XCD: The next home entertainment storage format

Brief

The XCD is a CD container format standard for multimedia content (much like VCD or SVCD). In contrast to S/VCD though, it allows arbitrary multimedia content TYPES (VCD/SVCD supports only MPEG1/MPEG2 system streams respectively and images). XCD can support, for instance, OGG, MPEG4, VP3, DIVX, XVID, JPG, etc.. ANY media type or container. It uses reduced Error Correction facilities, such that more space of the CD can be used for actual media (like S/VCD, compared with current computer CDs). Due to the reduced error correction, it's aimed at stream/media types that can handle errors to some extent at least. Yet, it allows keeping arbitrary 'special' sections of the stream/media 'protected' (i.e. special headers/indexes etc). It may contain recommendations for the player as for the order of the streams to play (in the form of optional playlists) and may offer interactive navigation through a menu system.

Targets

Allowing arbitrary stream/media containers/types (i.e. ogg, mcf, avi, mp3, wav, jpeg, gif etc).
To be playable by both stand alone players and computer players.
Keep the minimal player implementation requirements very low for the XCD overhead. (Naturally, it will also have to include actual decoders for supported stream/media containers/types).
Offering optional advanced features such as playlists, Interactive navigation (similar to CD-i) and more for players that support such features, and arbitrary binary information (files) to be used by computer users.

Status

XCD is currently in it's planning stage. Our 1st priority task is finilizing a minimal specification that will be sufficient to play the files, while beeing extensible, such that future versions of the specifications won't break compatibility with players that support only this minimal specifications.

History and background

This project was inspired by several discussions on Doom9 forum and The MCF-CD project (mostly Tronic and Ingo). Dext has modified VCDTOOLS to write a generic mode 2 form 2 CD image, and then a filter came to read these images on the fly. Media detection with the filter was inspired by Ingo's work on the ambitios Media-XW project and added to the filter by Dext. We then decided to group the CD related work (starting with mode2cdmaker and the dshow filter) under a single 'roof' and then define a spec and add some more features. the name 'XCD' was chosen in a poll on Doom9 forum.