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Comment by NDlurker | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to get into VCDs when I was a kid and I got a portable CD player that could also play VCDs, but the player was so buggy I just gave up. Maybe now is the time

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I too was fascinated by VCDs for a stint during my younger years.

For me, the attraction was the potential of breeching the then-seemingly impenetrable wall between my computer and TVs. I had recently come into the possession of a CD burner (DVD burners were not yet available, at least not cheaply) and when my family picked up a dedicated DVD player that was advertised as also handling VCDs, I saw an opportunity.

The associated software ecosystem was quite flaky, though. I tried burning them with Roxio Toast and Nero among other utilities, but producing VCDs that player would actually play was hit or miss. I burned several coasters and eventually gave up.

They were best sourced form a relevent alt.binaries. groups. Two I recall were Movies and Videos, which had TV show rips.

Dude you and me both. My parents bought a combo VHS/DVD player that as it turned out could also handle VCDs, and I was able to watch a pirated version of AI with it. Eventually I got hold of a PowerMac 8500 with RCA in/out and really got cooking.

Seeing content created on my computer actually play on a TV really felt like a miracle in the 90s.

In 1997 there was the Pure3D graphics card, it was a 3DFX Voodoo 1 that could do TV output. Of course it could only do it on games as it still needed the 2D pass through for VGA output, but it was neat to see the PC doing what consoles could do.

Credit to HDMI, it finally standardized the IO systems that means PC to TV is trivial nowadays.

exactly. i too remember getting into vcd and svcd as a way to get video to my tv. I remember making some sort of Matrox to SCART lead and later I eventually got a TV (sony tritron) with s-vid that also helped the transition. it wasn’t until I got a plasma (px80) and popcorn hour a110 that i freed myself up from hacky cds and trailing wires. this was early 2000’s

Yeah it was pretty rough up until the late 2000s. I had been running iMacs so video output add-in cards weren't an option so I had to resort to a variety of different tricks to achieve the desired result. One of the last ones I remember trying involved some sort of hijinks with my TiVo box to get it to pull stuff from my computer.

I eventually just gave up and watched things on my iMac G5 since its 20" screen wasn't all that much smaller than my CRT TV, and then later in college I upgraded to a 27" Intel iMac which had a nice IPS panel display and was better to watch things on than most flat panel TVs from that era around that size.

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