can video cds have a dolby digital soundtrack.

-- KH (phunkyphox@hotmail.com), January 12, 1999

Answers

No. You can't have a dolby digital soundtrack on VCD. If a disk can perform AC-3, quite big space is required to store the AC-3 signal. So far only DVD can be used to play AC-3.

The compressing technology used by VCD is old version and it's impossible perform so much information.

-- sm306 (sm306@yahoo.com), January 13, 1999.

Yes. Movie studios license the film to distribution houses and let the distributor pick the sound standard. Many films have Dolby Digital soundtracks(the Long Kiss Goodnight and Armageddon are two of the many). Yes you can have AC-3 as well. Many pirates from Thailand are in AC-3 formatted sound. The only sound standard that will not work is Dolby DTS(that is the huge compression). By the way Dolby Digital has three version: Dolby Digital Surround(most movies are in this foarmt), Dolby Digital AC-3(Most pirates encode in this format to clean up the sound), and the newest one Dolby Digital DTS(only for DTS encoded DVD and DTS decoders, and movie theaters). AC-3 was formed to make Digital Surround better and cleaner for DVDs. Pirates then figured out how to encode moives in this format. Thus it is becoming the sound standard for all movies.

-- the Lone Ranger (rutger_s@hotmail.com), June 04, 1999.

The Lone Ranger knows nothing about digital sound formats. All of the sound formats he is talking about were originally developed as theater sound formats. Dolby Surround is the original surround sound format for home video, and was a matrixed sound format, decoded by the Dolby Pro-logic system. By the way, Dolby Digital does not have three different versions. What was known as AC-3 Digital surround is now known as Dolby Digital. Dolby Digital is one standard for movie theater sound, along with Digital Theater Sound(DTS) and Sony Dynamic Digital Sound(SDDS). Those are all three different sound formats developed by three different companies. DTS was never developed by Dolby, DTS is its own company and has no affiliation with Dolby whatsoever. AC-3 is NOT used by pirates to "clean up the sound". It is a sound format itself, and just because some pirate labels his vcds with "AC-3" doesn't mean he did anything to the sound. It is just a gimmick to trick people who don't know any better about these sound systems into thinking they are buying a quality product, which thry are not. I saw a vcd with a logo that said "Double Digital" instead of Dobly Digital. Quality? I think not. If a movie pirate actually does have a 5.1 track on a pirated dvd, not vcd, like the Star Wars Trilogy, it was most likely taken from a laserdisc transfer, not encoded by the pirate himself. Furthermore, Dolby Digital was not formed to make Dolby Surround sound better for dvd. Dolby Digital and Dolby Surround are completely different in nature. Dolby Digital is a discrete 5.1 channel surround format, meaning it contains five SEPARATE channels of sound(front right and left, center, and surround right and left) and one Low Frequency Effect channel, which carries the low frequency bass to the subwoofer. Dolby Surround is a matrixed sound format, meaning that it contains four tracks of sound(front right and left, center and surround) matrixed into two channel stereo sound that is decoded by a Dolby Pro-logic decoder to carry seemingly four separate channels of sound to five speakers. Dolby Digital was developed years after Dolby Surround, as Dolby surround is an old sound format. Dolby Digital began in theaters in the late 80's/early 90's as Dolby Surround SR (spectral recording) and was later called Dolby Digital AC-3 Digital Surround Sound, mainly on home video laserdisc releases. Then in recent years, the AC-3 was dropped and it was then called Dolby Digital. Dolby Digital is the standard sound format for dvd. Vcd uses a regular stereo pcm track, not AC-3 5.1 surround, and that is the best you can get, stereo sound. If you have a Dolby Pro-logic Surround sound decoder, it will decode the stereo track into normal surround sound, meaning it is not Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound, but matrixed surround, not discrete. Just about every film released in movie theaters uses Dolby Digital as the standard digital format, then DTS or SDDS. Sometimes, the digital sound in the theater fails and the normal optical soundtrack kicks in, and the normal moviegoer cannot tell the difference. As to whether or not you can have 5.1 digital surround sound on a vcd, I doubt it. I have never seen a vcd with discrete digital sound and I don't think it is possible according to the Vcd 2.0 standards. It could be possible in theory, just look at how far some people were able to stretch the boundaries of vcd and still make a playable disc. But then again, in theory communism works. It would be cool to see a vcd with 5.1 sound, though. Some people really need to know what they are talking about before they spout false information to others. -JKS

-- James Kern Saxton (kernsaxton@hotmail.com), April 14, 2001.

well said - u saved me the trouble of saying it. i did try making a vcd with DD audio - it DIDN'T work :-(

-- ndumu (ndumu@hotmail.com), April 15, 2001.

Bummer. What did you use to encode the sound and burn the disc?

-- JKS (kernsaxton@hotmail.com), April 16, 2001.

sonic foundry soft encode - used to make DD wave files tmpgenc - to convert DD waves to mp2 and mux with mpeg video nti cd maker pro - to burn vcd played on a sony dvp c600d. the video played, but the audio was just noise. there are too many possible reasons why it didnt work - im not making any more coasters trying to find out, lol

-- ndumu (ndumu@hotmail.com), April 17, 2001.

basicly what you did is making a miniDVD \ Video-cd hybrid, you could try making a complete mini-DVD (doom9 has some cool guides) but theyll not play on most dvd players, but you could try it. personally I use it with my spdif sound card output and my radeon 7500 s-video output to my receiver, that way youll have near full dvd quality on a cd-R

-- Evert (thafunkyhomosapiensreturn@hotmail.com), January 14, 2002.