Resurrecting DcVD: Dreamcast Video Disc

What if DVDs never existed? Maybe Sega would have followed through with their speculated plans for a Dreamcast Video Disc (DcVD) - an alternative video format similar to Video CD, but one which exploits the Dreamcast's natural affinity with the Sofdec video and ADX audio codecs and the extra capacity of the proprietary GD-rom format.
Scott 'DocEggfan' Marley recently looked into the history of DcVD here at the Junkyard and he's been eagerly working away behind the scenes to bring the dead format back to life. Now, for your enjoyment we are proud to present the teaser trailer for Scott's endeavours. Turn the lights down, the volume up and prepare to be wowed by the dulcet tones of our very own Caleb in the trailer for the upcoming DcVD Dreamcast Video format!


We hope to release several copyright free movies using this resurrected format in the near future, movies that can be played directly in a Dreamcast GD-rom drive with no extra hardware required. Watch this space!

9 comments:

Unknown said...

Oh that's freakin' awesome guys. Looking forward to it!

atreyu187 said...

Yea George A Romero's Night of the Living Dead is an amazing movie. First film I ever bought as a kid way back in 1981 my how the years have passed.

"They are coming to get you Barbra!!"

DCGX said...

I saw/watched this vid on YouTube without the context of the Yard actually releasing real movies in this format. This makes so much more sense now.

Just one questions: why yellow as the primary color in the marketing/box art?

doceggfan said...

All the other major colours are taken:

Blue = blu ray (and Ps4 and Wii U)
Green = Xbox
Red = HDDVD
Orange = Dreamcast
Purple = UltraViolet

Seemed like yellow was the way to go, and it's similar but different to dreamcast orange

fanat said...

Just wanted to shed som light on the so called "DcVD" format. The format, as such, has never *officially* existed. Not even on paper. All it is is an sfd file + a hacked up sfd player ripped from a midway arcade collection disc (or whatever that thing is called). The wikipedia entry and logos are made by a guy called Override who used to post pirates of current movies (i still have a cdr of his Dead or Alive release) in this manner on a torrent site called underground-gamer. He made up the name for it. He also released a "dcvd suite" which contained sega's official sfd tools, tmpgenc, templates for tmpgenc, the hacked sfd player and selfboot tools.
Then I released a repack of that with cracked paid apps replacing the shareware in his version and redone logos, cause I thought his logos were lacking. I think I signed the repack as "anon" (before it was cool to do so, yo!). It can be found on various dc fan sites, the ones who aren't afraid to host warez.
As time passed it turns out his "dcvd suite" was more reliable then my "repack". The cracked apps no longer work (for whatever reason) and need to be replaced with fresh paid ones or shareware versions.
So there you have it. The DcVD is made up by dc enthusiasts, not as a hoax but as a convenient label for the things that we were doing (99,9% of the doing was done Override).
Undeground-gamer got a cease&decist, and Override disappeared with it.
Maybe he's still around under a different alias.
Just to be clear, all I ever did was that repack of his "dcvd suite". While he released tons upon tons of games, tools, mods, hacks, etc. Plus all those movies he released as part of his "DcVD" series.

doceggfan said...

Thanks for the info fanat and clarifying some suspicions I had. I was always dubious of that wiki page, as the logo just screams unofficial.

Do you remember where the cease&desist came from? I assuming it was more from hollywood for the pirate movies, rather than criware for the (mis)use of the official sfd tools?

fanat said...

Nope, hollywood didn't care. Each movie he put out had about 20-30 completed downloads (basically nothing). His game torrents were way more popular. He wasn't part of the staff there either, just a very active user.
UG was a site mostly for abandonware games for all older platforms. They had terabytes of both rare and not so rare games. Lots of nice full sets on there too. A lot of game hacking and modding was going on.

The C&D came from some big shot game company. I'm pretty sure it was EA, or some other mastodont publisher like that. Certainly not sega or nintendo (eventhough they're relatively big too).

DCGX said...

doceggfan - Ah. I can see that. Though a deeper orange (not red, maybe burnt orange?) may have worked given the Dreamcast is known for using orange and this is a video format for the Dreamcast. Just my two cents.

PH3NOM said...

Its funny to stumble on this thread years later. Fanat was pretty spot on, but was incorrect about the SFD player being ripped from a commercial game. I had the official SDK, and took the SFD example player included, and added controls to pause / play and set aspect ratio, while increasing video resolution up to 704x480.

After Underground Gamer went down, I legitimized myself and returned to the scene as PH3NOM, and went on to write a complete mutli-media player DCMC which can be found here http://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=102594