VideoCD

A VHS-resolution standard for storing digital video on an ordinary CD. VideoCDs use MPEG1 compression in PAL or NTSC resolution and are in ISO Mode 2 (CD-XA) format. VideoCDs are popular in Asia where VideoCD players are as common as VCRs in the USA. Prior to divx, this was a very popular format for DVD pirates to distribute ripped DVDs in. Many DVD players, such as the Apex AD-600A, are able to play VideoCDs. Microsoft ActiveMovie and Apple QuickTime also include an MPEG player that allows you to view VideoCDs on your computer.

VideoCD in a nutshell™®©

The video should be encoded in any of the following MPEG-1 formats:

NTSC

352x240, 29.97 frames/second

PAL

352x288, 25 frames/second

Film

352x240, 23.976 frames/second

Video bitrate is 1152 kbit/s.

Audio should be encoded at 16bit 44100 Hz stereo, MPEG-1 Layer II (aka MP2), with bitrate of 224 kbit/s.

This makes total bitrate 1394.40 kbit/s, which means that standard CD-ROM can hold approximately 72 minutes of video.

Multiplexing of the audio and video needs to be done in special VideoCD mode (no idea what this option in encoders actually does - special kind of padding of data, I believe?)

The disks should be in CD-ROM/XA format. In *NIX, there are a couple of options for mastering VCD images - such as mkvcdfs and vcdimager (latter is very much recommended!). cdrdao can be used to burn the disk.

If you want to read the disks, each video clip appears in mpegav/ directory with names like avseq01.dat, avseq02.dat and so on, for each "title".

Also note: Most DVD players are able to play VideoCD discs, but some have problems reading CD-R disks in general!

Sources:

VideoCD Frequently Asked Questions, Version 0.9 - 22-April-1999, R. Christopher Harshman - http://paradigm.uor.edu/~harshman/video/VideoCD-FAQ.html
MpegTV FAQ, http://www.mpegtv.com/faq.html
CD-Recordable FAQ, http://www.cdrfaq.org/