Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Video CD standard known as the White Book was created in 1993 when four technology giants including Sony, Philips, Matsushita, and JVC signed a pact. This agreement established a digital video distribution format that utilized existing compact disc infrastructure to store 74 minutes of video and audio on a single 650 megabyte disc.
The Video CD format offered a compact and affordable alternative to the bulky and expensive Laserdisc which debuted in Atlanta on the 15th of December 1978. While the Laserdisc provided analog video quality nearly double that of VHS tapes, the Video CD sacrificed data integrity and resolution to achieve lower costs and wider adoption in regions like Asia.
The Video CD became a cultural phenomenon across Asia by 1997 because of its low cost, tolerance for high humidity, and affordability compared to VHS and Betamax systems. North America largely ignored the format while countries like China sold eight million VCD players by 1997 and more than half of all Chinese households owned at least one player by 2005.
The Video CD utilized MPEG-1 compression to achieve a resolution of 352 by 240 pixels for NTSC regions and 352 by 288 pixels for PAL and SECAM regions. Audio was compressed using MPEG-1 Audio Layer II at a constant bitrate of 224 kilobits per second resulting in stereo sound that was often inferior to the audio quality of VHS tapes.
The Video CD had no means of preventing unauthorized copies when CD-R discs and recorders entered the market leading to a rapid decline in feature film releases by major studios. This lack of copy protection allowed the format to thrive in the gray market and become the preferred medium for both legal and illegal content distribution in developing nations.
The rise of the DVD format in the late 1990s and early 2000s marked the beginning of the end for the Video CD as DVDs offered higher resolution and better audio quality. The market for VCDs shrank with the number of Hong Kong factories producing VCDs dropping from 98 in 1999 to 26 in 2012 as the world moved toward more secure and higher-capacity formats.