SVCD was intended as a successor to Video CD and an alternative to DVD-Video, and falls somewhere between both in terms of technical capability and picture quality.

This data rate was chosen, in part, to ensure compatibility with slower and less expensive "2 × speed" CD drives.

Audio may have up to 6 channels (in a 5.1 arrangement) using the MPEG Multichannel surround sound format, although space constraints and inconsistent hardware support make it impractical, and very uncommon.

Variable bit rate encoding, while not supported by the MPEG-1 Audio Layer II standard, is part of the SVCD specification.

The SVCD standard supports several other features, including interactive menus, hyperlinks, karaoke lyric highlighting, four selectable overlay graphic subtitle streams, chapters, playlists, and DVD-quality still images/slide shows, along with audio, with a resolution of 704x480 (480i, analog NTSC compatible) or 704x576 (576i, analog PAL/SECAM compatible).

The primary motivating factor was the need for an alternative to the DVD format that would not be restricted by technology royalties.

Super Video CD (SVCD) was second, being developed by the government-backed China Recording Standards Committee, under direction from the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry, with technical support from ESS Technology.

The Chinese Ministry of Information and the Video CD Consortium agreed to join forces, incorporating the features of HQ-VCD under a unified SVCD format.

But by the time the SVCD specification was ready in July 1998, CVD had already been adopted by major manufacturers and had quickly established a significant installed base of about 600,000 players.

This prompted the Chinese government to force a compromise between the competing standards in order to maintain compatibility.

[citation needed] In the Western world, the format is more commonly used to store home videos or movies copied from DVD and Laserdisc.