[VCD]
digital video
without the copy protection

To its credit, the VCD format has no encryption (unlike DVD), no copy protection (unlike DVD), and you can make one with just about any old CD-ROM writer--all of which adds up to a thriving pirate market at your local Chinatown. To its discredit, VCD has a blurry picture resolution of 352x240 (NTSC, 352x288 for PAL) and A/V data is stored in an MPEG-1 stream that that looks--well--not so great, really, but is perceptually little worse than VHS. (Weird geometric compression artifacts are another bonus, particularly during scenes of quick movement.) And where DVDs merely look like CDs, VCDs are CDs--the media is the same, the only difference is the data format.

So the quality is not so great, but definitely acceptable. What makes VCDs cooler than that is their egalitarian playability:

• many DVD players support VCD playback (check the specs)
• you can buy a dedicated VCD player (a CD deck plus MPEG decoder chip and video out) at the same place you bought your bootleg Jackie Chan VCDs
• you can use your factory-fresh Pentium or PowerMac (slower than 100Mhz is unacceptable) and play VCDs with the system-supplied multimedia tools (Media Player on Windows, Movie Player on MacOS)
• if you own a Sony Playstation, Sega Saturn or Nintendo 64 (or even Amiga CD32 or Goldstar 3DO), you can buy an MPEG/VCD decoder attachment of debatable playback quality