CD Turns Your PC Into a Multimedia Center

Compact discs have already taken over the record industry. Now they’re about to invade your computer.

The same type of CD used to store music can also store computer data--up to 600 megabytes per disc. With that much available data, a personal computer can become a desktop library. And it’s not limited to just words and numbers. Thanks to CDs, personal computers also can function as multimedia centers, able to reproduce sound, graphics, photographs, animation and moving video.

A CD-ROM, which stands for compact disc read only memory, is a 5-inch round disc identical to the CDs that have virtually replaced phonograph records as the media of choice for music buffs. In fact, most computer CD drives, or players, can also play music discs, provided that they are connected to a home stereo or other sound system.

CDs can store 15 times as much as a 40-megabyte hard disk or the equivalent of nearly 1,700 of the 360-kilobyte floppy disks that are typically used to distribute software and data for IBM-compatible PCs.

However, unlike regular disks, CDs are “read only.” The data is permanently encoded. They cannot be erased or modified. As a result, they are not suitable to store a user’s data and are not a substitute for hard or floppy disks. A CD drive can be added to most IBM-compatible and Macintosh computers. Computers require special CD data drives; standard audio models will not work.

Because they hold so much data and because they can also hold software, they are an excellent publishing medium. A single disc can replace a wall of books, storing an entire encyclopedia, a set of huge reference manuals or a company’s entire parts list. In volume, they cost under $2 to duplicate and are inexpensive to ship.

Thanks to CD-ROMs and a new generation of hardware and software, computers are no longer limited to the dimension of words and numbers. They are becoming multimedia tools. Whether at the office or at home, a single PC can now inform and entertain you with pictures, animation, sound, graphics and video.

Now there are more than 300,000 computers equipped with CD drives and about 2,500 commercial CD titles, according to Nick Arnett, president of Multimedia Computing, an industry publishing and consulting firm. The number of drives and titles have both about doubled in the last year, according to Arnett.

Most selections are large compendiums of data such as “Medical Year Book Library,” “Automatic Patent Searching” or “Birds of America.”

A handful are games that take advantage of the technology by storing large video and audio files. “Cosmic Osmos” and “The Manhole” from MediaGenic take a child or adult on a long fantasy into mysterious worlds with vivid stereo sound effects. CDs are even being used to replace maps. Electromap of Fayetteville, Ark., publishes a world atlas with 239 full-color maps covering every country in the world.

In addition, a growing number of organizations are using CDs to store and disseminate their own information. I met a representative of the Social Security Administration who hopes to secure funding to transfer the agency’s procedure manuals to CD format.

Entire encyclopedias can--and do--fit on a single CD. The 1990 version of “The New Grolier Electronic Encyclopedia,” complete with 33,000 articles and more than 1,000 color illustrations, will be released in April for both IBM-compatible and Apple Macintosh systems. The suggested price is $395 plus $4 shipping. Grolier can be reached at (800) 356-5590.

Britannica Software publishes an electronic encyclopedia called “Compton’s MultiMedia Encyclopedia.” Delivered on a single compact disc, it contains nearly 9 million words, 5,200 articles, 15,000 photographs, charts and diagrams, 60 minutes of audio and 45 separate animation sequences. There is even room left over for the 65,000-word Merriam-Webster Intermediate Dictionary.

Pictures and sound make entries come to life. Look up Mozart and you’ll not only read about him but see his picture and hear his music. Look up the knee joint and you’ll see it move. The concept is interesting and many of the features are quite useful.

But I was not impressed with the “look” of the product. The text is displayed as white against a blue background and the pictures are not nearly as crisp as what you get in the printed edition. Some CDs, such as “National Geographic Society’s Encyclopedia of Mammals” (a work in progress) include gorgeous color photographs. The suggested retail price is $895. Britannica Software can be reached at (800) 533-0130.

Sony is equipping selected record stores with a Sony PC (IBM-compatible) equipped with a CD drive and a special interface board. On the screen is a listing of popular artists. Customers use a pointing device to select an artist and get a complete list of his or her recordings. When they make a selection, they not only hear it, but see a short “music video” on a replica of a tiny TV set (about 2 inches square) on the PC’s screen.

Sony’s special interface board makes it possible to integrate the audio with the text and graphics. The CD-XA board will be available in the United States later this year at a cost of between $300 and $400. It requires a CD drive (starting at about $600) as well as a PC equipped with a VGA (video graphics array) monitor.

Sony has no plans to export its record store demo discs to the United States but it is encouraging U.S. software and entertainment companies to develop their own discs. The company envisions it being used for business, entertainment, training, education and other purposes.

The moving video display is still rather crude at eight frames per second, far short of the 30-frame-per-second standard U.S. television. What’s more, the image is typically displayed in a small window on the screen. Video images take up a great deal of memory--the larger the image, the more memory required.

The Sony products are among the first to use the new CD-XA format. Other companies supporting that format include Microsoft, IBM, Fujitsu and Olivetti. Fujitsu has incorporated an optional CD-XA board in its new multimedia PC. Called FM TOWNS, the system is currently available only in Japan for $3,000 to $5,000, depending on configuration. For information call (415) 928-7270.

Another technology, called DVI or Digital Video Interactive, enables a PC with a CD drive to display “VCR-quality” full-motion video along with sound, graphics and text. Moving pictures take up an enormous amount of storage space but thanks to DVI compression techniques it is now possible to store about 72 minutes of full-screen video on a single CD. To play it back, however, requires that the computer be equipped with a special board that decompresses the data as it is displayed.

As compression and CD technology improve, it is likely that you’ll be able to play full-length motion pictures on your personal computer. That’s the day when the home computer takes its rightful place in the living room--as part of your home entertainment, information, learning and productivity center.