From: wave@media.mit.edu (Michael B. Johnson)
Subject: Photo CD confusion: formats & drives 
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
Distribution: ne
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1992 00:52:52 GMT

In article <1992Aug27.135253.11191@homebase.vistachrome.com> you write:
>>ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) writes:
>>>Kodak wants to tie up the file formats under lock and key.  You can't
>>>write a program to open their files.  You can't even write a program
>>>which generates their files.  Don't expect to ever see interfaces
>>
>>Where did you hear this?  Any CD-ROM player can access the first 
>>session on a CD.  Some CD-ROM players can access the second through Nth
>>photo sessions and some will need a PROM upgrade.
>>


First of all, that's not what he's saying.  He's saying that Kodak isn't
make the YUV file format of Photo CD available.  This is true, and it
blows.  Until someone reverse engineers the file format, developers
(whether commercial or amateur) will have to either wait for Kodak
to release a toolkit for their platform (at which point they pay Kodak
several hundred dollars for a development kit) or hope their vendor
(i.e. Apple, for example) licenses the software directly from Kodak and
makes it generally available.  

This is stupid on Kodak's part, as far as I'm concerned.  As for the
previous poster who said that the file formats of various applications
weren't known and that was fine with him, that may be true, but most
of those apps can happily import EPS, TIFF, PICT, RIB, etc. because they 
are documented interchange formats.  The bug in Kodak's short sighted
approach is that instead of being able to leave the image on the Photo
CD, you have to immediately convert the image to some known quantity.

This is all assuming of course that you want to use Photo CD with some
software or hardware not necessarily "blessed" by Kodak.  This is of
course to be desired...

As for the other comment regarding current and/or future CD-ROM drives
reading multi-session discs, there are, to my knowledge, NO drives in
the field that can read multi-session discs, and NO drives in the field
that will be able to read multi-session discs with a PROM upgrade.

You're going to have to buy a whole new drive, I'm afraid.

Actually, I take that back.  The CDI machines out there (I know we have
some around the Lab, I'm pretty sure they're commercially available)
can read Photo CDs, so I think they can do the multisession stuff.  BUT,
there are no commercially available vendor or 3rd party CD ROM drives
that you can hook up to a Mac, NeXT, PC, SGI, etc. and get to do multi
session stuff.  That's a strong statement, and I would love to be proved
wrong about it, but I've looked...

Anyway, let me just say that I think Photo CD is great, and in all ways
Kodak has done a great job, except for the fact that they have a closed
file format.  I don't think that will kill it, but it will certainly
slow the growth of innovative third party software, which is a real 
shame.



-- 

-->  Michael B. Johnson
-->  MIT Media Lab      --  Computer Graphics & Animation Group
-->  (617) 253-0663     --  wave@media-lab.media.mit.edu
-- 

-->  Michael B. Johnson
-->  MIT Media Lab      --  Computer Graphics & Animation Group
-->  (617) 253-0663     --  wave@media-lab.media.mit.edu
Newsgroups: rec.photo