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"I think a lot of people really want to do this (capture and show personal videos),'' said Andy Parsons, senior vice president of product development for Pioneer New Media Technologies, at a recent Consumer Electronics Show. "I wanted to do this two years ago and I was frustrated. I said I'm not going to pay $5,000 for a recorder.''

While Parsons was speaking on behalf of the firm's DVD recorders to copy his video on 4.7GB DVD media, video recording and playback has been economical for consumers for more than a year.

The secret?

Most of the computers offered have the power and capacity to support video production. Digital camcorders have FireWire connectivity to download your video to your system. Economical and user-friendly personal video production tools have become widely available. When you record DVD video on CD or MPEG-1 or -2 on CD it can be played on virtually any DVD-ROM drive or DVD player as well as computer-based CD-ROM drives. Products like Roxio's CD Creator and Toast as well as a number of the video production tools make it fast and easy to copy your videos onto CD-R and CD-RW media.

Why Video on CD?

There are a number of compelling reasons for businesses, institutions and individuals to write video content onto CD media:

Video Standards and Capacity

The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) defined the standards for compressing motion video and audio signals using DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) compression which provide a common world language for high-quality digital video.

MPEG-1 (White Book standard) was designed so VHS-quality video could play from a regular CD. The standard supports video coding with quality roughly equivalent to VHS videotape. Most graphics chips can scale the picture for full-screen playback, however software-only half-screen playback is a useful trade-off. MPEG-1 enables more than 70 minutes of good-quality video and audio to be stored on a single CD-ROM disc, which is optimized for non-interlaced video.

MPEG developed a related standard for coding video at higher data rate and in an interlaced format. The MPEG-2 delivers HDTV or theater quality video and is backward compatible with MPEG-1. MPEG-2 is optimized for the higher demands of broadcast, HDTV and entertainment applications, including satellite broadcast and DVD-Video. Resolution is about twice that of VHS videotape and the standard supports additional features such as scalability and the ability to place pictures within pictures.

While many people look down on MPEG-1 quality, keep in mind that you have viewed - and been very satisfied with - VHS-based videos for years. More importantly, when the videos are stored on CD they don't suffer from constant playback degradation and images don't deteriorate over time.

A standard 740MB CD will store about 30 minutes of DVD quality video at 4Mbps. While this pales when compared to a DVD disc's 4.7GB 2-hour capacity, the cost of production and distribution is significantly less and for many applications 30 minutes is a very long video. Consider:

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