Yet another Hacker News

39 points ClydeN 23 hours ago 8 comments

peebee67 2 hours ago | parent

Hilarious! Thanks for the research and write-up. I enjoyed the read.

happyPersonR 1 hour ago | parent

I never thought we would talk about VCD's again LOLLL

nice to see something about this technology again. It was pervasive across SE asia for a little :).

NDlurker 1 hour ago | parent

I wanted to get into VCDs when I was a kid and I got a portable CD player that could also play VCDs, but the player was so buggy I just gave up. Maybe now is the time

xp84 1 hour ago | parent

Reading the first half or so made me think, "Wow, they should really fix this."

The second half made me think, "Wow, what a gross format. Really glad we have no use for these anymore!" (Not that they should leave the Explorer crash unfixed, of course).

It's bananas to me that a CD-ROM cost like $400 in 1990s money at one point; then I spent $150 on my first CD burner around 2002, and now you can buy a USB Blu-Ray/DVD/CD recorder drive for under $40.

ssl-3 51 minutes ago | parent

VCD was in-keeping with the style of the time. General-purpose compute was expensive, so it was avoided.

Like the red book audio CDs that preceeded them, white book VCDs were a way to make playback a light-weight task on very specialized (maybe even single-purpose) hardware.

That's not necessarily a meaningful goal these days, but our limitations were different back then.

karpour 13 minutes ago | parent

Random anecdote: There was Video Cd, but also CD Video. CD video had both an (inner) CD part with audio, as well as a Laserdisc part which would usually contain a music video. Very weird format, but cool to have both analog and digital storage in one medium.

rasz 3 minutes ago | parent

win10/11 should be able to automagically mount ISO image with double click. There might be a way of isolating exact problem bit and distills it into USB flashable image with arbitrary filename.

buggeryorkshire 3 minutes ago | parent

Most use of VCD I saw was in karaoke, the low res graphics but decent sound worked fine for that - my karaoke DJ mate had hundreds.