Why can't I play the video of "Doctorin'The Tardis" By the Timelords on my V-CD carded Sega Saturn- the disc is a gold 5" disc first released in 1988 on phono vision is there a difference between CD Video & V-CD?

-- Al Hine (alhine@v500kbs.fsnet.co.uk), August 13, 2003

Answers

CDV is an old, dead format that only worked on laserdisc players. It is not compatible with VCD and can not be played on PCs, VCD players or DVD players. It can only be played on laserdisc players. CDV supported 5 minutes of analog, laserdisc compatible video and up to 20 minutes of CD compatible audio on a CD disc. The disc format was some kind of hybrid format that made it look like a normal audio CD to a CD player, but look like a laserdisc to a laserdisc player. There is no software to burn your own CDVs, in case you wondered. VCD is a completely different format that supports roughly 1 minute of video per minute on the CD disc (that means that you can get about 80 minutes of VCD video on an 80 minute CD-R) and is not compatible with laserdiscs or CD audio. DVD specifications were deliberately designed to be upwardly compatible with VCD, which is why most DVD players will play the discs, although a few American DVD players have been reported to have no support at all for the format. A few older Toshiba models were the most notorious for this.

-- Root (root@yahoo.moc), August 14, 2003.