VCD or DVD?

My Thai boyfriend is going to send me a VCD of a film of him taking part in a Buddhist ceremony at his local temple. I'm not clear what a "VCD" is though as I'm familiar with a DVD and have bought them in Thailand and all over the place of course but I have only ever seen disks labelled VCD in Thailand. What do I need to play them?

[Jetsam]

a VCD {Video CD) has an MPEG1 stream format , and the quality is significant less than the MPEG4 DVD stream format, a vcd is equal to VHS quality.
a VCD disk you can play on most stand alone DVD players, if not you can play it certainly on your pc , you have to search for the MPEGAV directory on the disk, in there is the video file and you can play it with numerous avi players.

Thanks Jetsam

Just what I needed to know.

Kun Jon - Sent you a PM