I recently got a VCD of a film unavailable any other way. For those who don't know, VCD is a Video CD, where the video is written on the CD in same digital format as audio CDs, so only one hour can get written on a CD, and feature films come with two CDs in the case. Quality us about that of VHS.

Anyway, some later model LD players will play VCDs, and while I was playing it, I began to wonder if the VCD 2 discs were stuck back to back, if an LD player that plays both sides would do so for the VCD. I suspect you'd have to hit the B side button to get it to start, but I might get a cheap VCD and attach the two discs together solidly to see if it works.

I know of no LD player which will switch sides on a 12 cm or 8 cm disc. They're just not set up to do it.

Right, that's why I thought it would have to be done by the operator pressing side B. Maybe it still wouldn't work, but I'll try it and see.

it wont work, i know some models that play the vcd (cld-v880)

Yeah, that's never going to work. By glueing two VCDs together you are essentially inventing a new format all by yourself, one that doesn't exist anywhere but your house. No player will try to read the back side of a 5" because no commercially available 5" has anything on the back side other than some DVDs, but even LD/DVD combo players make you flip DVDs even though they can to Both Side Play of LDs.

VCD or Video CD is MPEG encoding format made for CD-i (CD-Interactive) players and a few other products, it was about 330 lines of resolution and never caught on. It has nothing to do with the LD format and will not play in a machine not made to decode MPEG. CD-Video was made for the LD format. CDV has 20 minutes of music on the inner tracks and 5 minutes of LD video out the outer edge.

VCD and CDV are two totally different formats.

Yea, VCD is regular MPEG1, and can be copied and played on any computer if you want to. It have a horrible resolution at 352x240 and high compression =) 10 years ago it was the main format used by movie pirates before divx 3.11 alpha and svcd became common. in asia it was common with discmans with vcd support as well, think i have a few from the old days

VCD was hugely popular in the mid-90s to early 2000s. It was quite possibly the most popular format in the world during that period since it was the main format in China, HK, India, the Philippines, and other places. Real numbers are impossible to come by of course since every one of these discs was pirate, but I would say it "caught on" rather well.

The quality is horrific though, I'll say that for sure. People who compare it to VHS are doing a great disservice to VHS. VCD was the lowest quality commercial video format of all time. CED, 16mm, VHS, everything is better than VCD. At the same time...its sometimes less distracting than a bad DVD. Since VCD and VCDs authors didn't use any kind of adaptive compression you don't get as much of the macro blocking that DVD has. You basically get a wall of pixelated activity instead. In a way, I prefer that aspect.

Pretty sure even those LD players that can play VCD (like the DVL-909, 919 and some of the Karaoke players like the CLD-V880) have some kind of disc recognition (might be those actuator pins that I had to toggle at one point to get one of my LD players working again--thanks Duncan!) where it disables the disc turn mechanism when anything other than an LD is being played.

There might be a way to re-enable that function, but I'm not about to tear apart any players that I have to try to find out!

The DVL players may play them thru the DVD side decoding the MPEG1. It does NOT play them thru the LD side.