Commodore CDTV

[sim085]

Hi,

When it was released the Commodore CDTV was meant to be a multimedia platform right? Does this mean that it was meant to play movies from it's CD drive as well? If yes then what was the quality of such movies? Does anyone has screen shots?

Regards,
Sim085

[SamuraiCrow]

The authoring system for the CDTV was called AmigaVision.  It came with a short CDXL movie in HAM mode on floppy disk.  It was nothing special, just a Commodore executive telling people where they could call to find an Amiga dealer.  It did have synchronized audio though.

[Crom00]

CDTV was not able to play movies such as vcd. Video CD were thought ot replace vhs as a medium of choice. It never gained much traction outside of Asia.

It wasn't until CD32 that commodore made a MPEG playback add on cartridge that worked quite well.  A few games had fmv, the demo cd's had fmv and it played all my video cd discs such as adult, and asian action moviesm in addition to the philips cdi video cd's released in the usa.

CDTV video was relegated to CDXL video which was ham 4096 color video played uncompressed off the cd. It was never full screen and used reasonabl in well in Sherlock Holmes for CDTV. That was actually a decent fmv game for the time.

For big box amigas there was the peggy+ mpeg card I received with a scala a4000t. quite nice card that had similar funcionality as the cd32 mepg cart but it was designed to work with scala.

[Zardoz]

The CDTV falls short of playing movies or even VCD. think of it as an Amiga 500 with a CD  drive and a front end to play Audio cds and games.

the CDTV to me is a more so a game console type system then anything else. but can be fitted to run AmigaOS fully.

there is a good site about the CDTV and vereants here.

http://www.cdtv.org.uk/

[Zac67]

Don't forget that the CDTV predates the Video CD standard by roughly two years...

CDXL was pretty much (among) the first format(s) to play video from CDROM.

[beller]

The only thing other than Amiga cds that CDTV could play was the (now dead I think) CD+G format which gave you graphics along with a music CD.  This could also be used for karaoke too...

I think I still have a couple of CD+G disks around but the CDTV is long gone.

[Zardoz]

Yeah, CD+G never really took off. I thought it was kind of neat, but not to usefull. The only thing that uses it nowdays is Karaoke to splash lircs across the screen.

[Buzzfuzz]

Appart from the above mentioned things, the CDTV keyboard is very usefull
Cause it's black and you can plug it into a A4000 or if by some chance the keyboard is dead you can use if to modify any other Amiga keyboard, like making a black A500/A1200.

[Cammy]

Optonica made some really great multimedia CDs that made good use of CDXL video for the CDTV and CD32. If you ever get a chance, check out Insight Dinosaurs as an example of the CDTV's multimedia capabilities.

[Karlos]

Gah, the colour selection for the text in that image makes my colourblind eyes go funny. It's as if the text is floating :lol:

[Amiga_Nut]

Video CD was terrible anyway, all films required two CDs minimum and the early encoding systems were terrible with blocking of actions scenes everywhere.