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Video CD and Super Video CD

VCD and SVCD rips play directly from the bin/cue rip — no conversion step. No CSS is ever involved, so nothing beyond the bare .rbf is needed.

A physical VCD or SVCD disc plays the same way straight from a USB optical drive — see Physical discs. Everything on this page (what to select does not apply there; everything else — playback, seeking, the limitations below) is identical either way, since the disc, a .cue and a .bin rip all present the core with the same bytes.

Which file to select

With MiSTer_DVDcss, select the rip's .cue. The player reads the sheet and plays the disc's data tracks as one, so it does not matter which .bin holds the movie, and any audio tracks on a mixed disc are left out cleanly. Rips with the sync bytes stripped (MODE2/2336 in the sheet) play this way too. See Playing a .cue.

On the bare core, select the rip's data-track .bin from Load Video — usually the one labelled "Track 2". The small Track 1 is the ISO filesystem and does not contain the movie.

Also accepted, on either:

  • Single-file whole-disc .bin images
  • Raw .img files
  • Extracted .DAT files (the MPEGAV/AVSEQ01.DAT from a mounted VCD)

What happens

The core detects the raw CD sector format by content, strips the sector framing in fabric, and demuxes the MPEG-1 (VCD) or MPEG-2 (SVCD) system stream inside. Audio plays at the correct 44.1 kHz pitch, and seeking, pause and A/V sync all work.

SVCD's 480-wide picture fills the screen on both HDMI and the analog CRT output.

A VCD is 352×240 (352×288 on PAL), so with the analog output running the core gives it a native 240p raster rather than doubling every line to reach 480i. It happens automatically and there is nothing to set.

The status line and seek bar follow the picture: because a VCD or SVCD picture is narrower than a DVD's, they are drawn to fit it, with the text at its native size rather than the double-height size a DVD gets. Everything they show is the same.

Limitations

VCD support is deliberately basic playback, the reason being: it came almost free. MPEG-1 video and MP2 audio are both DVD-Video-legal formats, so they were implemented to meet the DVD specification rather than for VCDs. Once they existed, playing a VCD needed only the CD sector deblocking and an MPEG-1 system-stream demux on top — so it was added. Nothing beyond that was built:

  • No VCD menus or PBC (playback control). The movie track plays; interactive VCD navigation is not implemented.
  • No segment stills.
  • No title selection. A disc or a .cue plays from its first data track straight through the data tracks that follow it; the movie tracks of a multi-movie VCD are not offered as separate titles. To start at a particular one, select its .bin directly.
  • No CD-DA audio tracks — audio-only tracks on a mixed disc do not play.
  • 2336-byte-sector images need their .cue. Selected directly, only the common 2352-byte raw format is recognised.
  • A 23.976-coded film VCD would play fast. This is rare; almost all VCDs are 29.97 or 25 fps.
  • The elapsed and total times are an estimate in linear playback modes, worked out from how fast the file is playing rather than read from a navigation structure. On a VCD it is exact; on a variable-bitrate file it can drift a little through the disc. Chapter numbers are still blank, since there are no chapters to count.