Which one offers hands down the best video quality for VCD's? I've not been able to find a good answer to this anywhere. I hear its one of the victor cards but which one specifically? Hopefully somebody that owns all of them could shed some light on the subject...
Either the last Victor or the last Hitachi card, forgot which. However don't expect stellar quality from either because VCD is a very old, low quality format (plus I've yet to find any VCDs that worked on the Saturn, even originals).
Philips manufactured for CD-I about 20 years ago, there were Vivid Adult ones too. They both work well on Saturn. You can create your own discs by encoding the movies to MPEG1/VCD spec and burn it via Ahead Nero CD. IMO Saturn is the best Video CD player I've ever seen, not a DVD, at least gives satisfactory results.
Strange - I never had a problem with Video CDs on the Saturn, at least as long as they were NTSC ones. PAL worked, but on most of the cards gives you green or pink crap at the bottom of the screen - the only card that seemed to play back both PAL and NTSC without artifacts was the ... (goes over and pulls it out of his Saturn) Victor RG-VC3
I really should give this a spin, it's been on my to do list for a long time! Edit: I've never had any issues watching my Julia Roberts with Orang-utans VCD... Why is that even on VCD? My Star Wars worked OK - No idea which one though, they are all pretty similar in my eyes, except for the ones with Jar Jar Binks... They are much worse! Unfortunately I had some green judder dancing around because I had an NTSC card on a PAL unit or visa versa. Need to get it into an appropriate unit!
The Saturn is very forgiving in terms of VCD formatted disks. I've run standard, non standard, offical releases (Sony Classics, Warner, etc), and everything works pretty much as stated. As long as the bitrate doesn't go over 2500, the Saturn seems to play it just fine. But as far as SS VCD cards go, JVC Victor or Hitachi cards give a very clean picture. The worst cards are the 3rd party ones from HK and China.
I had one of the Victor brand ones that was really fancy because it could put out both NTSC and PAL and had some other cool features, it supported Photo CD as well. I didn't really have a use for it and sold it on eBay for a lot of money, haha! It came in the Saturn I bought from Japan and made nearly all my money back selling it
Been encoding fairly high quality kvcd disc and my vic-20 plays them perfectly at 2000k bitrate in NTSC format.
Fun fact: two of the same type of vcd cards may have a different internal ROM inside, and the code is just about the only thing different among all the different cards. So you can have two of the same RG-VC2 cards, but each behaving differently!
Forgive me for asking this question if it's rather stupid, but is it possible to just use any Saturn VCD card? Or is there a reason for having multiple different VCD cards out there? I'm gonna go ahead and assume it's possible to pop one of these things into a NTSC Saturn no problem?
They are region coded, so your Saturn has to match the region of the card, or you have to use an Action Replay or a region-free bios or a region switch mod. Without any region modding, the PAL card only runs on a PAL machine and the Japanese ones only run on Japanese machines. The SamsungSaturn can only use the RG-VC20 and the HSS-0119.
