So good, you'd believe it was television
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.CD-Roms used to be all about text. Then they acquired pictures and sounds. Now more and more of them, especially games, include moving images. Broderbund's In the 1st Degree uses TV reports that are of such high quality you can almost believe you are watching a real television set. True, the "TV" is only a part of the image on the screen, but the cleverness with which it is presented raises the game to a new level.
The first attempts at video from a CD-Rom depended on special hardware. Sigma Designs introduced its Real Magic MPEG or Video CD card in 1993. This card, which plugs into the computer's main board, still sells well today at about pounds 249.
There are hundreds of movies available on Video CD, which can be watched in excellent quality on a computer fitted with an MPEG card. The trouble is, do you really want to sit in front of your PC and watch a film? Most people who buy Video CDs will also buy a system such as CD-i, Sega Saturn, or a special hi-fi unit, that allows them to watch on a television set.
Various software encoding systems, especially Apple's QuickTime, have found favour in the computing market. The great benefit of the software- only approach to coding video is that each title can use the encoding method that best suits it. Before the video is played, the correct decoder is simply loaded from the CD-Rom into your computer's memory. However, software-decoded video is still not as good as video processed by specialised hardware.
People wanting to watch a video on their computers will do so because it is part of a film or a game, and should be happy with a software-only solution. Multimedia encyclopaedias, for example, have short film clips. They fill only up to a quarter of the screen (the picture starts to break up if they are any bigger) and they can be a little jerky. But if you are watching a newsreel of President Kennedy giving a speech, this is not a problem.
As processors get faster, they will do an even better job of decoding video from CD-Roms. In fact, there are now decoders for MPEG that operate solely in software. They do not yet give a video performance that is anything like as good as a hardware solution, but as processors get faster, the gap will narrow. Best of all, they are free.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments