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."

Comments

Cart in front of the horse

[RobertFisher]

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

Re:Watch out for CD-R VCD in older DVD players

[Verizon Guy]

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!

Re:Watch out for CD-R VCD in older DVD players

[ncc74656]

I personally like the 8mm CD-Rs. They hold about 24 minutes of audio or VCD, and are perfect for typical 30 minute shows (minus commercials == 22 minutes). They're much more convenient than the 12mm discs IMO.

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).)