Specifications

CD-i FAQ 2000 Edition Revised February 21, 2001

Latest version and more CD-i info: http://www.icdia.org

From a software point of view, there is no actual difference between the three broadcast systems.

Every CD-i disc can be played on every CD-i player. However, as with DVD-Video, some notes

with respect to aspect ratio and safety area need to be take into account. Please refer to: 3.13.2

Does CD-i make a difference between PAL and NTSC?.

4.17 Can CD-i be used on DTV, IDTV and HDTV television sets?

Yes, they can. All future TV sets provide for some means of connecting an analogue video source

like a CD-i player or VCR. Note that it is not possible to make a digital connection to for example

a DTV (Digital TV) or HDTV (High Definition TV) set with current players, nor will the picture

quality be improved when such a TV is used.

4.18 Is a CD-i player Y2K proof?

Yes. CD-i is based on the OS-9 operating system, which is very Unix like. It therefore does not

suffer from Windows or DOS-style year 2000 problems. Since Unix stores a year in a 7 bit field

which starts counting at the year 1900, the first problems (if some) will arise in 2027 (so then we

have a Y2.027K problem :-). A CD-i player continues to count onwards from the beginning of

2000, but it needs to be switched off and on at least one time in the new millenium for the player

to perform the necessary calculations at system startup. When displaying a post-2000 date from

a file correctly, some calculations need to be made by the application (in most cases, this

involves only adding a 100 to the results produced by the system). It is however very rare that an

application displays file creation dates, and the Memory and Storage options in the CD-i player's

startup shell have already taken care of this problem. The only problem-causing exception might

be CD-i players equiped with a floppy disk drive (CDI 310, CDI 180, CDI 602, CDI 605 and CDI

615) when using MS-DOS formatted floppies. For this to be solved, an updated device driver

(called PCF) is available from Philips. More information is available in a white paper from Philips

that can be downloaded at the CD-i Technical Documentation downloads section at