CD-i Magazines around the world

Here you will find information about CD-i Magazines and Publications. In the UK CD-i was the first publication exclusively dedicated to Philips new machine and was published by the very same company in the United Kingdom. It reads more like a catalogue than a serious piece of journalistic material, hopelessly biased praising the system. Even to the extent of describing the introduction of the CD-i to America as a "success" when in fact it couldn't be further from the truth. It's not known how many of these were eventually published but by the description on the first magazine as "Volume 1 Issue 1" it's obvious they planned to push ahead with more of these!!

After this, CDi was the first real consumer-aimed CD-i magazine with some issues containing a cover disc, again in the UK. The disc on issue 2 was the famous Valkieser demo that was originally made for CD-I WORLD, containing some of the first MPEG clips ever published. Amongst other discs was the Micro Machines demo version. They consequently spelled CD-i as CDi. The last issue was thought to be number 19, published in August 1996. The last page said: "The Next issue of CDi magazine will be published on October 3. Frequentasne hunc locum?". The Latin text means "if it will ever happen", fortunately a 20th final issue did appear in the UK which included a preview of the last CD-i game released, "Solar Crusade".

In the USA there was also CDi Magazine. This was the sister publication of CDi magazine UK produced by the same team. Generally the articles and reviews are exactly the same as it's parent magazine although their are some notable variations. One prominent difference is the advertising, the US edition has a much more direct eye catching appeal compared to the UKs darker and more information based adverts (release dates, price etc etc..). Only 5 editions of the magazine were eventually made ending with the last May 1995 release.

In the USA there was another paper about CD-i, called CD-I WORLD. Mainly aimed at CD-i developers and publishers, it was a tabloid-sized "newspaper-like" magazine covering both professional and consumer CD-i news containing a lot of advertisements of CD-i developing studios and CD-i authoring tools (OptImage, MediaMogul). Published before the US consumer launch in october 1991, it was the first dedicated CD-i magazine. There were also many "special issues" that were given away at multimedia exhibitions and fairs. There were also some CD-I WORLD disc issues, containing commercials for CD-i studios and demos of authoring tools, and they published a CD-i Sourcebook on CD-i, some sort of yellow pages of CD-i developers.

The most popular CD-i Magazine was published in the Netherlands, the home country of CD-i (and Philips). It started in 1994 and lasted until 1998. You can download each dutch CD-i Magazine from www.philipscdi.com, right here.
Over to some more curious CD-i Magazine editions. I don't know a lot about these issues and I would love to read/see them. First: The USA edition of CD-I WORLD:Below the French CD-i Magazine:Below you'll find the italian CD-i Magazine:I also found four covers of the swedish CD-i Magazines, previously unknown to me! If anyone of you have one of these, please let us know! Click on each image to enlarge them. The bottom right one shows that Discworld is being mentioned! I'd love to know what they have to say about this mysterious CD-i game! Also Battle Chess and Voyeur 2 are mentioned!

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Manuals of all CD-i hardware on Philips official website

Ofcourse I mean only the Philips CD-i hardware, but the official Philips website still has all manuals of the Philips CD-i players. It might help you when you just bought a second-hand player and you want to read the manual? Check out the manuals in PDF format right here.

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Philips Fantasy Factory was overseeing SMWW

We don't know a lot about the Philips Fantasy Factory. It is interesting to me because it is the only Philips studio who made a Nintendo title. Yes, all the other Zelda games were contract jobs given out by Philips. Just like with Super Mario's Wacky World. It is a pleasure to meet the people who were behind this. Thankfully our contact list made it to Steve: "You do remember correctly. I was a Vice President of development as well as the Executive Producer of the Fantasy Factory projects. I would be happy to answer any questions that I can, so just let me know." He was the Philips guy overseeing the Super Mario's Wacky Worlds part, which was a contract job for Novalogic for Philips. Apparently though, Novalogic cancelled the project without Philips knowing it. So it will be interesting to hear his side of the story.

We'll remember the Philips Fantasy Factory as one of the least productive studios regarding to the amount of games that they have released. It was based in the USA and released two titles on CD-i: -Name that Tune (1993) and -Hotel Mario (1994).

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CD-i as an educational platform

Together with Coktel Vision, who we know from creating Inca on CD-i, Philips attempted to enter the world of education with ADI: a tutoring program for students of all kinds of levels. The range starts with ADIBOU (the cousin character of ADI, which gave its name to the collection) aimed at young children, to ADIBAC, through ADI ADI School and College. It covers the main subjects: English, mathematics and English for the primary, plus German, geography and biology for college years. Designed by a team of about thirty teachers, programmers and designers, ADI was the first European range of educational software. Thanks to the succes of ADI on CD-i CoktelVision became the first developer of interactive products on the French market, and the leading educational software in Europe.

Coktel Vision, Philips and Pathé Interactive (a subsidiary of Pathé TV and Philips Interactive) took advantage of the season to start the ADI range on CD-I. Four titles for children were available. Even the youngest children can play with the CD-i. The beauty of the ADI software is that it remembers what you did, make you do exercises again which you have failed to before, commenting on errors and let parents monitor your progress.

For Philips, ADI was an excellent opportunity to showcase the ease of use of CD-I in Education. 500 to 1000 CD-I players were already installed in French schools (kindergartens and schools). In addition, 3000 CD-i players with ADI software were installed in schools in Germany, Quebec, Spain, Argentina and Great Britain.

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Two unknown/obscure ways to play CD-i on your pc

In all the years we've collecting information about CD-i we've come very scarcely across some CD-i playback board for a Windows or Mac pc. I've never met anyone who has some decent experience with these, but according to the flyers you'll find below, it existed. The first one is the Philips CDI/PC 2.0 Board. Philips Media System made a ISA card CD-i emulator so you can play all CD-i titles on a PC. How great would it be if this would work flawless and was widely available? The second card is the i2m pci card; It was a CD-i hardware emulator for the pc. Because its high price (They didn't sell many) they are very rare! I've never seen anyone for sale. There where two versions of the card:- Media Playback allows you to play cd-i titles and movies on your PC. - i2m CD-i Authoring Board enables you to write CD-i software and test it. Click on the images to see a 'readable' version.

The CD-i authoring board is an expansion board that lets developers create CD-i applications directly on their desktop using an authoring package such as MediaMogul. In addition, developers may play back standard CD-i titles (including DigitalVideo, Video-CD and MPEG-1 Real Time Files) from a CD-ROM drive or emulate CD-i applications from a local hard drive or over a network. The preview capabilities also let users display CD-i assets on their PC or Mac in true color, resolution and aspect ratio prior to burning a disk. This integrated solution provides a cost-effective alternative to the 605 professional player and emulator for CD-i authoring, preview and playback. The Authoring Board operates under an entirely different operating system (CD-RTOS) and therefore has Mac or PC drivers talking to CD-RTOS drivers. The Authoring Board features four connectors. One is a main serial port, one shared RGB/composite video, one VGA connector and one stereo audio. When a splitter cable is connected to the serial port, one port can be used for a CD-i pointing device and the other is used for terminal functions. Projects to create an emulator for PCs were unsuccessful. In 1993, Philips had in its public CD-i catalog, a CD-i PC. It was a hardware emulation card (ISA port), this package allows the execution of the CD-i software on a PC 386. Most CD-i titles have been developed on dedicated platforms (CD-i with hard drive) but soon the interest to develop an environment in PC / Mac was interesting. In 1996, the company i2m has introduced a CD-i emulation card for PC / Mac. This card has been sold on the professional market and its price, excluding software, was $ 1,000. Once inserted in the PCI slot, the card enables the implementation of CD-i (including discs containing digital video (VideoCD)) under Windows 95/98. It uses all the resources of the host computer: the discs are read from the CD-ROM drive of your computer (the CD-i compatibility of this player is required, as is the case for the majority of CD-ROM), and may also access the hard drive (this to run an "image" before it is burnt). The application which allows to use the i2m card is called "CD-i Playback".
The software is designed to read disks of the CD-i authoring boards only. You cannot read CD-i style CD-ROMs directly with the software, unless you have a CD-i add-on board. Even if you have a CD reader compatible with the CD-i (Green Book) standard, there are still a number of obstacles in your way. The filesystem used isn't ISO-9660, and CD-i players are based around a 680x0 CPU and have special hardware for video and audio. It depends on what kind of disc it is, and what you mean by "use". PhotoCD and VideoCD discs are CD-ROM/XA "Bridge Format" discs that play on CD-i players as well as dedicated players and computers. These use the ISO-9660 file system, and can be read with commonly available PhotoCD software and MPEG-1 players. DigitalVideo discs from Philips manufactured before June, 1994 are in CD-i format, not VideoCD format, and require additional hardware to be played on a PC. If your CD-ROM drive supports raw 2352-byte sector reads, it's possible to pull tracks off of a Green Book format disc, and extract audio or MPEG video data. This can be done by using the i2m card and software.

Thanks to: Terratron and Planet Numerique

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'The World of CD-i' should return soon

All signs still point to the return of The World of CD-i as a website soon. I'm still contacting both Omegalfa and DJKoelkast to get the website back online because I believe the content has always been very valuable to every CD-i fan. I wanted to take on the project all by myself and Interactive Dreams but DJKoelkast told me today he wants to keep the content in his own property. That means he will set up the website again soon. And 'soon' is all you get. Omegalfa won't be the webmaster of the website anymore, that would be me. He will return as a member to post new CD-i news. If this would happen eventually I am very happy. It would mean a little more attention to the scarce landscape of CD-i websites these days! I'll keep you posted.

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The Philips TV/CD-i combination

Why is it that the 21TCDI30 - CD-i / TV combo is almost never offered on auction sites? Perhaps that the built-in CRT television died of most of these units. It's been 15 years since this unit was released anyway. When there is one on ebay like this week, it is indeed a rare occasion. What do we have here? It looks like how the B&O CD-i player was constructed, only now the CD-i Player is implemented in the CRT screen on top. Interestingly CD-i Fan found that the 21TCDI30 is a CD-i 210/40 inside a TV!! It is a 21" colour TV sets with built-in CD-i player (with Digital Video capability) in the same cabinet. It is the second combo released by Philips. A little time earlier Philips also released the stereo hi-fi set with CD-i player included, do you remember that one? Both combo sets were probably distributed only in Europe. I have no confirmations that they were available in USA.

Thanks to: Shroo-man

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What language is used to program games on CD-i?

"Various languages can be used, but they are ultimately all compiled to (or in some cases interpreted by) 68000 machine language. The OS9 "memory module" file format is well-defined in the OS9 documentation; any development software that produces a valid 68000 machine langage module can be used. Microware used to supply a K&R C compiler and an 68000 assembler; they exist in native versions (run under OS9) but there are also cross versions for the PC, Sun and Mac. There are at least two ports of the GNU C/C++ compiler to OS9; these could also be used. Both compilers and the assembler need the Microware linker; I don't think GNU ld was ever sufficiently adapted to OS9 to produce a valid module file. For sprite blitting you really need to use 68000 machine language; it's too slow otherwise unless you have a small number of sprites or are not rendering at the 50Hz or 60Hz video frame rate. The best results are achieved using a "sprite compiler" that compiles the graphics to assembly language to draw them. For game logic you can usually get away with using C or C++. However, the big caveat is this: you REALLY need the "CD-i Full Functional Specification", a.k.a. the "Green Book". There are digital versions floating around the net, but they are hard to read and most of the pictures are badly mangled. The Green Book defines the CD-RTOS API, which is really just OS9 rev 2.4 with a custom set of file managers and drivers for the CD-i specific hardware. The rest of the needed OS9 documentation can be found in PDF format on the ICDIA site."

By: cdifan (Maybe we should start with a mailbox or a Forum-quote of the week?)

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Dragon's Lair - an Interactive Cartoon by Don Bluth

Dragon's Lair was produced by Super Home Entertainment (1994). It requires a Digital Video Cartridge and one Controller or Gamepad to play it. The game is a product of 100% cartoon footage and absolutely beautiful animation. There's really no one way to describe how this game feels; you move our hero (Dirk the Daring) in and out of perilous scenarios, use your sword to battle monsters, goblins, demons, or booby traps, or sometimes a combination of both. The controls are simple but very dependent on "timing". Whatever the situation calls for - an evasion or an attack or both is how you play the game. Timing is what will make and break you in this game. You can easily find yourself being stumped and playing for hours on end.

Gameplay: Princess Daphne has been kidnaped by Singe the dragon who resides within the castle of the evil wizard Mordroc. Dirk the Daring must brave the obstacles and the forces that oppose his efforts to reach the dragon's lair. Everything from trick floors to tentacles, snakes, collapsing floors and ceilings, ghosts, goblins, monsters and demons are all waiting to thwart Dirks rescue of his love, Princess Daphne. All the while, the player has 3 lives and a prayer to make it through 25+ differents scenarios and a long-winded drawn out battle with Singe himself. Lead on adventurer - your quest awaits!! Dragon's Lair is one of these games that all the "next generation" home systems were waiting to get their electronic hands on. When this game was released back in 1983, it caused quite a vivacious uproar in the arcades that helped slow down the video game crash of the 80s. Unfortunately, many spawn "rip-offs" of Dragon's Lair hit, and the idea of a completely animated "choose your path" adventure game drifted into only a memory for quite some time. Then the PC, Mega CD (Sega CD), 3DO and CD-i all came out with their attempt to revive this classic. While the PC, Mega CD (Sega CD) and 3DO seemed to be grainy or had selected scenes edited out of the original, the CD-i is almost an exact replica of the arcade version. The CD-i version of Dragon's Lair is supreme to say the least. All of the levels, the sound, the music, it's all here, this is THE version to play...unless you know some arcade off in the styx 130 miles away from any civilisation that still has the arcade game operable considering the game is so old it's almost impossible to find amymore. The gameplay is pretty simple to figure out. You start outside the castle and must maneuver Dirk in each scenario brought forth to you. If you pick the right move, the scenario continues, if you pick the wrong move Dirk dies. Pretty straight forward and simple...and frustrating to say the least.
Graphics: What needs to be said? The graphics are absolutely gorgeous on the CD-i. The colours are perect and the animation is flawless. The textures are so prestine; the CD-i really brings this eye-candy game home to the TV screen. As stated before, the CD-i version has ALL the scenes which were edited out from the version ReadySoft put out i.e. the wind tunnel room, the burning ropes and the falling platform are all in this version. Nothing else can be said for this version of Dragon's Lair; it is the one to own.

Sound: The sound is all 100% with the video. With the other versions, the sound seemed to be just a little out of sync with the on screen action. The CD-i version is in sync and intact. The sounds of the score can be a little irritating, but other than that everything is perfect; you even hear Dirks humming after some of the scenes and of course all of Dirks lil "OoOOooOo" and "EEeEEeePeePepP"s are in this version which are absolutely hilarious.

Reviewers Opinion: Another picture perfect review and now here is the pro and con section of the review. This is a different style of game for alot of players. Most people I know really can't sit down and play a game that requires the player to just push a direction or a button, and thats as far as the player gets involved. Some people almost don't really even consider it a game, but "path choosing" objectives where only the player pushes a button to literally watch a movie. I consider it a game because without me (the player) nothing's going to happen; just like any other home console or arcade game. Anyways, the cons - for one is timing. This game can get frustrating quickly because for some of the scenes the player has to hit the key not a second early and not 1/2 a second late but right on THIS second. There are scenes I already know which way to hit and I hit the direction 0.00001 seconds too early, then I die. Dragon's Lair 2 and Space Ace for the CD-i are much much better regarding this con, but Dragon's Lair is extremely touchy with timing.
Another con is the "death scene", after Dirk dies you'll see him fall in front of you, arms folded and he morphs from a human to a skeleton then falls apart. The first 3 times or so it's cute, but after the 500,000 time it gets rather old. For sound cons, the "score" screen, my goodness could they have picked any worse sounds? I would rather listen to a cat get dragged through a keyhole than "WHOW WHOW WHOW WHOW WHOW" (ed. isn't that a sound of a cat being dragged through a keyhole?)..ugh. One last con, continues...this game so needs continues. Now granted if you go through so many scenes without dying, you'll get a life, but this game begs for continues. When you're 15 scenes into the game and you die due to the "timing factor" - ask yourself - do you really want to start ALL over? Not too many people do because that makes the game old fast. Sometimes I take a week break just after playing it one day because I don't want the game to get old and on my nerves.
Finally, the replay factor isn't that high. Granted if you go through the whole game, it's going to be a long time before you play it again for quite some time unless you've got incredible patience and truly love seeing the same thing over and over again. With all these cons though, the game really is quite enjoyable. It is true eye-candy and probably another one of my top 5 reasons (games) to buy a CD-i. It is one of the games that CD-i owners could really hold their heads up to and smile. Dirks little squeals will crack the player up; I love it when I get a scene where Dirk squirks and squeals because I know I have a good laugh ahead of me. This game is quite hard to find now even on CD-i, but if you can find it and own a CD-i with a DV card in it, I would say it is worth the money.

Reviewed by Angel, The Black Moon Project

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CD-i Games Rarity Rating / A-C

Okay then guys, this is going to be the definitive series on CD-i game rarity that we shall thrash out over the coming weeks. It will kick off with all of us listing the games and how rare we believe they are. Some I have not given a rating at all and have just put a question mark (?) because I am honestly not sure about those specific titles even after working on the CD-i for over years now!! Some will probably be regional releases that we're not too sure about such as Lingo, which is a Dutch release. Post below and rate the games as follows:
1 - 4 = Fairly common and easy to find.
5 - 7 = Stepping up the rankings and would be a CD-i title any respectable collection would have.
8 - 10 = These are the rare to ultra rare CD-i games that you wish you had!!

Also inform us of your influences over the rarity ratings, for example if you go to the used goods shops in your local area or perhaps visit the regional ebay (please specify which i.e. American, British, Dutch etc etc...) and tell us where you come from.
For Interactive Dreams it would be:

Location: The Netherlands
Influences: ebay (American, British, Dutch, German), web based retailers and used goods stores in The Netherlands.
Games Rarity Rating:

A Great day at the Races 5
ABC Sports® Presents Power Hitter 3
ABC Sports® Presents The Palm Springs Open 3
Accelerator 8
Alien Gate 3
Arcade Classics 8
Asterix - Caesar’s Challenge 5
Atlantis - The Last Resort 10
Axis & Allies 3

Backgammon 3
Battleship 3
Brain Dead 13 8
Burn Cycle 1

Caesar’s® World of Boxing 2
Caesar’s® World of Gambling 2
CD Shoot 2
Chaos Control 3
Chistmas Country 10
Chistmas Crisis 10
Cluedo 5
Cluedo - The Mysteries continue 5
Connect Four 3
Creature Shock 10
Crime Patrol 10
Crime Patrol 2 - Drug Wars 10

Next week: More CD-i games ratings!

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Programming on CD-i is a real challenge

It's not that there is no community who would love homebrew games on CD-i. It's just that nobody knows how to code for it anymore. Or there is just no significant time anymore for those who can. Look at the small marvels we've welcomed in the past years: CD-i Emulator in 2005, which took cdifan years and years. It must have been a real pain to get it up and running and it will be no coincidence that no updates are available since the very start. It's just too difficult and time consuming. I know he has done some work on emulating the Digital Video Cartridge and although I'm confident that he will show us some of it in a few years (!), that's probably the last thing.

It seems like a miracle that Frog Feast made it to CD-i thanks to a real long developing proces. It's a lot more difficult than you would think. I even more realized this during the Frog Feast process Charles has gone through, which I documented on Interactive Dreams here. Take a look, just for an impression how the process went.. I'd love to see new homebrew developments by the way (ofcourse), Charles was a unique person who just did it (with a lot of help of our CD-i guru 'cdifan', the author of the CD-i Emulator. Unfortunately both persons are absent or absent-minded for a pretty long while now. Recently, I'm betting my hopes on CD-i member 'KingArthur' pulling the programming of the adventure "Beneath a Steel Sky". "Would a project on this scale be possible with an application such as mogulike combined with the full version of the cdi emulator for debug purposes? Would there be a need for any other applications or hardware, if so what would they be?" Is porting a known game to CD-i easier than developing a new game? I can imagine that the CD-i would be really hard to program for, but Charles provided the break through. CD-i programmers: Where are you? You can all join in at the official CD-i Homebrew Forum, located here.

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CD-i development in Australia

Last year we discovered the hidden CD-i world in Japan, where Japan Interactive Media produced at least three exclusive Japanese games on CD-I: Mah-Jong, Golgo 13 and Sharaku. Now there’s another continent left we’ve never heard of in the world of CD-i: Australia. Shroo-man from the CD-i Forum comes from Australia and he found some opening document where CD-i development in Australia is discussed.

"The first CD-i disc designed and developed in Australia featured the Victoria University of Technology. After a brief introduction, this program displays a Main Menu of options, including an explanation of where the University is situated, the courses offered, faculty structures, and a Producers Corner. If a user selects the "Where" option from the Main Menu, the program branches to a sequence of images in which a camera zooms onto a world map until finally reaching a detailed map of Melbourne and its western suburbs. Background music and a narrator's voice accompany this process, and icons identifying each of our four campuses are superimposed on the final map. Using the remote control device, a user can then select any one of these icons and take an audiovisual tour of the corresponding campus. Options to explore more detailed information about the location of Melbourne, including distances from other Australian cities and selected cities in Asia, USA and Europe are also available. Similarly the "Courses" option enables a user to interactively explore the range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses available at the University. Again the user can select icons to extract more and more details about a specific field of interest, rather than receive an overload of information about all courses."

As an experimental product, this CD-i disc did not have commercial value. But it shows at least the availability of CD-i in the land down-under. Who knows what titles will show up when we dig a little deeper! -Thanks to Shroo-man

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‘Palm Springs Open’ was the first game on CD-I

Proving games were on the list of Philips Interactive Media from the very start shows the 1990’s developments on Palm Springs Open, being the first commercially released CD-i game and one of the first CD-i titles in general to hit the CD-i system in 1991. In America ‘Palm Springs Open’ was bundled with the system, focusing on families and diverting itself from the known videogames of Sonic and Mario by offering ‘grown-up, serious’ entertainment. It’s typical that popular genres like shooters and platformers didn’t reach the format until a few years later, and Philips was betting on ‘chic’ games like chess, golf, puzzle games and a little later: Interactive TV game shows.

A historical excerpt from the 1991 press: "Sceptics of the consumer appeal of CD-i, or compact disk-interactive, should try their hands at American Interactive Media's Palm Springs Open, which is being marketed as a promotion package in anticipation of the consumer CD-i launch next year (CI No 1,685). The elaborate 18-hole golf game is made from live footage from the Palm Springs golf tournament as shown on the US ABC Sports channel. For each new game the wind direction changes, so the player never plays the same game twice. The golfer has a choice of clubs and drivers, and aims by directing a mouse or joystick on a remote control. Once the ball has landed, the ABC commentator makes his personalised comments to a wise-cracking guest and the crowd roars its own reaction. Computergram's conclusion, after an afternoon spent at Philips NV's Interactive Media Systems centre in Dorking, Surrey sampling the product, was that if the consumer will fork out for an audio compact disk player, then they might as well splash out on a CD-i player, as soon as system prices fall to an affordable level."

From: CBR Online, thanks to Shroo-man

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Burn:Cycle Original Game Score design

Some CD-i games offer excellent soundtracks and Burn:Cycle is no exception. Burn:Cycle was originally released as a 2CD set including the soundtrack on the second disc. A similar package was released with the 7th Guest. Those two are the only two games on CD-i that got an extra soundtrack audio CD included. There is a blog where the guy behind it designs custom covers of 'lost soundtracks' and Burn:Cycle is one of them. If you want to add the Burn:Cycle soundtrack to your audio collection, check out his site to download the high res pictures.

Thanks to pagemaster65

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Kumi Akiyoshi's Burn:Cycle screenshots

Burn Cycle is a CD-I title that blends puzzle play and 3D graphics with live action footage. It is created by Philips Interactive + Trip Media | Visual Design. Kumi Akiyoshi worked on the Burn Cycle project: "my goal was to work closely with a team to create a compelling, unusual game experience through rich graphics and interesting visuals." He left us a few interesting high-res art pictures which I believe are not screenshots of the final game. The resolution is also higher than I know from the game.




Credits: Kumi Akiyoshi

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Greg Holt: Artist & Colorist at Philips Sidewalk Studio

Greg Holt was a Clean-up Artist, Colorist (backgrounds and characters) at the Philips Sidewalk Studio (1992 - 1994). He was responsible for the coloring and character art of games like The Crayon Factory, Wacky World of Miniature Golf, Surf City, Berenstain Bears On Their Own. Greg: "This was the type of work I mainly did as a clean-up artist and colorist. I would take the animators scanned pencil drawings, re-trace the lines in D-paint, and color in the characters. I also made sure to maintain line quality during animation. Software used : Amiga D-Paint".

Below you'll find some examples of his finished work at Sidewalk:



Thanks to: Greg Holt

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Extract video from VCD- and 'Digital Video on CD-i'-discs

CD-i discs were made for the CD-i consoles and are according to the 'Green book' standard. Because CD-i discs were designed to play only on CD-i players, deviations from normal CD standards were allowed. The new standard was called 'Green book'. The TOC on a CD-i disc does not contain an entry for the data track(s). Only audio tracks can be in the TOC. Consequence is that not many CD/DVD-ROM drives see a track on the CD-i disc and if they do they often get the start address and length wrong. IsoBuster however tries to compensate for that but if the drive (because the TOC is not right) refuses to do anything or read right or whatever still recognizing problems can occur. Therefore it's often a good idea to try and read the CD-i disc in more than one system. Some drives do it better than others.

If the CD-i disc does only contain data tracks you have the best chance of being able to mount the media and browse the content. If there are audio tracks on the CD-i it will get extremely difficult to find a drive which is able to read the CD-i correctly. Reason for this is that the data track is not in the TOC but the audio tracks are, so almost all CD/DVD-ROM drives consider the CD-i to contain audio only (so in fact an audio CD). Trying to read data from an audio CD is then not allowed by the units. Still it depends a bit on the layout (some CD-i discs are finalized as CD-i (then it might still work) but often they are actually as CD-ROM/CDDA discs so that they can play on standard audio players also). With CD-i recognition there are no guarantees and it will certainly not improve as the format is long 'dead' (Some might disagree ;-)) so modern CD/DVD-ROM drives don't tend to support it anymore. The File System is also different on a CD-i disc.

A lot of 'Video CDs' were created in this Green book (CD-i) standard. These Video CDs are not according to the White Book standard which became THE Video CD standard. So, these CD-i Video CDs don't tend to work on PC (for all the reasons above) but IsoBuster tends to be able to get to the content because in most cases the CD-i discs are finalized as CD-i and the contain Data only. These CD-i Video Discs do tend to work in standalone Video CD players.

If you extract the mpg from a whitebook VCD 2.0, the mpg will be accepted by all VCD creating Write Software. If you extract mpg that is not conform VCD 2.0 (e.g. from a CD-i), a lot of VCD creating apps will complain. However, some of them still allow you to create a VCD from the stream (Yippee) (e.g. WinOnCD, Adaptec VCD Creator 4.0). Downside is that CD-i players check for CD format and then determine how the mpg format should look like. Resultantly, the CD-i player will most likely freeze on this kind of mpg on a CD-ROM. HOWEVER ... The whole intention of converting to CD-ROM is for the benefit of being able to view the mpg on PC ... And PC Mpg decoding soft has NO problem with this !!

So, you are now able to 'back-Up' all your favorite CD-i movies to CD-ROMS that can be seen by Windows.

VCD or Video CD is a standard designed for Video content on CD, playable in standalone VCD players (The ones you place under you Television set). The standard is called 'White book'. White book VCDs are not to be mistaken for Green book Video CDs. VCDs are completely compatible with normal data CDs and the content should be easily accessible. The File System on these CDs should be ISO9660 although occasionally one finds them with a Joliet File System (in addition to ISO9660) also.

VCD CDs contain a fixed file and directory layout. A CDI folder with content so that the VCD can be played in CD-i consoles as well and an MPEGAV folder containing the actual Video File (a *.DAT file). This *.DAT file references data which is located in the second (and higher tracks if available). The second and higher data tracks on VCDs contain the actual Video data, mainly in M2F2 sectors which can be interleaved with M2F1 sectors.

So, if the File System is corrupt and one can't find the Video (*.dat) file, 'Extraction of the Mpg data only' from the second or higher tracks is still possible via IsoBuster. IsoBuster features great and proven recovery functionality for this kind of situations.

credits: Isobuster

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