From: sss@castle.ed.ac.uk (S S Sturrock)
Newsgroups: rec.video
Subject: Re: CD-I to compete with LD?
Keywords: CD-I, LD
Date: 11 Nov 92 09:13:21 GMT
Organization: Edinburgh University

In article <1992Nov9.140656.8026@cs.wisc.edu> brianp@ssec.wisc.edu (Brian Paul) writes:

<ultimate nightmare of meeting a Philips rep deleted>
>
>He started off by showing me the back of a CD-I player:  it has a large
>expansion bay intended for the "CD movie" upgrade.  I had to ask him to
>make sure there was no misunderstanding "So you're saying that with the
>upgrade, I'll be able to play full-screen, full-motion video from a 5" CD
>just like LD players do?"  "Yes."   As for resolution he said it would be
>approximately S-VHS quality.  I neglected to ask him what the playing time
>would be per disc.

S-VHS huh?  News to me.

Besides which I think he is being a typical thicky sales rep and missing
the boat entirely on this thing.  The CD movie option will allow digital
picture (compressed) and audio (also compressed) to fit 1 hour per side on
a 5" CD.  To say the resolution will be up to S-VHS standards is not quite
the right thing to say, a digital format will not suffer the usual colour
abberations of any analogue format.  While the actual luminance may not be
as high resolution as S-VHS the fact that colour will be handled better
should result in a better (to the eye) looking picture assuming this is
being driven through a direct RGB input.  Of course, modulate it and you
throw away that advantage and it just becomes rather a grotty composite or
at best Y/V picture.

Effects like CAV on LD should be easily achieved by CD movie though.
>
>Anyway, now I'm not sure about buying an LD player if this 5" video CD is
>for real.  A 5" format sounds more attractive than the 12" (?) LD format
>unless there is a noticable difference in A/V quality.

There will be a noticible difference, that's for sure.  Motion artifacts
being the most obvious.
>
>Has anyone else heard about this who can add anything?  I'd hate to make
>an investment in LD technology if it's going to be replaced by something
>else within 2 years.

Investment in LD is a good bet simply because there is so much material out
there.  I invested in a multistandard LD/CD combo player because PAL discs
are still a little thin on the ground and I have a multistandard TV but
mostly because there is just so much stuff out there on LD and you can bet
that it will take years to get a small portion of them onto CD movie.

Rumour alert.

A friend of mine met a chap who is experimenting with fractal compression
who showed him a 486 PC laptop with the whole of Casablanca compressed onto
a 1.44 meg disc.  The image was small but only because the PC didn't have
the performance to uncompress the image to a large display, the fellow
claims that every detail is there and only needs a more powerful computer
to show it.

If this is true, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, and this can be got
to market CD-I will be dead along with all the other compression systems
used today for video.

Another interesting point is that I have seen fractal compression
demonstrated and given a poor quality image the fractal compresed image
actually had *MORE* detail than the original, admitedly this may not be
real detail but it looked real so who cares?


-- 
Shane Sturrock, Biocomputing Research Unit, Darwin Building, Mayfield Road,
University of Edinburgh, Scotland, Commonwealth of Independent Kingdoms.  :-)

Civilisation is a Haggis Supper with salt and sauce and a bottle of Irn Bru.