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As CD burners, digital cameras and DVD players find their way into more and more houses, people have discovered Video CDs as a great way to show photos on the television. And just as traditional photographers have studied film and the process of developing it, you’ll get the best results from Video CDs if you understand the medium of CDs, compression and televisions. We put this guide together to explain the technologies involved in displaying photos on the television, and how you can optimize the display of your Video CD shows. And if the technology and terms seem a little overwhelming at first, don’t worry – products like PhotonTV are designed take care of these things for you. So what’s a VCD? The key to making CDs that play on DVD players is the Video CD or “VCD” format. And while the interest in creating Video CDs of digital photos at home is relatively new, the Video CD itself has been around for 10 years. In 1993, Philips, Sony, Matsushita and JVC developed the Video CD specification (or “white book” as it is referred to in technical circles) to provide a CD format that could play interactive multimedia on PCs, televisions, game consoles, etc. It became very popular in Asia, with millions of VCD players sold. The success of the VCD 10 years ago in Asia was a matter of timing, since at that time VCR wasn’t as established in Asia as it was in other parts of the world and the VCD filled that home entertainment void. VCD quality is comparable to VHS in many respects, although the technologies are extremely different. VCDs use digitized and compressed media to allow about 70 minutes of full motion video to fit on a single standard CD. The compression is MPEG-1, with a resolution of 352x240 (NTSC). In 1995 the VCD 2.0 format was released. As far as photos go, it added an important feature: a high resolution mode (704x480 for NTSC) that could be used to display still pictures. Even on a small television, there is a significant difference in quality between a photo displayed at 352x240 (movie) resolution and one displayed at 704x480 (still picture) resolution. In 2000, the Super Video CD format was released, which took another step forward in terms of movie quality. Instead of using MPEG-1 compression, Super Video CD made use of MPEG-2 compression, which is the same technology used to encode DVD video. The high resolution still picture mode was retained, and the resolution for movies was increased from 352x240 (Video CD 2) to 480x480 (Super Video CD) And finally, while not a formal standard, there are a number of Extended Super Video CD (XSVCD) formats that can provide even greater resolution. iZotope PhotonTV, for example, can create XSVCDs at 704x480 resolution for video and still images, which is essentially DVD quality. In summary, the table below summarizes the common VCD formats and resolutions.
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