VHS, VCDs, and Laserdiscs in Southeast Asia

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.

> SVCD provided a near indistinguishable quality difference with DVDs when using most CRT TVs

From what I remember, SVCD uses roughly the same MPEG-2 video compression as DVD-Video, but with a much lower maximum bit rate. Even with a movie split onto two CDs, the bitrate was still less than half the bitrate of a professionally mastered DVD. I always found the quality of SVCDs to be noticeably poor.

On an high end LCD monitor the diffrence was very visible but on an average CRT TV in didn't make a huge difference.