Hello fellow Assemblers! I have a question about VCDs and Dreamcast, it goes like this: Are there any VCD players for it that do not require a dongle (like this one)? Of course there's GypPlay, but it doesn't support swapping discs. So the movie has to be burned on the same disc as GypPlay. Quote from readme "You cannot swap in anything except original GDROMs". DCDivx supports only divx/xvid/avi. Then there's DC Movie Player but it doesn't have AV sync coded, which I guess means that videos will be out of sync. I have a cople of original VCDs, but nowhere to watch them. XBMC4Xbox won't recognize them, and won't even play the files via filebrowser. My dvd player doesn't support VCDs, and watching them on my PC is horrible. VCD wasn't made for HD displays.. So, is there a VCD player out there for Dreamcast (which works without a dongle and won't be out of sync)? Advice outside of playing the actual VCD discs on a Dreamcast (or maybe Xbox or PS2) is wholeheartedly discouraged.
Yeah! I still own the kit with remote. It was some awesome at the time... This is the set, but not sure if it works without a remote.
It's a nice thing, but it doesn't work without the remote dongle. Do you have any idea what it's called? Like a keyword or something?
I doubt this is what you want to hear, but from my understanding most DC VCD players were pretty poor. If your looking for a good VCD solution, a Sega Saturn + VCD Card would be (by a very large margin) better than anything you could get going on a DC I feel. Again, just my humble option.
Nope, but I will now! Thanks a lot! The Saturn has always been on my wish list. But, I'm a bit stuck up. Meaning, I want to finnish certain games on the consoles that I already have before I get sucked into another retro-gaming blackhole like the Saturn. I've just recently seen a side by side comparison of VCD quality between the Saturn and Dreamcast. The Saturn seems to be vaguely better, certainly darker. I can see how a dedicated chip might be better than a quick and dirty software player like the one for DC. Anywhoo, thanks for your input! I used to do that too, sort of. I taped movies I got from Direct Connect on VHS via my PCs composite out on the good old Geforce 2 Nice job finding the player, good job guys! Thanks a lot for the help, super nice of you!
No idea, not that I know of. On the topic of Xing Hong. Well, I'm sincerely grateful to RXShorty and Kuririn84 for helping out, but the player is horrible. Everything is super blocky and there are lots of artifacts on screen. That's not the VCD, that's the Xing Hong player. There was another commercial VCD player on Lik-Sang called Dream VCD / MP3 Player, that's supposed to have great video quality, but it was never cracked afaik. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
Maybe if there is some solution with DreamShell the quality could be better because it doesnt have the limit of a CD.
The problem isn't with the video format, it's the player. Xing-hong (at least the cracked version) is a really bad player, sadly.
Here's a quick comparison of Xing Hong versus GypPlay It's GypPlay from 00:00 to 00:21 after which it's Xing Hong. Xing Hong plays the actual, retail, VCD of A Scanner Darkly, for GypPlay I had to copy the video .DAT file and create a selfbootable CD. But the video file itself is untouched. Obviously, GypPlay is not a solution. Since it doesn't play retail discs and has to be burned on the same disc as the video you want to watch. This comparison is just here for educational purposes.
I had the xing hong player with dongle, got it on lik sang back in the day. It did not work without the dongle/remote. But, if you held down three buttons on the remote while booting up, the remote would be recognized as a DC controller and you could use its buttons for the dpad and abxy buttons. There was a subsequent release of a VCD player for DC that was supposed to be decent. AFAIK, this was probably an update to the xing hong player than something else. The xing hong disc for the crap version said "dream movie" on it, and the update was also called "dream movie" AFAIK. It also came with a very similar looking controller and dongle, except the plastic on the controller and dongle were silver and sparkly while on the first edition crap player it was white plastic. I never tried the second edition player, but I heard the artifact issues were fixed and it also played MP3s.
This is how the cracked version looks like, it doesn't need the dongle hence "cracked". So I think you're confusing the Dream VCD / MP3 player with the Xing Hong VCD player. I am aware of the Dream VCD / MP3 player however I'm not interested in buying it for the sake of watching the two VCDs that I have. Thank you for your participation
Yep that's how it looks when you boot it up. My disc/remote/dongle setup for the Xing Hong player looked exactly as pictured below: As you can see, the disc and remote say dream movie on it. Later on, this version came out which supported MP3 playback and was supposed to give better VCD support As you can see, the discs, controller/dongle etc look pretty much the same as the Xing Hong white plastic dream movie, and the silver set is also called dream movie. I never had a copy of this second set, but based on the similarities, I assume its an update to the xing hong player.
There's definitely a VCD player disc for the DC that doesn't require a dongle - I had one years ago and I watched Planet of the Apes (the Tim Burton one!) on my DC on a VCD that I got from a market stall. When I was a student at University I used to buy VCDs from the market near my halls of residence and I used the boot disc to watch all sorts of crap on my Dreamcast. Another one I clearly remember watching on my DC was D-Tox with Sly Stallone. I can't recall what the disc was called or anything like that (sorry) but it is 100% possible.
