ABSTRACT
Introduced by multinational electronic corporations Sony and Philips in 1993, the video compact disc (VCD) is an optical disc, 4.8 inches in diameter, designed to store and display audiovisual content. The VCD is technically an advanced modification of the CD-ROM, equipped with an MPEG video codec that can store up to 800 MB of digital data or 72 minutes of recording time. Thus, a feature length movie is typically compressed into two or three discs. Because of this compression, the VCD’s image resolution (352 x 240 pixels) is comparatively lower than its predecessor, the laser disc (590 x 480 pixels), and its successor, the DVD (720 x 480 pixels). Therefore, when it comes to visual quality, the VCD does not rank high in the hierarchy of digital media.
