DANA INTERNATIONAL - VCD's

    For those of you considering buying these VCD's from The Dana International Fansite, you may be unsure of exactly what you'll be getting.  I'd like to give some quick reviews of the VCD's -- and some information about how to best play them -- to guide anybody who's curious or confused.

    Nothing, of course, is a substitute for the official releases, but sadly there are no officially sanctioned Dana International video releases out there.  Even finding her music isn't easy here in Canada, so I've needed to resort to some diverse techniques.  They used to be available through www.israelism.com, but that company has been "under construction" for months now.  You can find her more recent CD's on www.amazon.com, but to get the older CD's you either need to contact Israeli record companies or resort to www.ebay.com.

    There's some general info about the VCD's (and how to view them) under the list below.  

    I'm not sure where most of the clips come from (though I did manage to gather some information, and some specifics from the wonderfully informative Dana International Unofficial Website.   I could have written essays about some of the clips, and taken many more screenshots, but for the sake of brevity I kept it...well, brief.  If you're ready for the reviews, choose the VCD you're interested in learning about (I split them up into separate pages to speed up loading time):

    Basic information about these VCD's:

    All of the videos are presented in 352 x 240 DAT format, 30 frames per second (the pictures in the reviews are the actual size of the videos).  They come on burned CD's with colour packaging.  The videos themselves are of varying quality, depending largely on the VHS tapes they came from (some are marred with roaming bars of static or have sudden edits at the beginning or end...some are in black and white, which I suspect wasn't their original format).  The actual video quality is -- as the Fansite mentions -- in most cases fair.

    The audio is monophonic and usually clear.  Sometimes it drifts out of sync, but I don't think this has anything to do with the VCD's themselves; I think it depends on the computer's system resources and the program used to play the videos.

How do you play VCD's?

    Not every DVD player will be able to play them, even the ones that claim to be able to read the VCD format...maybe it's due to the Dana VCD's being burned.

    Quicktime on a Macintosh with OS 8.6 can read the files without any problem, though not automatically...you need to launch the Quicktime player, and manually navigate to the mpegav folder on the VCD's in order to play the .dat files.  There are a few free VCD players for the Mac available on the internet, but since Quicktime does such a good job you probably won't need to look for a better player.

    A WindowsNT system is a bit more difficult.  Windows Media Player doesn't seem to be able to recognize these VCDs.  There is a good list of free VCD players here, though I have settled on GDivX Player from dvxity.  It's a bit flaky and bizarre, but it does the job and does it nicely.

GDivX Player Quirks

    To play one of the Dana VCD's, you need to insert the VCD into the CD-ROM and launch GDivX.  When the remote window pops up, click Playlist -> Add, navigate to your CD-ROM drive, and go into the mpegav folder...all of those .dat files are the videos.  Select the first one and choose "Open," and it will appear in the playlist and start playing at 352 x 240 size.  While it's playing you can add the rest of the .dat files to the playlist, and save the playlist (which is not a bad idea, because you can't add all of the .dat files at once...doing it one at a time, every time you want to watch the whole VCD, is a pain!)

    When the first video is over, the next one in the playlist will start up...maybe.  You can also skip ahead to the next video by double-clicking on the appropriate .dat file in the playlist, or by Shift-Clicking on the "Forward" icon on the remote.

    What if you want to see a bigger Dana?  Well, there are a few ways to do this, and you try them at your own risk.  Click on the "Zoom" button on the remote (it looks like two overlapping windows) and, in the Manual Adjust drop-down menu, select the size you'd like.  200% usually looks pretty good, but the bigger you get, the choppier the motion will probably be.  If you want the video to fill the whole screen, choose "Full Size," though this is where the GDivX weirdness really starts:

    With the video playing larger than 100%, you may or may not see the remote window on top of the video.  You may be tempted to get rid of the remote window so it doesn't overlap the video...don't!  At least on my system, if the remote window (or some other GDivX menu or pop-up) isn't there and slightly overlapping the video, the video becomes horribly choppy.  As long as the remote is there, it looks pretty clean.

    After each video is finished playing, the window size for the video goes back to 352 x 240, which is annoying.

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