Short for Super Video CD, an advanced variant of conventional Video CDs (
VCDs).
Similiar to VCDs, SVCDs consist of an ISO9660 track containing meta data (menus, introduction screens, etc), and several MPEG data tracks.
While VCDs use MPEG-1 only, SVCDs contain MPEG-2 data tracks. The MPEG streams on the SVCD are of variable bitrate, which yields a significant quality improvement over MPEG-1 VCDs, which have to be constant bitrate MPEG streams.
Standard resolution for SVCDs is 480x480 (with wrong aspect ratio, which will be corrected when the player scales the image to the screen resolution), at a maximum bitrate of 2500kbit/s with MPEG layer 2 audio at bitrates of approximately 192kbit/s.
DVDs also use MPEG-2, but at an higher resolution (typically 720x480), with a higher bitrate (usually 5000kbit/s), and with AC3 audio streams at a bitrate of 448kbit/s.
SVCDs can be created from MPEG-2 streams using the VCDImager tool, and can be played on good DVD players, or using MPEG-2 software decoders on a reasonably fast computer.
There's also an extended XSVCD standard, that allows other resolutions, such as 720x480, but is mostly unsupported by DVD players.