I remember burning SVCD (Super Video CD) which were encoded in mpeg2 for shows and movies I was recording with my Pinnacle aquisition card. That was a bit before DivX then Xvid codec became popular enough for any DVD player to support it.
SVCD provided a near indistinguishable quality difference with DVDs when using most CRT TVs and had the advantage of being supported by any DVD player dinxe the same video and audio formats were used. You could burn the movie into 2 CDR if you wanted to maximize the quality, 2CDR were still cheaper than 1 DVDR.
I’m a little surprised that one of the supposed advantages of Laserdisc over tape is resistance to humidity. Wasn’t delamination/corrosion (LaserRot) a not-uncommon problem for LD? I’m guessing humidity issues (particularly mold) were much more pronounced with tape.
One of my neatest Beijing finds was an usually eloquent huckster (i.e. not a country bumpkin) leading me through maze of alleys and hallways to a VCD shop that repackaged discs into really nice matching spines and covers. Kind of like criterion collection / Nintendo switch games. Like analogue custom plex art - they had service where you can colorize your collection.
> It’s wild to me to think people can simply move overseas and interstate now and watch the same intertube programming, but that’s a different post.
This is still not easy without piracy, at least for liveTV.
Not easy, but not hard either. Same for the physical media. It just takes different ways/methods of skirting the same rules.
Were bootlegs popular?
The first time I traveled outside the western part of the world, I was (naively or not) surprised by the sheer amount of bootleg tapes sold in regular stores. Same with DVD when that time came around.
Bootlegging of everything is a huge business.
Back in the 90s Singapore was such a big market for this that it acted as the major driver for motivating globally synchronized releases. i.e. for Reader's Digest magazine* in the US in 1995 if you did not release it on the same day in Singapore it would be easily available in pirated form within days, removing any ability to make money in that market for the legitimate product.
In UK pubs circa 2000 it was notorious that certain people would approach your table to sell you bootleg DVDs, and that if you indulged them you'd then get access to their "special" selection.
* And yes, that example is totally serious.
In Thailand in the ‘90s, there were street vendors selling every dvd and cd you could think of, all bootlegs, complete with copied artwork and packaging. It was completely out in the open.
same in Mexico. i remember buying a ton of nu-metal CDs from street vendors on vacation as a kid.
Copy protection for physical media was so rudimentary back then. VHS tapes literally just have a piece of plastic you could break off that acted as copy protection. Everyone had CRT's so no one was a quality freak either, really.
> VHS tapes literally just have a piece of plastic you could break off
I think that made the tapes read-only.
VHS copy protection was mostly some flavour of Macrovision (at least in Canada).
Even in the States, there were computer swap meets in my town, and VCDs were everywhere in the 90s at them. I remember the first time I saw one, and asked where the VCR was, but realized it looked different than a VHS would look. I had no idea at the time, but I would later go to work for a company that started with making interactive CDs, VCDS, and eventually DVDs. Not sure the bootleg market had anything to do with it, but I was at least knowledgeable about the format when asked in job interview. So evidence of one, bootlegging isn't all bad!
Bootlegging was massive in Malaysia. Whole floors of some of the high-rise malls in Johor Bahru were VCD shops.
Rainbow Centre in Karachi was a highlight of my childhood.
I'm pretty sure they're still popular outside of the western world. At least for some things. eBay is filled with bootleg DVDs of Anime, TV shows, etc. There is no official Simpsons Season 21+ DVDs for example and yet they are not very hard to find...
My friend that lived in Iran said you basically would have a guy that goes around and basically opens his trunk and offers bootlegs.
Sometimes they’d disappear for a while and you’d have to work with your existing collection or find a new guy.
But that was pre ubiquitous-ish high speed internet.
Very popular. Even Seinfeld got caught up in it.
TFA
Funnily enough, the article spent a paragraph explaining the initialism and acronym, only to refer to VCD as an acronym later.
It's interesting that LaserDiscs were popular. They were quite niche in the West so I imagine they must have been expensive to produce. Who even made the machines?
Did they make writers?
I think they existed for (doubtless very expensive) niche professional purposes though formats were probably different. But not for consumers. Have a stack of lasdiscs in my garage which I sort of hate to just chuck but probably will someday.
A decade or so ago, we got rid of a huge collection of about 350 laserdics - a guy drove from two states over to pick them up for his small towns community center where they would play movies for the town.
One of the frustrations about things like that is that you pretty much know someone would want them but I'm pretty much not going to go to the effort of connecting with that someone.
Criterion Collection. nuff said
You can buy a vhs cleaner that accepts some alcohol and then fast forwards and rewinds through the tape. The alcohol would soak into a sponge bit and wipe the tape.
At least this is my recollection.
Memory partially valid.
An important part of using a head cleaning tape was to use play mode, not FF or RW. Only play (or record) modes would have the tape wrapped around the head while FF/RW would disengage the tape completely from the head. This is done to save head wear, and to help prevent magnetizing the head.
(Except on examples like this weird, late-model Sony deck I have: On it, the tape is always engaged with the head from the time it is inserted to the time it is ejected. And the head itself is "self-cleaning.")
At the VHS dub house I worked, each of the recorders would be taken down once a month to have all of the rollers, head drum, and other parts of the tape path that made contact with the tape cleaned by hand by the engineering department. In the head end where the masters were played, we'd do the same thing on the master playback equipment at the beginning of each shift and possibly more frequently if the masters were of less quality or really old. The 1" machines were easy to clean, but the cassette formats were more difficult in having to pull the units out of the racks, remove the cover, blah blah.
At least this is my recollection. <shivers/> the really bad ol' days
Memory unlocked, incredible. I just clearly remembered doing this to re-record some stuff.
Brings back memories of VHS copies of bootleg and other questionable content (Pr0n) being sold in certain shops in Singapore (if you know where to find them) in 80s.
Loved this, such a good reminder that for a lot of us in SE Asia, VCDs weren’t just a format, they were basically the bridge between VHS bootlegs and early DVDs. Karaoke, bootlegs, family movies… it was all mixed in.
What’s interesting is how much the timing of official releases shaped all this. If you had to wait months for a cinema run or home video, the “street version” was too tempting to pass up.
> the bridge between VHS bootlegs and early DVDs
What about DivX/XviD?
What about DivX/XviD?
VCDs had broad hardware support, and were more mainstream.
I used to travel around Southeast Asia a bit, and whenever I was in Hong Kong, I'd load up on VCD movies at mainstream stores like HMV.
I still have VCD copies of The Incredibles and On Her Majesty's Secret Service I bought at HMV.
VCD were a format that put compressed video and sound onto a standard CD. That is where Mp3s sort of come from. The VCD actually used MPEG1layer2 for sound, but layer 3 came along and computer enthusiasts used that for audio in the mid 1990s. SVCDs came out in the later 90s They used the MPEG2 like Dvds and were often spread over multiple discs. DIVX came from a Microsoft program that had MPEG4 inside of the software, this and the wrapper AVI came together for the first internet distribution focused format. There was a Chinese DVD player and some mainstream ones that supported VCD and SVCD and later avis. There was an active scene modding certain Phillips DVD players in the early 2000s.
You left out the DIVX pushed by Circuit City with the DRM crap limiting the number of plays. I never truly looked into the format, but I once heard that the format would use IPB long-GOP encoding, but left out the B-frames and used in their place the code that made it locking. It's demise couldn't come fast enough. I seem to recall it needing a phone cable to work as well, but the wiki page does not mention that, but does mention something implying connectivity "The player's Security Module, which had an internal Real-Time Clock, ceased to allow DIVX functions after 30 days without a connection to the central system."[0]
What's the usage of the word 'factoid' when its use is clearly to just say 'fact'; considering the word 'factoid' actually means something that looks like a fact, but is – in fact – false? The fact that it should mean 'false fact' but may be used as 'true fact', makes the opening of this piece rather confusing.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid
I was only familiar with the second definition -
- a briefly stated and usually trivial fact
I was only familiar with the first for a long time, until I realised that other people were using it in the same manner as literally.
What's the usage of the word 'factoid' when its use is clearly to just say 'fact'
What's the use of the word "usage" when its use is clearly to just say "use?"