Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!emory!gatech!mcnc!ncsuvx!news From: kdarling@hobbes.ncsu.edu (Kevin Darling) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Is CDTV CD ROM drive compatible? Message-ID: <1990Dec11.095100.26677@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> Date: 11 Dec 90 09:51:00 GMT References: <90344.151536IO00844@MAINE.BITNET> <90345.021910R38@psuvm.psu.edu> Sender: news@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu (USENET News System) Organization: NCSU Computing Center Lines: 23 > CDTV is compatible with CDROMs that are of the ISO-9660 standard > format. Look for that designation on the label. That ISO standard is for the directory layout only. Unfortunately there is no standard yet for the actual data contained in the files. CDROM-XA is supposed to take care of that, but it seems a long way away. In the meantime, you virtually always have to have the specific program (the data retrieval engine) ported to your machine, in order to be able to access the data. There are a few discs with available data specs, but they're the rare case indeed, it seems. Most cdrom makers keep their data encoding a secret. There's a lot happening which may alter what becomes a "standard", also. Besides that other IFF article someone mentioned, IBM has just announced _their_ multimedia exchange format called RIFF. They also have a library to handle external audio/video devices in an independent way. And then of course Apple has their own standards. Now, those are just interchange formats, but they may affect cdroms in the end. Looks like the usual historical "standards" mess to me best - kev