Specifications

CD-i FAQ 2000 Edition Revised February 21, 2001
Latest version and more CD-i info: http://www.icdia.org
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4. CD-i players
4.1 Which companies sold CD-i players?
The CD-i standard was set up in the late 80s by Philips and Sony, the same companies behind
the CD-Audio and CD-ROM spec. The idea was to establish a worldwide standard that could be
lincensed by other manufacturers in a similar way as previous CD-standards. In the early
development-stage, changes looked very promising for CD-i: almost all big consumer electronics
companies announced plans to manufacture players, or showed prototype models. Among those
companies were Pioneer and Matsushita (Panasonic), but the players that they showed were
never actually taken in production. Sony sold some portable CD-i players for a very short period
of time in 1991. But in the end, Philips became the major backer of the CD-i system, supporting
the system with software titles, authoring tools and some 20 or so models of CD-i players, which
were produced until June of 1999. By then, CD-i was already dissapeared from the consumer
market for some years, but it was extensively used by a wide variety of companies in the
professional field. Refer to section 2 (CD-i applications) for more information. Over the years,
several companies joined Philips in producing players, or selling modified OEM-versions of
existing players, such a LG Electronics, Kyocera, Bang & Olufsen, Grundig, Digital Video
Systems, NBS and Memorex.
4.2 What CD-i players are available?
Philips alone produced some 20 models of CD-i players, including consumer models to fit in a
regular stereo system, mini CD-i players, portable CD-i players with and without a screen, stereo
systems with an integrated CD-i player, TVs with an integrated CD-i player, professional CD-i
players and special authoring CD-i players. A complete list of all CD-i players ever made,
including their subtle differences, is available at the Complete CD-i players overview at
www.icdia.org.
4.3 What is the difference between a consumer and a professional CD-i player?
Philips sold various professional CD-i players next to the standard consumer models. Both types
of players comply fully to the CD-i standard as defined in the Green Book and were based on the
same CPU and audio and video ICs, but the professional players usually offered some extra
features. There were professional players with an integrated floppy disk drive, with a parallel port
to connect a printer or ZIP-drive, with SCSI-ports, with ethernet network connections or with up to
5 MB of extra RAM. Some players had a feature that enabled the users to customize the startup
screen of the player shell. Several professional players were especially made for CD-i
development studios, since they included input ports to connect an emulator (see section 7 (CD-i
authoring) to simulate the playback of a CD-i disc from an external harddisk for testing purposes.
Refer to the Complete CD-i players overview at www.icdia.org for more information about the
differences between the various players.
4.4 Does system performance differ between the various players?
No. Although there are various models of CD-i players, every CD-i disc will perform exactly the
same in terms of system speed or audio and video quality on every CD-i system. The Green
Book extensively specifies how and at what speed the audio and video data should be read from
the disc and parsed trough the appropriate decoding ICs. Even if a faster CPU is used in a CD-i
player (which is allowed by the Green Book, but so far never actually implemented in any CD-i
player), system performance will only rise slightly because the realtime retreival of audio and
video from a disc is not influenced by the processor. The seektime of the laser-unit in the CD
player may, according to the Green Book, not be more that 3 seconds for a full stroke. It is
possible for a CD-i player manufacturer to implement a CD drive with a faster seek time, but apart
from getting faster to the desired data, also in this case the performance will not actually differ.