentally, The only reason that studios don't put movies out on VCD in the west is simply that it's such a great, convenient format, easy to back-up and duplicate and long-lasting. The reason they put original material out on the format in Asia is because local pirates already were doing so, and the market had already selected the format as preferable over tape. The studios had no choice by to support the defacto decision and release original movies on VCD, much to their chagrin.
Tape is a fantastic format for the studios. It's expensive, analog, time-consuming for users to duplicate, and the media rapidly decays if you use it. Sudios support DVD only because most PCs can't easily write DVDs
VCD is fifteen years old. It was created in 1987. Now, was that so difficult?
Well, this is kind of strange. I don't know about the US or South-East Asian markets, but I do remember seeing something called `Video CD' in the UK during (I think) early 1989.
There were 3 sizes of disc- ordinary CD size, LP size (12") and another somewhere inbetween. I had a leaflet advertising this format, and saw some discs (5" and 12") on sale. IIRC they were gold coloured.
I'm pretty sure that this wasn't the same Video CD format as the one that was introduced with the Philips CDi, because the standard-sized CDs could only hold 20 minutes or so of video (good for music singles, I guess)- hence the reason for the existence of the larger discs.
I don't think the store got any more discs in that format after the initial supply, which says it all.
More importantly, when the `modern' VCDs were being marketed in the early 90s, I got the impression that this was a different format to the late-80s 'Video CD's.
So, I'm kind of curious about this now...
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I'd like to know from what dimension you're getting an 8mm disc that holds nearly half an hour of video. :-) (I think you meant 80mm, or 8cm).
On a more serious note, 80mm discs wouldn't be bad for some things if they weren't so much more expensive than 120mm discs. Economies of scale have favored the larger discs. (In any case, the shows I burn to SVCD are "1-hour" shows that get trimmed down to ~45 minutes. The smaller CDs wouldn't work for that...and note that I'm using SVCD, which is a better format than VCD (SVCD is MPEG-2 instead of MPEG-1, and it uses higher resolution and higher bitrates).)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.