New technology? Help!

Does anyone have first hand experience with VCDs? I’m looking at a few on E-bay and it sounds like a cool way to watch movies on the road. For what its worth, I’d either be trying to play them on my personal laptop (300Mhz, 96ram) or my work laptop (366mhz, 128ram).

Any ideas? Is the playback decent quality? If you have the hard drive space, can you copy the disk to your hard drive for smoother viewing?

Suzette

The quality of VCDs varies; in my experience, they’re of slightly lower video quality than videotape. Still, for something compact to view on the road, that ain’t a bad deal.

Playing a VCD on your computer doesn’t require any special equipment or anything, although you might need to download player software (there are free players out there). Yeah, in some cases you can copy the data to your hard drive, but in my experience the benefit is small. What you’re playing is a medium-res MPEG-2 movie at fullscreen; a CD drive that can push 600K/sec (a 4X drive, in other words) will do just fine.