CD Video (Not Video CD)
CD Video is a confusing format, not just because of the similarities of its name to Video CD, but also because it's really two formats pretending to be one, and one of those already existed under another name. In this video I attempt to navigate through this confusion to explain what CD Video was and why it’s all but forgotten nowadays.
Comments (54)
The corrupted audio from that Cameo disc would make for a great ASSET video.
I wish I could see the faces of the audience in that 1987 MPG1 demo.
CD Video: It‘s not paining, it‘s passed on.
Was not aware that the guy from photonicinduction did CD Video promotion movies from the 80's :-)
Video CD was prolific in the Philippines as well up until 2016 or so. Used to pick them up at the mall for a few bucks even for new releases until I had a reliable internet connection at home, kept a few of the cooler ones when I came home as they are region free
INXS and Levar Burton in the same Techmoan video-nice! Anyway, I remember reading about CD Video on Wikipedia-neat to see the real deal. As for the later Video CD, the only commercial one I have is an M2M karaoke CD from Asia.
Being an 80s hip-hop fan like yourself, I have Salt-n-Pepa’s ‘Push It’ on this format. And 30 years later, it’s still never been played!
Other CD formats that may or may not warrant videos or mentions: kodak Picture CD and CD Enhanced. BBC Music Magazine cover CDs used the latter for a while until it dawned on the publishers that it was less hassle to include the articles in the actual magazine.
I seem to remember getting a Kodak picture CD made at some point. Perhaps I should round a few of these up in one video at some point.
Awesome video. I actually bought a CD Video a couple years back here in Japan. It's a game soundtrack with a video tacked on. Pity I'd have to buy a Laserdisc player to watch the video track. <a href="https://www.discogs.com/Takami-Asano-Chase-HQ/release/9521659" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.discogs.com/Takami-Asano-Chase-HQ/release/9521659</a>
Chase HQ one of my favourites. I bought a follow up to the Pandora Arcade stick I reviewed a while ago with SCI Special Criminal Investigation included in it - it’s a much faster processor so runs really smoothly, although it’s controlled with a digital stick. I’m reluctant to do a review on it as the last one ruffled a few feathers.
Brilliant video! Soon you might be covering the popular streeming video format ;)
I can remember VCD and its unofficial cousin SVCD being sold on every flea market in Germany with the newest movies on them. o.o
You're not going to stop until you have a sample of every home audio or video format created. I can't wait for you to get to Baird discs.
I agree about CD-i! Back in the early 90's I worked for a store called "LaserLand" and we sold the Philips CD-i system and it seemed like the future. It was, on disc, a prototype of what the Internet would become. I miss it! Or do I, really? I think Mat would do a great job with it.
Thanks, this was very interesting! I am still wondering how it is possible i completely missed this format as an 80's teenager :)
I think that was part of the problem, it was much easier to miss it than it was to find it.
Mat, that bouncing bar above the image the disc-rot exposes gave me an idea; have you ever thought about doing a future video on Macrovision; the home copy-protection format widely used to prevent VHS copying? The videos currently on YouTube about it dont really go into any detail and I'm sure a lot of VHS bootleggers back in the idea had no idea what it was or how it worked and why some machines weren't susceptible to it. The gadget side of it could be the primitive "macro-busters" created to circumvent the technology which would get rid of the image pulses but seemingly creating a far less sharper (atleast by VHS standards) image.
It’s something I know very little about, but perhaps one day I’ll read up on it to see if there’s enough there to make a video about.
Joe read my mind. I'd really like to see Mat's take on CD-I. I picked up a copy of "Ghost" on this format to see if it would play in Laserdisc or DVD player which it doesn't, so whatever Philips used for this was a different syle of encoding. If you need that copy of "Ghost" in the future TM, let me know.
It should play on a VCD compatible DVD player. Have you tried any other VCDs?
By the way, if you're ever going to do a video in the future about CD-i and Video CD, don't forget to include the CD-BGM (Background Music) format which was also related and was compatible with CD-i players (though it was usually played on the Philips BMS-3000 player which was made by the company known later as Plextor). If you can find any background music CD's in that format from 1994 or 1995 by Philips BMS (Background Music Services), chances are about 100% that I was involved in making them. Let me know if/when you want more information. :-)
Thanks, I will.
The first CD-Video I ever got was "Chriet Titulaer Happy 88". You can find it on YouTube. It's a video that shows how CD's are made. Unfortunately it's in Dutch. Chriet Titulaer was a well-known Dutch scientist who could be seen on TV very often in the 1980s and 1990s. The "Happy 88" CD-V was intended as a New Year's present and came with a book about all kinds of interesting future technologies that one day would be in your house. But the CD-V and the players weren't ready on time. He gave the book and CD-V away at the Firato in Amsterdam in 1988, that's where I got it from. I was into music videos and I thought the format was kind of interesting so I bought a couple of the 12cm discs in 1988 and 1989: Donald Fagen - New Frontier, Cameo - Word Up! and another one that I can't remember or find right now (EDIT: the third one was Shakatak - Down on the Street). All three that I *can* find look to be in excellent condition but I've never been able to play the video part; the format got discontinued before I had a chance to buy a player :-)
That sounds really interesting. The 12cm discs could only hold a few minutes of video, but I wonder what they packed into those minutes on your disc. My demo disc has exactly 6 minutes of video on it..to the second and I’ve read that this is the maximum.
Fascinating, Mat. This has reminded me I used to buy the occasional CD+G disc. When my kids were little I had a Commodore CDTV that, apart from running great kids games and having the coolest on-screen CD player graphics ever, also played low res graphics from CD+G discs. I remember I had a Fleetwood Mac disc with a few pictures and the lyrics which came up on the TV when playing the music. I can't say I was overwhelmed, but it is another CD disc format you might like to think about featuring at some point. I had a quick search and find the format is still used in karaoke systems - never knew that!
Yes, I’m planning on getting to CD+G at some point. Just the other day I was trying to find if I had some CDs with Text for the track names. Apparently this didn’t take off either. This just smacks of laziness because there’s no other reason to leave it out - there are no compatibility issues associated with it. In the end I did find a couple - they tended to add Text to the Hybrid SACDs, but even then I found that it was only on a couple from the ten or so I tested.
@7:00 "The digital audio part is completely gone". On the video part of the CD-Video, both the audio and the video were analog. That's why the bad audio sounds like an FM radio that's not getting a strong enough signal.
I think the audio is digital on the video section...that was one of the big selling points. The articles talk about Philips having to refund everyone who has a laservision player (all 15,000 of them) as PAL CD Video only had room for either an analog or a digital soundtrack but not both. So anyone with an old laservision player wouldn’t be able to play the new CD Video discs with their digital soundtracks...or at least they wouldn’t be able to hear anything if they did.
I see Scandal has rating of 91% on RottenTomatoes. Never seen it.
Coincidentally enough the lady it’s all about, Christine Keeler died just last month. I can’t remember seeing it either, perhaps I should pop the disc in one day before it self destructs.
Kenny Everett!
Neat video. I owned a laserdisc player back in the 1990s. I saw in the manual that it supported these "CD-Video" discs but I was never able to find one. However, I did come across one of the 8 inch laserdisc music singles in a resale shop once, so I bought it. It was a Bobby Brown single, which I couldn't stand. But I bought it mostly just to say I had a 8" disc. (or was it 7", now I can't remember!) One thing that I found interesting is that my 8" disc is a little different from your Madonna disc. Yours is a two-layer disc with a blank side. But my Bobby Brown disc is just a single layer like a regular CD, just larger. So that's interesting. I actually still have that disc somewhere even though I sold all of my laserdisc stuff back in the 1990s.
Yes the Madonna one was a special edition, the white layer was the equivalent of doing a picture disc, the white plastic being appropriate for the song title. Most 8” discs would be standard silver on both sides. You were wise to offload your LaserDiscs while they still held value. Now the cost of shipping is worth more than the discs themselves (with a couple of exceptions).
Great video! So what are the differences between Video CD and DVD? And are the relatively recent 'hybrid' CDs the same as CD video? Discs such as this..... <a href="https://www.discogs.com/Michael-Jackson-Dont-Stop-Til-You-Get-Enough/release/656162" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.discogs.com/Michael-Jackson-Dont-Stop-Til-You-Get-Enough/release/656162</a>
VCD is MPEG 1 encoded video on a CD, DVD uses MPEG2 and of course the discs are DVDs. Many DVD players could play VCDs although I’ve found by the time Blu-ray came around this backwards compatibility with has largely disappeared. That disc you linked to has a DVD section. The main thing that distinguishes Video CD is that it has analog video, so approx 400 lines composite. The only thing that’s digital is the audio.
Younger people with their Star Trek quality smart phones probably don't appreciate the many changes in formats and technologies that appeared and disappeared on the road to where we are now. The migration from analogue to digital wasn't a smooth one, to be sure. Thanks for documenting that transition.
Hey, now, that's not the case. Does (barely) under 30 qualify as young?
Pointless pedantry follows: the Domesday Project playback computer was a Master, not a Model B. Not only that, it needed an internal co-processor board and a SCSI interface to talk to the LV-ROM unit. There was also a version developed for the RM Nimbus (a not-quite-IBM-compatible DOS machine based around the Intel 80186 which people outside the UK are probably fortunate enough not to remember), but I don't think I ever saw one in the wild. More interestingly, it's totally fascinating that the video from a badly rotted disc can remain almost completely intact bar a few dropouts while the soundtrack is completely obliterated.
Thanks, I’ll add in that correction to the video description text box (for no one to read). I suspect those rotted discs would get worse towards the outside edge, but I only played the first few seconds. I suppose that also demonstrates one of the advantages of analog video...just like TV reception, it’s still watchable even when it’s got a good amount of snow on it, however if a digital signal has an issue it quickly gives up.
Man...those gold discs sure did suffer from rot, didn't they? I vaguely remember owning a couple of these.
Haven't seen Kenny Everett in anything for years! That's going to be me looking for his TV show now. Great video as always Mat.
The golden format is what I mainly remember of the 80's allthough I love my recent laserdisc collection and my Pioneer CLD 2950 player. I noticed a brief mention of the CD-I format in the video. Do you have plans to make a video for this format? It was never succesfull, I know, but I allways loved the CD-I players and commercials from that era.
I don’t have any immediate plans for CDi - but it will probably show up in a video at some point.
Nice work as ever. The only CD video that I can remember seeing on sale in a shop (Manchester HMV} was this one. Even at the time I wondered how many of the target market would have the equipment to play the video sections It hadn't occurred to me until now that a VCD wasn't the same thing although it should have done as you wouldn't try to play the latter in a music CD player. <a href="https://www.discogs.com/Joshua-Bell-Presenting-Joshua-Bell/release/7072209" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.discogs.com/Joshua-Bell-Presenting-Joshua-Bell/release/7072209</a>
I own one solitary CDV, the 1987 release of New Order's True Faith, which was effectively their very first three-inch CD Single (albeit with a promo video as well) soon after Factory Records began re-releasing their artists catalogues on the "new" compact disc format. Tony Wilson claimed some years ago that the main reason he and Factory were suddenly gung-ho for CDs was because he wanted some music to play on his new car stereo! As for Factory and CDV, there was one more New Order single released on the format the following year, the 1988 remix of Blue Monday, then that was it. The prices for these True Faith and Blue Monday '88 CDVs now go for an astronomical price on the second hand market, I myself bought True Faith a few years ago and got it for a fairly pricey (but lower than some others) amount, and I won't even bother trying to buy the other, as sellers are valuing it at completely silly money. The only difference between the Blue Monday CDV and the standard CD single released at the same time is the promo video on the former (the audio tracks are identical on both formats).
Great video, learned some stuff. Is it me, or did the gold CDV discs seem to rot at a much faster rate than laserdiscs did?
It certainly seems like it - however the movie I got is fine. Perhaps it was just the ones they pressed in a particular factory. I believe the output from the Blackburn or Burnley plant (I can’t remembet which it was) was particularly reviled.
WOW! Such enthusiasm! Much awe! ^_^ No wonder why it never took off.. haha. Great video as usual.
The only CD Video disc I ever had in my hot little hands was the bonus CDV disc from the Bowie Sound + Vision box set. When I got it in 1989, nobody I knew had any kind of player that would play such discs, and there was no such thing as a CD drive for your PC in 1989.
Brilliant Video. I never heard of CD Video Interesting format. I had lots of VCDs though
I was never convinced of the format, I was happy with the laserdisc format, us home cinema snobs dissed the VCD CDV for poor quality and production and it didn't have the AC3 formats or dolby surround processing that we all had invested into.
This format is a new one on me! I still remember those 10 to 15 Video CD's (not CD Video) titles that were briefly displayed in the likes of WH Smith in the early 90s. No-one really cared and they soon disappeared. Not surprising when to play them you pretty much needed to buy the £199 MPEG upgrade for the already unpopular CDi, or have a £2000 PC. That said I've probably still for the 'Have I Got News For You' VCD in the loft!
I bought a load of VCDs in the 1990s and well into the 2000s because I was into watching Chinese action films. At one point there were four VCD shops in Manchester's China Town and I'd spend many a lunchtime going from one to another browsing the titles. DVDs were only available for some of the titles and usually cost between £25-£30. Given that I had no reviews of these films, I'd buy the VCDs because they were £8, and most shops did a three for £20 deal.