RCA VideoDisc CD-ROM Soon To Be Available

RCA VideoDisc CD-ROM Soon To Be Available

UPDATE: The CD-ROM is now available. Click HERE to order.

I plan to have an RCA VideoDisc CD-ROM available in early 1999. This CD-ROM will be authored in HTML, and will be similar to the CED Magic web site, but where CED Magic contains about 20 MB of data, the CD-ROM will contain about 600 MB. The additional data will consist largely of high resolution photographs of the front and back of all the titles listed in the CED Title Database. These photos will be 1024 x 1146 pixels in size, meaning that they will appear life-size on a 14" monitor set to a resolution of 640 x 480. This will be close to the electronic equivalent of holding the CED caddy in your own hands- all but the finest text will be legible on monitors set to 640 x 480. The main utility of this will be the ability to look at the caddy without having to retrieve it from storage or even own it. Since a lot of CED's are now being acquired over the internet, the ability to see the caddy layout prior to purchase will be useful information to purchasers and bidders. The photographs will be linked to clickable fields in the CED Title Database, and will also be navigable in an alphabetical slide show fashion.

The production of this CD-ROM will be a non-profit hobbyist exercise, so I'll be selling the disc for the distributed cost of mastering, replicating, and shipping, which I'd estimate at $5 to $10 per disc depending on the number of interested collectors and the replication process chosen. The disc will be a hybrid, playable on Macintosh, Unix, and Windows 95/98/NT/2000 machines. If you are interested, submit your name and email address on the form at the bottom of this page, so I can get a count and also add you to a list of people to be notified when the project is complete.

CED Magic DVD-ROM

This project is still at least a few years away, but this will be the DVD version of the above CD-ROM with even more data added. A CD-ROM can hold 650 MB of data, but a single-sided, single-layer DVD-ROM can hold 4380 MB, about seven times as much. This additional space will be occupied by a set of low-compression caddy photographs, as well as digital video related to CED, like the 23 minute tour of RCA's disc and player manufacturing facilities. It should be possible to master the DVD-ROM so the video segments can be watched on a computer with a DVD-ROM drive or a television with an ordinary DVD player. Small runs of DVD-ROM's are exorbitantly expensive to master now, but just like small runs of CD-ROM's have gotten much less expensive, the same will be true for DVD-ROM's as the number of drives and economy of scale go up.