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I recently bought some movie VCDs. My DVD player is damaged, so I thought I would play them on my laptop.

The problem is that the quality is very low and the original movie prints look like 3gp videos. The movie files are of type dat.

I understand that these discs are meant only for TV, but is there any way I can play them on my PC without losing clarity?

fixer1234
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Mithun Madhav
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  • If your TV has a USB interface, you can copy the discs to a pen-drive and play from there: depending on your TV, you may need to rename .dat to .mpg. Or you can play them over a VGA or HDMI cable from your laptop to the TV, according to the interfaces available. Otherwise buy a cheap DVD player: they are under £20 in UK. – AFH Oct 09 '14 at 10:51
  • Hmm.. my TV is a pretty old one and only has AV interfaces (red, white and yellow connectors). So there's no way i can play the movies on my PC itself ?? – Mithun Madhav Oct 09 '14 at 11:03
  • Why the downvote ?? – Mithun Madhav Oct 09 '14 at 11:11
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    Well if your problem is with the image quality, that is kind of the result of having them on VCD rather than DVDs. There isn't a way to get better quality than what you currently have sadly since the quality is dictated at the time of encoding and burning of those discs. – Eric F Oct 09 '14 at 11:56
  • @EricF:The Film has very high quality when played on a TV with a regular VCD player.IT's just on PC that it looses all clarity.Myunderstanding is that this happens because the files are in .dat format.I think it might be optimized for playback on a televison rather than a pc – Mithun Madhav Oct 09 '14 at 12:30
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    I find VCD quality acceptable on older TVs, even though they are only MPEG1 (352x240/288 NTSC/PAL), partly because of the up-scaling done by the player: even with a blu-ray player and HD TV they are watchable, which is why I recommend replacing your DVD player. You may try an alternative player on the PC, which may up-scale better, but your viewing position close to a higher resolution display will always make you more conscious of the source limitations. No idea why you were down-voted: your question seems perfectly reasonable to me, and it's very annoying when people do it anonymously. – AFH Oct 09 '14 at 12:52
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    That is exactly what is happening ( what AFH said) It all is just your perspective I would think because of resolution, size of screen, and distance to screen factors – Eric F Oct 09 '14 at 14:57

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The video quality of a VCD is much lower than a DVD. That's because a CD-ROM can only hold 650 Megs of data, compared to DVD's 8 gigs (for a dual-layer DVD). To fit video onto a VCD, the video is highly compressed and runs at 352x240 resolution (compared to DVD's resolution of 1920x1080).

VCDs were also designed to run on old CRT TVs or old VGA monitors with low resolution. Playing them full screen on a modern TV or monitor, they will look bad due to scaling the video up to the higher resolution. This causes blockiness, pixelation, loss of clarity, etc...

Unfortunately, there isnt much you can do, other than run the video at its native resolution, or maybe scaled up slightly.

Keltari
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