Date: Wed, 13 Nov 1996 12:35:12 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> Cc: jsuter@intrastar.net, isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: bang bang bang bang - lame lame lame lame Message-ID: <7574.847917312@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 13 Nov 1996 14:09:51 CST." <199611132009.OAA23742@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
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> I must confess that I have not been following the technology that > closely, but I was wondering what the resolution is. Standard PAL resolution - we're not talking HDTV here, simply a way of playing movies from a CD on your TV (and CDs take up much less space than VHS tape, are more robust, don't stretch or get eaten by your neighbor's mutant Croatian VCR, etc etc etc.). I think the thing that's really blocked this technology from taking off in the home consumer market is the fact that most movies require two CDs, and fat, lazy american consumers don't like having to get up in the middle of the movie and swap CDs. Now that the high density CDs are coming in (Walnut Creek CDROM is getting some of the first writers for them, in fact) this could change significantly and I could easily see the entire "I Claudius" PBS special fitting onto a single 4GB CDROM. :-) > The last I heard, most "real time MPEG" stuff worked at standard TV > resolutions (or only mildly better) and was pricey as all heck. Not pricey at all, actually. You can buy MPEG decoder boards for around $200 now, though be careful to avoid the "Real Magic" MPEG video cards as they are complete and utter crap. I was so disgusted with mine, not to mention their deceptive advertising practices (nowhere do they note that the card will work with *one* and only *one* brand of CDROM - it takes a call to their tech support department and several hours on hold to learn that tidbit), that I simply threw mine in the trash. Wish I'd saved it though - I'd have taken it to the new rifle range I found which allows you to set up your own types of targets just so long as you clean up after yourself. :-) Thankfully, there are other cards on the market now. > Since computational time should be proportional to the resolution of the > display, it should be much easier to do a 320 * 200 display (64000 pixels, > and at 16 bit depth that's 128Kbytes of data) as opposed to a 1024 * 768 > display (786432 pixels, and at 24 bit depth that's 2.4Mbytes of data). Well, PAL is somewhat higher than this and while the frame rate of my CD-I is unknown, there's no perceivable flicker and I'm pretty sensitive to video refresh rates below 25FPS. Jordan
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