Nope. With the right software you can burn them to a CD and they will play back on a DVD player. I have the cheapest DVD player I could find and they play.
Playback of VCD depends on the DVD player. Most of them used to support VCD and picture cd’s. Both can be burned on standard CD writers. Nero has a drag and drop option to create various forms of video cd’s including VCD and SVCD. The program is pretty standard, ships with most pc’s.