Philips Video Cd's Wanted/ Plus the US Master VCD List

Anything relating to CD-i can be discussed in this forum. From the multiple hardware iterations of the system to the sofware including games, reference, music and Video CDs. Maybe you hold an interest in Philips Media and the many development houses set up to cater for CD-i if so then this is the forum.
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Post by kcalhoun » Sun Jun 13, 2010 10:14 pm

More evidence that April, 1994 was the cusp. A Billboard magazine article of April 9, 1994, "Video CD Hardware, Software in NARM Spotlight," attributed the following information to Emiel Petrone, a senior VP with Philips Interactive Media: "Paramount CD titles now on the market will not be playable on other Video CD systems, but future titles will play on any Video CD player."

The article is available at http://books.google.com/books?id=QQgEAA ... ge&f=false.

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Post by kcalhoun » Mon Jun 14, 2010 10:43 pm

The promotional video for CD-i Digital Video (available at http://www.icdia.co.uk/video/dvpromotion.mpg) lists the following initial titles for Fall, 1993:

Top Gun
White Christmas
Black Rain
The Hunt For Red October
Patriot Games
The Naked Gun 2 1/2
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Apocalypse Now

as well as the following "Upcoming Releases":

An Indecent Proposal
Fatal Attraction
Sliver
The Firm
Posse

This is pretty close to the list of titles I believe were released in the U.S. as CD-i DV discs (swapping "Wayne's World" and "Coneheads" for "Apocalypse Now" and "Fatal Attraction").

"Apocalypse Now" shows signs of having been bumped from the earlier release schedule after it had already progressed far enough for Philips to print booklets and sleeves: the booklet of the released version that I have, authored 11/94, has the "Digital Video" designation, and a sticker is affixed to its sleeve to indicate that it's in fact a Video CD. The CD-i DV promotional video shows clips of "Apocalypse Now" in pan and scan format, while the eventual release is letterboxed; perhaps the question of how to present the film for CD-i was a sticking point.

And while I'm making wild guesses about why titles may have been delayed, I'll note that the CD-i DV promotional video also shows brief clips of a Michael Douglas interview and of footage taken on the set of "Fatal Attraction" under the narrator's claim that "selected movie...titles will offer...celebrity interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, and more." Perhaps Philips Interactive Media ran into snags in preparing or gaining approval for such material for "Fatal Attraction" and shelved the project. Does the European release of "Fatal Attraction", one of the early releases there, contain anything like that?

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Post by Bas » Thu Jun 17, 2010 6:46 pm

Excellent stuff! Well worth the highlight on the Interactive Dreams frontpage! Sorry for not having more time to dive into the subject now, but I will :)

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Post by kcalhoun » Sat Jun 26, 2010 10:18 pm

kcalhoun wrote:The list of movies released as 'CD-i DV' titles in the U.S. is different. Of the 16 full-length movies mentioned in a list of released CD-i titles through June, 1994 as compiled by the Developer Services group at Philips Interactive Media of America (archived at http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp. ... cdicat.txt), I believe that 13 were 'CD-i DV' titles, a.k.a. 'Digital Video on CD-i'. Here are those 13, along with the approximate date of authoring according to the timestamps of the files on disc for those titles I have in hand:

Black Rain (9/93)
Coneheads
The Firm (12/93)
The Hunt For Red October (9/93)
Indecent Proposal
The Naked Gun 2 1/2 (9/93)
Patriot Games (9/93)
Posse
Sliver
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (9/93)
Top Gun (9/93)
Wayne's World (2/94)
White Christmas (9/93)
I can confirm now that all 13 of the above were released as 'CD-i DV' titles in the U.S. Here are the missing dates (not release dates, but datestamps of the video files on disc):

Coneheads (1/94)
Indecent Proposal (11/93)
Posse (1/94)
Sliver (12/93)

And here are dates for some of the CD-i DV titles released in Europe:

Top Gun - 1/94
Star Trek VI - 2/94
Ghost - 3/94

These titles bear very little resemblance to the U.S. CD-i DV releases. For one thing, the U.S. releases store the MPEG video streams in .rtf files, while the European releases use .dat files. The layout of files in the filesystem differs as well.

While the U.S. releases carry a BIBLIO.txt file indicating that they were authored by Philips Interactive Media of America, there's no indication on disc of authorship of the European releases that I could find. I've read that Philips considered use of one-size-fits-all MPEG encodings for CD-i for both NTSC and PAL systems, but the movie titles Philips released in these regions were apparently authored independently, from scratch.

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Post by motley6 » Fri Jul 02, 2010 5:37 am

Bryan Adams- Waking Up The Neighbors
Bon Jovi- Keep The Faith
Xmen Night of The Sentinels
White Christmas

all of these are Digital Video on CD-i and not VCD format


I was under the impression that the UK and US DV on CD-i were not VCD format but some of you have said that the UK versions are dat files. Are you positive?

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Post by kcalhoun » Fri Jul 02, 2010 7:22 pm

motley6 wrote:Bryan Adams- Waking Up The Neighbors
Bon Jovi- Keep The Faith
Xmen Night of The Sentinels

all of these are Digital Video on CD-i and not VCD format
Yes, we haven't made an attempt here to list the Digital Video on CD-i titles other than the feature films. "The Cream of Eric Clapton", "Webber: The Premiere Collection", and "100 Greatest Touchdowns" were also released as Digital Video on CD-i.

I'm not sure about "Pete Townshend: Live" -- from what I can tell, while the demonstration disc was a CD-i DV disc with CD-audio tracks, the 3-disc commercial release was Video CD.
I was under the impression that the UK and US DV on CD-i were not VCD format but some of you have said that the UK versions are dat files. Are you positive?
The three European titles I have, listed and dated in my earlier post, do indeed have .dat files, but they are not Video CDs -- for one thing, the filesystem used on these discs is the proprietary CD-i filesystem and not ISO 9660, used by Video CDs. But the layout of the files in the filesystem is much closer to that of a typical Video CD than what you find on early U.S. releases. Here, for example, is the filesystem tree of disc 1 of the version of Star Trek VI released in Europe, as reported by IsoBuster:

\CDI\ALL.RTF
\CDI\BUMPER.DAT
\CDI\CDI_FLM1.APP
\CDI\MUSIC01.DAT
\CDI\NINTRO01.DAT
\CDI\NINTRO02.DAT
\CDI\NMENU01.DAT
\CDI\NMENU02.DAT
\CDI\PINTRO01.DAT
\CDI\PINTRO02.DAT
\CDI\PMENU01.DAT
\CDI\PMENU02.DAT
\CDI\VIDEOCD.APP
\CDI\VIDEOCD.DAT
\MPEGAV\MUSIC01.DAT
\abstract
\biblio
\copyright
\path_tbl

Note that there is, for example, no \VCD directory here -- meaning that even if the files were stored in an ISO 9660 filesystem, the title would not conform to the Video CD specification (and of course the video encoding doesn't comply with the VCD spec either).

But, the file \MPEGAV\MUSIC01.DAT is in fact a 500 MB file carrying the MPEG-1 encoding of the first half of the feature. \CDI\BUMPER.DAT contains an MPEG-1 encoding of a copyright warning. I couldn't find any other MPEG data on the disc.

I would suppose, not having read the Green Book very closely, that the naming and layout of files for CD-i titles containing digital video were rather arbitrary, because each title carried its own app that knew where to find the video in the filesystem. That it was possible to build CD-i apps that could process MPEG streams stored in .dat files is clear, because CD-i apps for true Video CDs that came soon afterward would do just this. Without the constraint of compatibility with any other platform, or indeed of compatibility even with any other CD-i title, I'd suppose that any number of conventions could have been established for Digital Video on CD-i titles, including layout and naming resembling Video CD.

In fact, Philips Interactive Media Systems in Europe established a convention for the layout of their early movie titles rather closer to Video CD than PIM of America did, no doubt anticipating at least the possibility of an eventual move toward compatibility with other systems that could play the titles they produced.

Apparently it took several months, between February and May of 1994, to retool the process at PIM of America in order to author Video CD titles. Judging from the evidence of the early European titles, I would guess there was much less of a delay there. It would be interesting to round out the list of dates for early movie titles in Europe to see if we can pinpoint the transition period.

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There is a 14th

Post by kcalhoun » Wed Jul 07, 2010 4:57 am

The Addams Family (3/94)

was also released in the U.S. as Digital Video on CD-i. I overlooked it earlier because it doesn't appear in PIM of America's list of CD-i titles released as of June, 1994 (link given above).

So the obvious question is: were other Digital Video on CD-i titles released in the U.S. but not mentioned on that list, either because they were released in that form after June 1994 or because PIM of America's list was incomplete? I'm going to guess that there probably were, but I don't have information about any as of now.

The later authoring date of "The Addams Family" narrows down the transition period a bit -- almost precisely to April 1994.

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Post by kcalhoun » Fri Feb 18, 2011 12:28 am

Just as the Master List says, Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1/94) is yet another, bringing the total to 15 confirmed features released as Digital Video on CD-i in the US.

I can't say how that one got left of the list of titles available as of June, 1994 from PIM without knowing when it actually hit the retail channel. But that's what I started with: the assumption that if it wasn't on that list, it came too late to be DV on CD-i in the US. Clearly a flawed assumption, that.

So in all we now have --

The Addams Family (3/94)
Black Rain (9/93)
Coneheads (1/94)
The Firm (12/93)
The Hunt For Red October (9/93)
Indecent Proposal (11/93)
The Naked Gun 2 1/2 (9/93)
Patriot Games (9/93)
Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1/94)
Posse (1/94)
Sliver (12/93)
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (9/93)
Top Gun (9/93)
Wayne's World (2/94)
White Christmas (9/93)

As previously noted there were also music, sports, and special interest titles released as Digital Video on CD-i in the US. These are just the known features.

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Post by Gaara » Wed May 25, 2011 7:23 am

VCD collecting?

Wouldn't mind getting into that myself (I only have two VCDs (one of them coming in the mail), and two "DV on CD-i" titles). Mainly of interest to me are forgotten documentries and other unusual things unlikely to appear on DVD...

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Post by proxy10 » Thu May 26, 2011 9:21 am

Excellent stuff! but i dont want have it now

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Post by phatrat1982 » Mon Jun 13, 2011 3:29 pm

OK so the real main reason I came to this forum is to ask about VCD movies so here I go my questions for you experts here.



I found the site because I was looking for a master list of VCD titles released in the US, and well that lead me here to this very thread. BUT I still have some questions that I want answers to. I know VCD died early in the US and I know that Philips was not the only company who helped develop the format and I know other video game systems could play the movies usually with video card upgrades kinda like CD-i did. The list previous in the thread and the site it is taken from all state these are made by Philips and were promoted as compatible for CD-i but VCD went beyond just CD-i right so my questions are as follows,




1. DID anyone else publish titles for VCD in the US that were not marketed as CD-i compatible but just general release like WB or somebody or were all VCD's tied into CD-i even if they were playable on other hardware?

2. IF answer 1 is YES does anyone have a list of titles NOT published by Philips but well everything else?


3. IS there any chance Star Wars was available on CD-i or VCD at any point in time?




Ok so I can't find answers to 1 and 2 but I did discover a WB format called Movie CD for PC CD-ROMS but that I presume is not the same.


question three I got an answer from Star Wars.com they did a special on all home video releases of Star Wars and VCD nor CD-i DV were mentioned so I can assume those movies were not on the format am I correct or is it safe to assume starwars.com could be wrong? I mean they kept saying "available on digital format on LaserDisc"but Laserdisc is not digital so if they got that wrong could they have gotten other info wrong?

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Post by phatrat1982 » Fri Jun 17, 2011 1:53 am

ok so I found the information I was looking for on another forum.

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Post by Trev » Fri Jun 17, 2011 2:30 am

phatrat1982 wrote:ok so I found the information I was looking for on another forum.
Link?

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Post by phatrat1982 » Fri Jun 17, 2011 3:46 am

I don't even remember now what I was even asking and I didn't save the link to the forum I was on. I think my main question was were any other movies sold in the US that were not made by Philips or something like that.

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Post by Trev » Fri Jun 17, 2011 4:08 am

It's okay, no big deal.

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