CDI Karaoke, Japan

 Ohayo gozaimassssss

A very nice box arrived in the post today - likely the vast majority of Japanese Philips CD-i titles - and previously unknown, a series of karaoke discs, aptly named "CDI Karaoke".

The year was 1992, an older yakuza's flame runs a karaoke bar in downtown shibuya. Sake is warm, the snow outside is cold. Across the room, through the stale smoke, you see a table holding a vase with a lone peony, and beside it - a karaoke machine. Over 170 glorious discs of enka in Philip's very own CD-i format.

You'll never be able to live such a marvelous moment, luckily for you - the next closest thing is becoming available... the CD-i collection. Preserve CD-i has begun the process of dumping / submitting to redump.org / scanning / uploading to archive.org all of these discs for you to enjoy.

While our short term existing as a website has already seen very rare holy grails come to light, I'm particularly excited about this absolutely trove of insanely rare discs. Thank you very much to sadikyo and blazers for help making this happen. This is a very special moment in CD-i preservation!

Uploading here.

AudioVision CD aka AVCD

 AudioVision CD or the shorthand AVCD is a format I stumbled across getting lost down a rabbithole of formats on discogs.com when researching CD-i discs.

What is an AVCD?

Like CD-i Ready, AVCD stores data in audio Track 1's pregap, though interestingly the discs are specifically Mac friendly, featuring a HFS filesystem - though the disc I picked up (Techno-Squid Parliment self-titled) also includes a windows installer.exe.

Of course at that point in history, we should remember that QuickTime (Apple software) was often the dominant video technology to distribute even on the more popular Enhanced CDs.

Don't you wonder sometimes about sound and vision?

Well luckily there's an info-blurb on the front of this CD.

In case you were wondering, Philips.

Most AVCD's in the discogs format filter, ARE IN FACT NOT AVCD's, but don't let that stop you from a fun afternoon hunt. Here's a few clues in case you're interested in building another obscure format collection.

For clarification - these discs are not Philips CD-i related, just another obscure Philips format. However the audio tracks will play well enough on the CD-i player as all Redbook audio does.

Techno-Squid Eats Parliment's self-titled release is now preserved on archive.org (until it is taken down).

Photo CD Preservation Avalanche!

Photo CD is part of the multimedia long-arm supported by Philips CD-i players, and as such an avalanche of the discs crossed through my path as part of the silk road that starts form my contacts in Europe and ends at Blazers.

Behold! A handful of the new Photo CD added to Preserve CD-i!'s archive.org page.

The uploads include everything from travel collections in far off lands (for me anyway) of Bali, Thailand, and Iceland (aka 'Island') - to XXX-rated naughty housewives. A few historical collections too leave me wondering if better quality versions of some of these important photos exist - anywhere - since Photo CDs have the ability to store high resolution scans (unfortunately for the museum collections however, they're pretty low resolution).

A unique cataloging system emerges.

One very interesting pattern I noticed among the Photo CDs (from Philips to the third party ones) is the disc volume labels included a pattern "PCD" followed by four numbers #### - example: "PCD0394" for Europa. This seems to hint at a serial number issuing coming from Philips. The system seems to break down for some of the "Sexy Bytes" titles in which PCD0895 gets reused over and over, but this could be a hint that they just didn't request serial numbers to be issued for all their titles as perhaps it seemed unnecessary to them.

View the recent uploads on Preserve CD-i!'s archive page here (NSFW titles included)

Thanks retaliator for the scans & dumps sent from Germany! Thanks daddy Blazers for the bankroll!

A bit about CD-i Films released in USA (with Bonus Mystery!)

My journey into the CD-i-verse began less than a year ago when I decided to clean up redump.org's miss lists and stumbled across the mess of information that was copy-pasted into the wiki ages ago. Among the many categories - games - demos - multimedia - etc - was 'movies'. While Europe's CD-i catalog is much murkier to define what VCD's fall under the 'CD-i branded' category (for two reasons #1 CD-i branded labeling is less pronounced on Euro VCD releases #2 catalog numbering is more generic) - USA's much cleaner / clearer and has an end in sight (largely due to the USA market not needing countless translations). Now- for this article I'm focusing strictly on the USA market.

Stating the obvious- the CD-i branded movie category broadly breaks down into two categories:

1. CD-i Digital Video format. These discs play in CD-i players with Digital Video cards, but do NOT play in regular VCD players.
2. Video CD format. These discs play both in regular VCD players as well as CD-i players equipped with a Digital Video card. Confusingly, these discs often - if not always - include a "Compact Disc Digital Video" logo, in addition to a "Video CD" mention. 

The serial numbers for both types of releases start with a USA-CDi-distinct "310" serial number.

CD-i Digital Video format release.

Note - "DigitalVideo" in the lower right hand corner of this cover.

Video CD format release.

Note - "Video CD" in the lower right hand corner.

A treasure trove surfaces:

Donations largely drive preservation. If you think I'm donating my life savings (in addition to all the time I spend) preserving CD-i discs - you crazy yo. I certainly don't love you THAT much. This is the reason we rely on others helping out - often in the form of donations. VintageVic will be shipping off the above stack of CD-i branded movies to atrac17 for preservation (redump datting and archive.org mirroring) - knocking off the majority of USA movies from the Redump miss list. Pretty fuckin' fantastic if you ask me! Thanks to VintageVic for not letting these go to waste or rot undumped one of many video game museums.

Less spectacular, but hey I'll share too- recently I snagged a handful of mostly-rarer titles which I've dumped and scanned a couple for Preserve CD-i's archive.org page.

I managed to snag a few movies a couple weeks back as well when I spotted a handful of rarer titles (as well as a couple common ones I wanted to dump).

Bonus Mystery! UPDATE: NOW ALL SOLVED!!

Well, what the hell? What's wrong with a little click bait now and then. But genuinely, this is one of the bigger mysteries I'm searching for an answer to-

There are a handful of USA CD-i branded movies I can't find out whether or not they were CD-i Digital Video or VCD. Do you own any of these? If so can you share a cover pic?

• Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Which and the Wardrobe (update: VCD)
• Metropolis (update: VCD, probably not CD-i branded?)
• Navigator, The (update: appears to be a PAL VCD, not CD-i branded)
• Red Heat (update: VCD)
• Incident at Roswell (update: PAL VCD, not Philips branded)

Internetten op je TV! (814 0154)

"Internetten op je TV!" is a rolling demo with a handful of videos that promotes CD-i's internet functionality. A few variants of this critter are alive in the wild, presented in this post is serial variant 814 0154 - distinctly Dutch. According to wikipedia, the Dutch are a "West Germanic ethnic group" - so basically German language but sounds a little less mean. While scholars debate whether or not Dutch is an actual language or just an internet conspiracy, let's have a closer look into a slice of content from The Netherlands.

Behold: the variant I post about today.

Now that you have seen a picture. I feel pretty good that this article has meaningful content. There are people who like to read and are smart, and there are people who like picture because they are pretty. So this article is a good one to share to everyone you know as we've just determined the demographic is 100% of the population. That said, i've decided to also record a video as well, which will surely go viral as all the kids these days like to watch videos more than seeing pictures.

The one thing you need to watch in this video is the segment with Dave. Dave knows what the fuck is up. Just listen to him and he'll tell you all about internet, and women, and something called "voetbal" which must have been a popular thing many decades ago before video games really took off. Just listen to Dave, he'll even tell you how to fix your broken marriage:

Scans here.

CD-i Demodisc Fall 1996 & Spring 1997 (Europe) [VCD]

 I've always had a soft spot in my heart for demos and promo discs - for a good handful of systems I've hunted down rare and unknown discs from many countries all over the globe. I don't have a rare demo to show you today for CD-i, but one of many neat CD-i "demos".

An interesting thing about CD-i as a console - likely due to budget - is that there weren't a lot of real, actual playable demos released. "Demonstration Discs" were full builds of the games that were actually what is commonly referred to as "promos" (for press). Most CD-i "demos" were actually rolling 'demo' promo commercials - and more often than not, released in VCD format.

The vids on the disc.

Among the videos is one promoting the unreleased kids game "Tom & Tim":

Artwork for the unreleased title.

Scans and rom download here.