The Official Video CD (and CD-i DV) Thread

[kfbkfb]

This thread is about the 1st Digital Video (and Digital Audio)
consumer optical disc format.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_CD

I first saw CD-i Digital Video at the SCES in Chicago in the early 1990s
(a short portion of the James Bond movie The Living Daylights).

I have several Video CDs:
Clear and Present Danger
Star Trek The Motion Picture
Never Say Never Again
The World is not Enough
and one CD-i Digital Video (purchased 1993-11):
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

My Panasonic DVD-S1 plays all my Video CDs but won't play my CD-i DV.

I played the Star Trek CD-i DV at a Department Store on a Philips CD-i
player with the FMV/Full Motion Video cartridge, as I recall, the picture
impressed me by being almost noise free (unlike Broadcast, Cable,
LaserDisc and Videotape).

Clear and Present Danger has very good picture quality (P&S)
and has a Dolby Surround encoded stereo soundtrack.

Star Trek The Motion Picture has fair picture quality (P&S), but
it seems to have been made from a master video with a lot of
dropouts in both the video and the audio.

Never Say Never Again has fair picture quality (somewhat letterboxed),
but was made from a damaged film source with a lot of scratches and
noise and a few jumps in the movie.

The World is not Enough has good picture quality (P&S) but has one
segment where the encoder seems to run out of bits and the picture
degrades dramatically.

Back in the mid-1990s, before DVDs, our local Best Buy had a small
section with Video CDs.

What are your experiences with Video CDs (and CD-i Digital Videos)?

Kirk Bayne