[fastest finger]

Originally Posted by 2Bdecided

VCD certainly came first, and was certainly "official". I remember our local TV shop demonstrating VCD on a Philips player with a Star Trek Movie in the early 1990s (before 1994).

Less than five years ago, both DVDs and VCDs were still available in China - the VCDs being lower priced. A bit like CDs and cassettes coexisted over here during the 1990s.

Cheers,
David.

You're right. Several games consoles of the day were able to play the discs, mainly with the use of a plug-in hardware module. Namely the Sega Saturn, Philips CD-i, Commodore CD32 and 3DO if I remember correctly.

[Lumstorm]

HMV in Glasgow used to have a large selection of VCD's along with the 3DO and CD32 to play them, You could also buy a mpeg decoder card to watch them on a PC at that time computers never had the power to handle fullscreen video without extra help.

[Simon Rodgers]

Originally Posted by Nigel Goodwin

I've never seen an 'official' VCD, all the ones I've seen were Chinese and proper 'stamped' CD's (not CDR's) - but there's no copyright in China, so they just pirated a DVD and made VCD copies from it.

I've never seen an official release one from a studio, or even heard of one?.

UK releases exist but from the early 90s I believe. They don't do them now and they are quite rare. I have a few VCDs myself but none of them are British.

[Simon Rodgers]

A few people here are saying VCD was the early form of DVD which is kind of true. VCDs did not evolve into DVD though otherwise they wouldn't be popular or even used by anyone would they?

[Kodaz]

Do people still use old Disc film players? I doubt it. Disc film was rubbish.

Originally Posted by Chris Frost

Also, on whether VCD pre- or post-dates DVD I am also unclear. I suspect it came before, but it took computer technology a little while to catch up in order to make pirating in volume commercially viable.

As others said, Video CD definitely came out first. It was supported by the Philips CD-i and Commodore CD32 (both via optional addons) in the early 90s. Of course, as it was no better than VHS quality and couldn't be recorded, it had little point in countries where VCRs were established.

Originally Posted by Chris Frost

I think problems with humidity were cited as an issue for domestic helical scan tape based systems [in south-east Asian countries]

Yes, I remember this explanation from the time (I think) too.

Originally Posted by Simon Rodgers

A few people here are saying VCD was the early form of DVD which is kind of true. VCDs did not evolve into DVD though otherwise they wouldn't be popular or even used by anyone would they?

That depends on how one defines "evolved" in this context.

I'd argue that it was, in the sense that the DVD disc itself was basically an improved (higher precision and hence higher-capacity) version of the original CD and CD-ROM technology used by Video CD (akin to how 33 and 45 RPM vinyl improved upon their 78 RPM predecessors).

And DVD Video's MPEG-2 encoding was basically an improved version of Video CD's MPEG-1. In both cases, they were an evolution of the original concept.