Newsgroups: comp.publish.cdrom.software Path: cdrom.com!barrnet.net!sgiblab!sgigate.sgi.com!olivea!charnel!yeshua.marcam.com!MathWorks.Com!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!sun4nl!relay.philips.nl!philica!adrie From: adrie@ica.philips.nl (Adrie Koolen) Subject: Re: CD-I data accessible to PC? Message-ID: <1994Mar28.081103.1123@ica.philips.nl> Organization: Philips Consumer Electronics, Eindhoven, The Netherlands References: <2mvg9bINNmlr@xs4all.hacktic.nl> Date: Mon, 28 Mar 1994 08:11:03 GMT Lines: 32 In article kruse@sector.kodak.com writes: >In article 2mvg9bINNmlr@xs4all.hacktic.nl, chris@xs4all.hacktic.nl (chris) writes: >>Recenetly i got interested in MPEG video compression. I also read >>somewhere that videos on CD-I are also compressed with the MPEG-1 >>method. However when I put such a CD-I into my CDROM-XA drive, DOS >>could not recognize it as a valid disk. When treated as an audio CD >>MSCDEX says something like "Not high sierra or ISO9696 something" >>My question: is it possible to trick the computer as to be able to acces >>the data on CD-I's?? > >Not easily... If the disc is truly a CD-I disc, then the CD-I tracks >do NOT appear in the TOC of the disc - thus making it very >difficult to access the information in these tracks. The data >tracks MAY be accessible but probably not as a mountable >DOS file structure. > >Then, start worrying about what format the data is laid down in... If the CDROM drive and/or the device driver are very clever, you might be able to read the data blocks from the CD. Problem is that the file system format on a CD-i differs somewhat from High-Sierra and ISO-9660. The main problem is that integers are stored only in their high-byte-first format, as CD-i players use a Motorola 68000 compatible processor. The low-byte-first fields are left reserved (=0), so MSCDEX will not be able to read a CD-i file system. Some time ago, I did write some software to read directories and files from a CD-i, using a 386 PC and a LMS 205 CDROM drive. So it can be done, but not by the standard MSCDEX. Adrie Koolen (adrie@ica.philips.nl) Philips Consumer Electronics, Eindhoven, the Netherlands