Viewing MPEG video
You might actually view the full motion video clips that are stored on a CD-i disc using version 6.0 or later of Microsoft Windows Media Player. This application is available for free download at Microsoft. Media Player allows you to view a wide variety of media formats, including the MPEG audio and video formats used in CD-i among others. CD-i allows for a much broader variety in combining audio and video rates, and hence audio and video quality, than for example Video-CD where the audio and video bitrates are fixed. Media Player plays most of them, however sometimes when an MPEG sequence is interleaved with other material on the disc, the picture may look disturbed. You can often recognize an MPEG sequence on the directory in which it is placed, for example FMV or VIDEOS. Also, look for the extension .rtf, which stands for Real Time File (and not Rich Text Format!). .rtf-files might be MPEG-video sequences, but also other, non-playable media files. Just try this out by loading the file in Media Player. Note that it is possible in this way to view movies that were released in the pre-Video-CD CD-i format, but also video sequences from other titles like games.
Viewing stills and hearing audio
Usually, all media information on a CD-i disc is stored in one large Real Time File. When this is the case, you cannot use this file on a PC. But sometimes, individual audio and video files are stored on the disc in CD-i's IFF (Interchangable File Format) format. This is the format that is used in CD-i authoring packages and studios. You can usually recognize these files from the following extensions: .d .cl3 .cl4 .cl7 .cl8 .rl3 .rl7 for video (where d stands for DYUV, cl for CLUT and rl for Run Lenght Encoding), and .aas .asm .abm .abs .acm .acs for audio (where the second letter indicates the level of ADPCM used, and the latter one indicates m for mono and s for stereo). You can view images using Robin Burrow's CDiView, a better solution might be to convert video and audio files to standard PC formats using the OptImage Conversion Utilities (both available at the PC/Windows asset conversion and management tools page on this site).
Viewing text files
You can view text files on a CD-i disc using a regular text editor or word processor. On most CD-i discs, you can find files which are named something like copyright, abstract and bibliography. These files give more information about the content of a CD-i title and the people that developed it. On some CD-i titles, you can find additional production notes, hidden features or cheats explained in a text file, since the developers did not need to care about people outside other CD-i studios, since they were unable to access this information. Please be aware of the limitations of reading text files that are explained below.
Viewing the contents of a CD-i disc's Primary Volume Descriptor
When you access the CD-i Filesystem Driver's control applet in Windows' control panel, you can view the contents of the Primary Volume Descriptor of the mounted CD-i discs. In the PVD (sometimes refered to as Disc Label), important information about the disc is stored, such as the names of its album, volume, publisher and even the data preparer.
The driver is based on several modern technologies, resulting in such benefits as:
- Uses system disk cache (VCACHE)
- Has a few 16-bit compatibility functions (to enable browsing the CD in DOS box)
- Is active only when CD-i disc is inserted, does not affect the usage of normal CD-ROM discs
- Supports all functions to enable browsing in Windows: open, close, read files, etc.
- File copying to other media is also possible
If you found some really interesting stuff on a parcticular CD-i disc, or you find a new way of using it, or if you have just a question or comment about this driver, please contact me.
