I’ve been toying a lot with CVD recently. CVD which stands for China Video Disc was designed to be the successor of VCD in China but it lost its battle to SVCD. The technical characteristics are (PAL with audio encoded at 224 kbits/s) :
VCD 352×288 25fps MPEG-1 at 1150 kbits/s
CVD 352×576 25fps MPEG-2 at 2520 kbits/s
SVCD 480×576 25fps MPEG-2 at 2520 kbits/s
And, even if SVCD has a higher resolution, CVD seems to be better !
One reason is that most TV sets have a horizontal resolution of about 352 and therefore the 128 additional lines do not change anything. As a result, given that the bitrates for CVD and SVCD are the same, the CVD image is better.
Another reason for using CVD is that it’s resolution is exactly half of DVD and therefore can be copied directly on a DVD-R and played as a DVD. So I won’t have any transfer problems when I’ll buy my DVD writer in some months.
Read this great article for more information about CVD.
