Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

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> Pour one out for CD-i. Ahead of its time.

As someone whose first job in tech was doing software QA for a publisher of CD-i titles, let me say: no, it really wasn't.

If anything, CD-i was behind its time. As a game console, its poor controls and sluggish responsiveness made it inferior even to consoles like the Genesis and SNES that had come out years earlier; as a means of playing back video, its reliance on a low-resolution SDTV display made it inferior even to a computer with a VGA monitor; as a repository of information, its dependence on optical media made it inferior even to a nascent Web accessed over a 28.8kpbs modem. Even at first release, there was nothing CD-i did that some other product already on the market wasn't doing better.

This wasn't because the engineers at Philips were bad at their jobs; as the parent comment notes, it's more to do with CD-i being a product designed for a market segment that turned out to not really exist. So it ended up getting sold into market segments that did exist, against products that had been designed specifically to satisfy the needs of those segments. And of course those products ran rings around it there.

> As a means of playing back video, its reliance on a low-resolution SDTV display made it inferior even to a computer with a VGA monitor.

No kidding. Its reliance on low-resolution MPEG-1 for video meant VCDs compared poorly even to VHS. I believe the NTSC discs had roughly similar horizontal resolution to VHS, but only about half the vertical resolution. I suppose the quality would be similar in theory, as the VCDs were not interlaced like VHS, but that wasn't my experience.

I had Star Trek II and a couple other movies on CD-I video discs, and my first impression was, "wow, I can barely make out these opening credits."

I do, however, credit my CD-I for giving me early exposure to the VCD format. I had a CD-R back before most people even knew they existed (they were still called WORM drives), and I put together a few school projects on VCD.

In a similar boat; I got a CD-I with the add-on MPEG-1 module (picked up for $20 for a floor-model clearance table in the late-90s), but in my eyes the big failure of VCD as a format was needing two discs per movie.

VCD's aren't that terrible though (a 4head Hifi VCR though would look better), here's a recording of the opening of the Matrix with some trailers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRElGEgHzEE

VCD's never really made it into piracy. If I recall at the time the Warez scene was using Vivo Active [1] (H.263 video and G.723 ADPCM audio) splitting videos at 650Mb, which gave greater fidelity than MPEG-1 in a smaller package. I think that only lasted a year or so until DiVX/Xvid came along.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivo_Software

I can recall a period when pirated MPEG-2 SVCDs could be found easily enough. It was mostly during that period where DVD players were commonplace, but DVD burners were rare. I think some players (Apex?) could even play MPEG-4 video off of CDs, though I don't think that was a standardized format.

Regardless, pirated SVCDs were nowhere near as common as the h.263 discs you mentioned, and you're right about MPEG-1 VCDs. I don't recall seeing (m)any pirated movies in that format.

> a 4head Hifi VCR though would look better

I'm suddenly missing my old Sony SLV-N81 :).

That comment was more for @bsenftner, tbh. They tried, but it didn't work out. No need to rub salt in the wound just because the format didn't catch on.

Oh, and for the record...SNES > Genesis.

While they are considered to be part of the same 'generation' ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console#Fourth_gene... ) the Genesis was released two years before the NES, which at that time was around 1/3rd to 1/2 of a console generation.

IMO, where Sega really failed was all of the failed addons. They didn't really have a 'good' console until the Dreamcast, it had many features that were too far ahead of their time, while being crippled by others which were detrimental. Largely using an outdated 'mega CD' like format and lacking support for DVD playback, which the competitor (PS2) ended up having as a major selling point. In some parallel universe where the Dreamcast happened to have DVD playback (as well as games on either CD or DVD depending) and the option of an ethernet or modem addin Sega might still be making consoles.

DVD wouldn't have saved Dreamcast. DVD drives were far too expensive to manufacture at the time. Sony was large enough where they could subsidize the inclusion of a DVD player in PS2, selling the console at a loss. There was no way Sega could do the same; Sony manufactured their DVD drives.

The Dreamcast had a 56k modem built-in, and an Ethernet adapter was sold later on, so I don't know what you're talking about.

And Genesis was a "good" console. It was Sega's only console that was commercially successful.

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