Specs for Freeware Developers

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Specs for Freeware Developers

Red Book
Yellow Book
Orange Book
Green Book
White Book
Blue Book
Photo CD
CD Subcodes
ISO 9660
multiplay
HFS
UDF
DVD-V, DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM
SCSI/ATAPI MMC

Note that when I say Property of <some company> it usually means the spec is locked tight under an NDA and silly licensing red tape.
The reason they're mentioned is because they are defacto standards, not open ones. You cannot release the source code unless there's an equivalent (or you figured it out yourself using legal reverse engineering techniques)!

See http://www.licensing.philips.com/licensees/programs_license.html for the ugly Philips details on the official colored books.

For an overview of the various CD formats, see the following links:

http://www.disctronics.co.uk/cdref/cdframe.htm
http://www.ping.be/~pin11466/formtxt.html
http://uranus.ee.auth.gr/report/eng/part1/chapt-03/3-1-1.html
enhanced.pdf
http://www.fadden.com/cdrfaq/

For open-source CD software, see:

The CD building projects for UNIX

For information on CD Logos, see:

http://www.u-m-l.com/itlogomu.htm

Red Book

Property of Philips Electronics / Sony

Equivalents

ANSI part # 60908

Formats Discussed

CEI/IEC 908 does not cover CD-G, CD-TEXT, CD-MIDI, etc. Only basic CDDA is described.
See Also CD Subcodes for subcode infornation.
(use this in combination with the free ECMA yellow book below to get a close CEI/IEC 908)
CD+G Info

Yellow Book

Property of Philips/Sony but generally an open format.

Equivalents

ECMA-130

ISO-10149

Formats Discussed

CD-ROM, CD-ROM XA, CD-ROM Bridge, Mixed Mode CD CD-ROM is in basic Yellow Book. CD-ROM XA was later added in the Extended Yellow Book.

ECMA-130 (June 1996) claims to be aligned with ISO-10149.

Orange Book

Property of Philips Electronics, Kodak, and Sony

Equivalents

None

Formats Discussed

CD-R, CD-RW, Multi-session, Photo-CD family (Portfolio etc)

Green Book

Property of Philips Electronics and Sony

Equivalents

None

Formats Discussed

Generally a dead format except that nowadays it used mostly in conjunction with White Book VCD's which are popular in China.

White Book

Property of Philips Electronics, JVC, Matsushita and Sony

Equivalents

None official, but see the links below

Formats Discussed

(What about 3.0 super VCD?, Is this a C-Cube invention?)
See Also:

Super Video CD Overview

http://www.munich-vision.de/vcd/

SJ/T11196-1998

vcd.html

http://www.mpegtv.com/faq.html

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2496/vcdfaq.html

There's a newer VCD format called DVCD (Double VCD, or "Super-Dense VCD"). A full-length film is packed onto a single VCD (~90 mins). The format appears to be the same as a standard VCD (White book, MPEG-1, .DAT files). However, the data files are larger than a normal VCD. But it's a pressing trick (yes, the disc is really dense), not a new compression type, and they're not MPEG-2. (A copy of the .dat file to a hard drive will be a duplicate file of the same size. I've seen these disks hold over 97:00 minutes of 2352 byte sectors, yeilding a file just over 1.0GB. These discs play in standard VCD players (well, sometimes) and some CD-ROM drives. These discs are much more defect-prone than the standard VCD.

Note that VCD is an OLD format. It lacks the ECC that yellow book CD's (CD-ROM's) do. Using a modern CODEC, like DivX ;-), combined with a standard iso9660 CD-ROM will produce much higher quality, with stronger error detection/correction, and use less space than VCD does. However, it will not be playable on a standard DVD/VCD player.

Blue Book

Property of Philips Electronics and Sony

Equivalents

None

Formats Discussed

CD EXTRA, Enhanced CD, (CD Plus?) Historical note: Laserdiscs (analog video discs) were covered here as well.
See also http://www.riaa.com/ecd.htm

Other Formats

Photo CD

Property of Kodak

From Jorg Schilling:

Kodak published everything except the MC68070 programs that should ?? be in some directories and the compress tables from the PCD picture format. But the compressing algorithm was easy to guess so there is free software. Solaris on the other side includes Kodak licensed SW for PCD in the main dist.

Note: This is the oldest format. not to be confused with the newer FlashPix and newest Kodak Picture CD formats.
Photo CD is an XA based multisession format. It is described in the Orange Book

See also
Photo CD Links
hpcdtoppm - open source .pcd format converter