I am currently looking for a standalone VCD player. I notice that most of the players in the market supported VCD version 2.0. However, there are also one or two of them like "KENWOOD" supported VCD version 3.0. a) Anybody who can explain what are the differences between VCD version 1.x, 2.0 and 3.0. ? b) What is the most common version in the market currently ? If I bought a version 2.0 player, can I play VCD version 3.0 should it become popular in the future ? c) Some VCD players come with S-Video interface; would it really improve the video and audio quality to a noticable level if I connect it to my TV using S-Video cable ? d) Some says VCD players come with three disc changer tray can easily get jammed. Is it true ?

-- Lee Heng Yew (hengyew.lee@usa.net), November 20, 1998

Answers

I don't know a whole lot, but I'll post what I know.... If anyone else has more answers, please post them.

a) I think the major difference between VCD 1.x and 2.0 is that VCD 2.0 supports menus. I don't know anything about VCD 3.0.

b) I think most players support version 2.0. If version 3.0 becomes popular, a version 2.0 player will probably be able to play version 3.0 discs, but it won't provide any of the new 3.0 features.

c) Don't know, but I don't think so, because the video quality provided by VCD is limited in the first place. I doubt that S-video cables would make much difference.

d) Don't know.

-- Russil Wvong (rwvong@geocities.com), November 25, 1998.

Version 3.0 Support HTML format

-- Ian (ianr@starmail.com), January 22, 1999.

Answer to your question c) Theoretically, an S-video connector should provide better quality in whichever video-format that stores luma and chroma signals separately. This is the case of VCD as well as DVD, S-VHS and Hi-8. In the other hand LaserDisc, VHS and Video-8 stores the information as composite, which means that luma and chroma are intrinsically mixed inside the source, so step-before an hypothetical S-video output, a so called "comb filter" would have to separate them apart, which makes no sense since this is exactly what the TV always does after receiving a Composite signal. The problem of mixing Luma and Chroma, is that for very high quality video (higher quality=higher frequencies), the luma overlaps the chroma, so the high frequencies components of luma get lost in the separation which leads to quality degradation. Therefore, the true improvement of S-video only happens when the soure is either DVD, S-VHS, Hi-8. VCD's quality is too bad in practice for this overlaping to occur, so there would be no difference in this case between using composite or S-video outputs.

-- Matias (petrellm@telefonica.com.ar), October 04, 1999.

only some VCD Players support VCD3.0 and some dosen't but VCD2.0 version discs can be played in VCD3.0 version VCD players

-- arun thomas (arunregi@netscape.net), February 20, 2002.