CDXL - Background

Background

In an era shortly after the introduction of CD-ROM drives and before low cost MPEG decoding hardware became available the CDXL format was created, primarily for the Commodore CDTV, to permit playback of video from CD-ROM. CDXL was tailored for the Amiga chipset and took advantage of DMA transfers, thus achieving playback with a low CPU load. As a result CDXL could only support weak video compression and therefore relatively low video resolutions and moderate frame rates.

CDXL is a simple streaming format, consisting of linear concatenated chunks (packets), each with an uncompressed frame and associated audio data. There is no overall file header, just a header per chunk. The frame rate is constant but not stored in the file, so it is necessary to set the playback speed in the player software manually. The CDXL format initially allowed playback of up to 24 frames per second with up to 4096 colors encoded in HAM-6. Audio support allowed for 8-bit mono or stereo sound. When the Amiga CD32 was released the CDXL format was extended to support AGA color modes (up to 262,144 on-screen colors from a 24-bit color palette) and higher display resolutions.

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