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playing (S)VCDs as DVDs on a PC

Hi,

Maybe this is better for the newbie forum, but I figured more people here would have the answer.

I've been trying to use the onboard DVD player on a bunch of PCs to play VCDs. I tried on WinXP, Win2K, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD ... none of them want to recognize the disc as being DVD-playable. Obviously, they all have software specifically meant for playing VCDs, but I've noticed that playback with those programs is sometimes slow and jerky, even with great graphics cards. Since playing VCDs in standalone DVD players is usually crystal clear, I assumed that a DVD player on a PC would also have better performance than the VCD software ...

So have you all had this kind of problem playing VCDs on computer DVD players, or should it be working?

svcd and vcds are reconizable in all my computers with a dvd drive and also just plain cd-rom

and they are supposed to

try powerdvd or windvd for pc and VLC for any other OS

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ehhhhh

oh now i see what you mean

no it does not work that way, those standalone dvd players have codec chips to play svcd or vcd

some gfx cards do have svcd codec chips such as my friends radeon 64ddr vivo, but the dvd player for computers itself does not contain any codecs of anykind, it is just designed for reading data from a dvd or cd.

my main computer, which is a mac.... , does nto have a vcd/svcd codec card on the video card, which means it is software rendered, and thats where you get that jumpy performance

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ehhhhh

ok, thx for the info. that's what I figured. my strategy on Mac is to start playing the disc, stop the movie, and start it playing again. that usually helps. ffw'ing and rewinding are almost impossible ...

alternatively, i just rip and watch the mpeg (or watch the mpeg before i burn the VCD) with mplayer on OS X. mplayer is so much better than VLC IMHO, but it makes it too easy to 'surf' through the movie, so i spend too much time rewinding and watching scenes again! installing mplayer is easy using fink, but the build takes about 2.5 hours.

-hst4r

Daemon Tools

Use WinDVD Platinum (err whatever ver u want) and use Daemon Tools to load the bin/cue to watch it from there, or as all others have said, a PC will play a VCD/SVCD as a dvdplayer reguardless in Windvd.

Enj0y