Faster, Fatter CD-ROM Titles on Hold

Dave Andrews

Although the next wave of CD-ROM drives promises higher performance than today's quad-speed and x6 drives, developers say that they will wait for the next CD-ROM standard, Digital Videodisc (DVD), to arrive before they release the next generation of "edutainment" titles.

New x8 drives have already arrived, and more are on the way. By June, most drive vendors will offer x8 drives with up to 1200-KBps data transfer rates for $250 or less; at least o ne vendor says it will release an even-faster x10 drive in the third quarter of this year.

But while the latest drives offer improved seek-time performance and potentially smoother video playback than current drives, they're still shackled by the CD-ROM standard's 640-MB mem-ory res triction. This limit has developers waiting for the DVD standard and its 4.7-GB storage minimum before they release the next wave of titles with optimized (i.e., full-screen, 30-frame-per-second) video.

"When we develop titles, we want our products to run well on the majority of the CD-ROM drives on the market today, and those are two-speed and quad-speed drives," says Dave Wooldridge, director of marketing for L3 Interactive (Santa Monica, CA, (800) 644-2823), whose edutainment titles include Mathemagics and extreme-sports instructional programs. The double-speed drives' low data transfer rate means they can't play back video that's recorded at 30 fps without dropping frames. This is why content developers often use 256-color video recorded at 8 to 10 fps. If your title doesn't run well on the lowest common denominator, Wooldridge says, "you lose your mainstream market."

However, content developers say that even if all consumers were to install new x8 CD-ROM drives, developers still couldn't op timize for the drives' higher performance without having to eliminate content. Officials at Graphix Zone (Irvine, CA, (800) 828-3838) say they already have a problem squeezing all the content they want onto a CD-ROM disc. The company's titles, including its latest, Nixon, already have a lot of video and audio clips squeezed into a standard CD-ROM. Increasing the quality of the video (e.g., by including 30-fps instead of 12- or 15-fps video) would force the company to include fewer video clips.

Graphix Zone officials say DVD's increased storage will let the company include longer-playing, full-screen movies instead of the small-window videos it currently provides. More disc space also allows for better-quality audio: DVD can more easily accommodate 16-bit, 44-kHz (CD-quality) audio instead of the 22-kHz audio typically used today.

Although content developers are, for the most part, not optimizing for x8 or x10 drives, purchasers of the latest technology will still see benefits in the area of CD-R OM disc access, according to software developers and drive manufacturers. Vendors say the faster rotation of x8 and x10 drives results in improved access times; this benefits database-intensive programs.

To achieve the maximum performance benefit from x10, Pioneer New Media Technologies (Long Beach, CA, (800) 444-6784) will release a dual-mode drive in the third quarter of this year. One mode, Constant Linear Velocity (CLV), has the disc rotate at a faster rate while the drive reads inner tracks and at a slower rate while it reads outer tracks. This ensures consistent and smooth video playback when video stored on the outer tracks is accessed.

But CAV mode spins the disc at a fixed rate, eliminating the access delays that occur when a disc is slowed down in CLV mode. Pioneer says CAV mode's 80-millisecond access time will make its Super 10X drive a better solution for applications that require fast access times.

In general, the faster CD-ROM drives also allow for less expensive components , says Scott Elrich, product development/marketing manager at Teac America (Montebello, CA, (213) 727-7669), which will release a 8 drive in June for about $200. For example, as access times drop (e.g., a 300-ms access time was typical about two years ago), cache sizes can also decrease, from 256 to 128 KB. Higher production volumes from drive makers also contribute to lower prices, and that's good news for game players who will want to buy drives offering the latest technology in order to get smooth-playing video.