VHS, VCDs, and Laserdiscs in Southeast Asia

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?

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]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX

DIVX/XVID is ambiguous, it is a video format and separately a crappy DRM ecosystem from defunct Circuit City. The format DIVX would compress a full length movie to about 700MB (a CD capacity), where VCD MPEG-1 only got 75-80 minutes. LaserDisc owners were already trying to solve the disc-change interruption problem with premium two sided players. The format was also better to watch, in that the compression artifacts were less obvious. But the Rights Holders at the time, like for music, were more concerned with piracy, even though everything they did would make the consumer experience worse and drive more piracy. DIVX the DRM is a great example of an anti-consumer consumer format, and environmentally wasteful too as the plastic disc became "spent" after 30 days.