New products, new standards and a new consortium pave the way

Write-once CD drives (CD-WO, also called CD-R for CD-Recordable) are slated to be released soon at prices much lower than those of the first-generation CD-WO drives from Yamaha and Sony. The ramifications are numerous; most obviously, they will make CD publishing possible as an in-house desktop technology, not wholly dependent on pressing plants or even on service bureaus such as Kodak proposes for Photo CD.

For example, at last month’s CD-ROM Expo in Washington, DC, JVC demonstrated a basic CD-WO “one-off CD-ROM” production station, which it expects to sell for $12,000 in the first quarter of 1992. The new write-once CD drives themselves are now being quoted to vendors at $2,500. The writable discs, expected to sell soon at $30 each for 600 megabytes, can be read on conventional, inexpensive CD-ROM drives. They will certainly be used for low-volume CD-ROM production, for “secure” applications, for CD-ROM prototyping, and as a premastering medium for submission to a CD-ROM replication house.

Newly proposed standards, however, aim to go well beyond these uses, making the write-once CD data disc a ubiquitous high-capacity data storage and distribution medium. As such, it could compete with digital audio tape (DAT), 8mm tape, removable magnetic disk media, microfilm, and non-CD-format writable disc technology for applications such as system backup, archival storage and document imaging.

A new consortium. To make possible the birth of a newly capable CD-R medium, Philips convened a task force of technical experts known as the Frankfurt Group (so-named because the meetings took place in Frankfurt, Germany).

Its charter is to develop a file standard for the recordable CD format. Its draft of an ambitious new standard, the Frankfurt Proposal, is based on the Orange Book, which defined the underlying technology of writable CDs, just as the High Sierra-ISO 9660 file system standards were based on the underlying Yellow Book specifications that brought CD-ROM to life in the mid-1980s (see Vol. 1, No. 5, p. 18).

To promote CD-R and the Frankfurt Group’s standard, a new organization, known as the CD-R or Frankfurt Consortium, has just been founded. Announced at CD-ROM Expo, the Frankfurt Consortium comprises key companies involved in CD-ROM/CD-R hardware, software and media production, including Philips, Sony, Ricoh, Sun Microsystems and Kodak.

The proposed Frankfurt standards aim at widening the niche for CD-R by going beyond the whole-disc-at-a-time recording mode of the first CD-R systems. The Frankfurt proposal will make CD-R suitable for multiple “recording sessions” (adding new data each time) and for updating as well as appending files.

The proposed standards would also improve file access time by putting extended file attribute information in the directory and path tables, thereby making access to files more direct.

BOON FOR DESKTOP PRESENTATIONS

Both users and developers would benefit from a recordable CD data disc whose files could be updated more as those on a normal computer disk are. Such a disc would, among other advantages, make it much easier to develop and distribute desktop multimedia presentations.

The Frankfurt standards aim to permit CD-R (as well as hybrid CD-ROM/CD-R discs, which the Orange Book also defines) to be readable by CD-ROM XA, CD-I and Photo CD readers, as well as by conventional CD-ROM drives. Support for specific multimedia capabilities of these formats, such as audio/data interleaving, would depend on the “authoring” software driving the CD-R recorder.

There is a fly in the ointment. To make incrementally written CD-R discs readable on standard CD-ROM drives, the existing CD-ROM ISO 9660 standard would have to be replaced with one in line with the Frankfurt file structures; more precisely, Frankfurt would become a superset of ISO 9660.

Despite the ramifications for discs already on the market, this need not be a totally bleak prospect; it would improve the performance and cross-platform interoperability of conventional CD-ROM applications as well as those in the write-once format.

The proposed new standards would in theory permit the same CD-ROM and CD-R discs to be read on dos, Unix and Macintosh platforms without sacrificing the flexible file-naming conventions and greater directory depth that are importantly supported in the non-dos file systems. Cross-platform interoperability would also be enhanced by making it much easier to put programs or data specific to different operating systems on one disc, since such specific data could be segregated into their own “tracks.” In other words, it would be much easier to create a single disc that could be played on dos, Windows, Macintosh and Unix platforms.

Is Frankfurt a hot dog? As might be expected, because the Frankfurt proposal ultimately proposes to supersede ISO 9660, it has not met with unanimous acclaim. Another standards proposal, the Rock Ridge extensions, was designed to make ISO 9660 CD-ROM discs more useful on Unix platforms while retaining DOS compatibility. Rock Ridge can also be used to define the file system for CD-R, and it can be implemented quickly, without overthrowing 9660. The Rock Ridgers seem to feel that Frankfurt is indeed a hot dog.

Frankfurt proponents, however, see Rock Ridge as a temporary fix. Because of performance limitations, the Frankfurters say Rock Ridge will never allow CD-R to live up to its potential. They say compatibility with future erasable/rewritable CD media may also be a reason for pushing for significant changes now.

Regarding 9660 compatibility, Fred Meyer, president of Meridian Data and a spokesperson for the Frankfurt Consortium, says that it is important to remember that all “old” ISO 9660 discs would be readable on “Frankfurt” drives, and “Frankfurt” CD-R drives could, if need be, still create discs compatible with the old standards.

Good news, bad news. The bad news is that CD-R or CD-ROM discs using the new Frankfurt features would not be readable on today’s unmodified ISO 9660 drives. The good news in this respect is that firmware and/or software driver upgrades are expected to enable most existing CD-ROM readers to be Frankfurtized.

It looks as if the Frankfurt proposal will be implemented by Philips and the Consortium, with ISO and other standards organizations ultimately giving their blessings, in much the same way that Philips, Sony et al. created the colorful “books” that made CD audio and CD-ROM possible.

Bernard Banet