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Datavideo
VDR-3000 review
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Datavideo
VDR-3000
VideoCD uses MPEG-1 files, and over an hour of video can be stored on a single 650Mbyte CD. SVCD is MPEG-2 based, and sports far better picture quality, but a 650MByte is good for only around 30 minutes of footage. CD-DVD is a DVD disc image stored on a Compact Disc. One format we hadn't encountered before was HQ-VCD, which uses an MPEG-1 stream at the same resolution as VCD, but at twice the bitrate. CD-DVD and SVCD appear to use constant bitrate encoding, rather than a variable bitrate - with CD-DVDs being encoded at 0.6 MBytes per second, and SVCD being encoded at 0.3 MBytes per second. The VDR-3000 has overcome some of the hassle associated with putting video on little shiny discs, but it really only takes us part of the way there. One of the joys of video CD is the ability to create menus and present video in a non-linear format - a benefit not offered by discs created with Datavideo's machine. Also, the many compatibility issues we have encountered in the past regarding DVD players, formats and the discs themselves still apply. If you have a PC-based video editing system, then it's still a more versatile and cost-effective bet to invest in a CD writer and VCD authoring software. However, where the VDR-3000 scores is for no-fuss transfer of video to CD - and if that's what you want, the VDR-3000 is currently one of a kind. More in the May
2001 issue of Computer Video Magazine |
Recent features... Reviewed in May's
issue: In this month's
news:
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Here
at Computer Video Towers, we've spent a good deal of time looking at
Video CD creation, as well as the format's high-quality, MPEG-2 counterpart,
Super VCD. Even with dedicated software at hand, there'`s a lot to take
in, and Mac users especially will feel left out in the cold, thanks
to the limited range of software applications for their systems. To
the rescue comes Datavideo's VDR-3000, a set-top recorder capable of
recording audio and video to disc in a wide variety of formats - VCD,
HQ-VCD, SVCD, CD-DVD and standard audio CD.