so, a few weeks ago, I was reading a PC magazine from 1993, and I came across a review of something I'd never heard of: a full feature-length movie released on CDROM.
to be clear: no, it's not a VideoCD. that standard didn't get finalized until a year later, and nobody had a computer that could play them for another couple years. VCD used MPEG at a bitrate of over a megabit, so you needed a high-end CDROM (theoretically 2X, but in practice, probably 4X) just to read the disc fast enough, and then unless you had a top of the line CPU, you still couldn't decompress it on the fly - MPEG decoder cards remained relevant until at least 1995. There was at least one card (Sigma ReelMagic) that purported to solve this, bundling an MPEG decompressor and CDROM interface onto one ISA card; it would have sold for $500, on top of the $1,000 you'd need to spend for a 4X CDROM. Oof.
At any rate, VCDs just didn't exist in 93. Full motion video playback on PCs was also pretty rare in general - and yet, a company named Kinesoft decided to release a feature film on CD, for playback on your PC, and they did a really, really good job of it.
Unfortunately, the film they picked was It's A Wonderful Life. as I understand it, that movie has been in continuous rotation on television every single Holiday Period for the last 50 years, so nobody actually needed a special PC version; you could just turn on the TV, since the only time you'd ever watch it is at christmas anyway.
but perhaps they chose this particular film in order to show off their vision for PC-based cinema. It's A Wonderful Life: Multimedia Edition is, frankly, an incredibly rich experience, one of the strongest arguments I've ever seen in favor of the multimedia fad of the early 90s. it's the whole movie, but it's also a raft of additional features that put most DVD releases to shame.
first, the film itself: it's contained in two AVI files, split across the discs. the video is 320x240 Cinepak, 12FPS, at 1100 kbps. In theory, a single-speed CDROM should be able to stream this - 1X = 150 KB/s = 1200 Kb/s - but according to review, even a 2X couldn't do it without constant pauses for buffering. This is probably because the audio (11KHz uncompressed PCM) juuuust pushed it up to the breaking point at 1195 kb/s. The review reported that it worked well on a 4X drive - but again, that was a $1,000 expense. Oof.
I'm also not sure how beefy your PC needed to be. I haven't had a chance to test this on a contemporary machine yet, but the review made no mention of CPU requirements. Cinepak dates to 1991 and originally shipped with the Video Spigot, a Mac video capture card; it was then integrated into Quicktime, which was never (AFAIK) meant to be used with accelerator hardware. My guess, therefore, is that it was designed to be decoded in software, on CPUs that were midrange even two years earlier. So very likely, if you had a 386 or better, you were in the clear.
So, in practice, this seems to have been pretty watchable. 320x240 isn't too bad; the compression isn't too brutal; as you can see above, the video is pretty Perceptible. You can of course fullscreen it, although I imagine that increased the CPU load.
The actual contents of the AVI look better than what renders in Windows in the 256 color mode that was typical of the time. I suspect if you had a 16 bit card (which were available at the time) it would have looked better, but as-is it's decently watchable. The audio is 11KHz PCM, which is pretty tolerable as well.
The player is quite good for the era. The fast forward and rewind buttons are very responsive and precise (in DOSbox set to 386-era speeds at least - perhaps not on real hardware.) You can also see the exact frame and time index, which were not universal features.
But then we get into the expansive set of extra features. By expanding the fields under the player you can, for instance, select from any "chapter" in the movie (defined by Kinesoft, of course) and jump to it; you can also see a thumbnail before you jump, which would have saved a lot of seek time. You can also, curiously, hear audio commentary about each chapter.
I have no idea who recorded this - presumably some employee of Kinesoft - but it gives historical and contemporary context, such as explaining that the characters of Bert and Ernie provided the inspiration for naming the two Sesame Street characters.
But perhaps most impressively, the disc includes the entire script. And it's not just a plain text file; it's fully synced to the film. At any moment you can click a button to jump to the current spot in the script - and from the script view, you can click a button to jump to the corresponding moment in the film.
You can also set bookmarks that apply to both script and video, and you can search the script, from the film viewer. Literally, you can type in some text you're looking for, and it will find it in the script, then scrub to the corresponding frame in the video. I mean, what the fuck?
Is this precedented? I admit I am not much of a DVD Extras nut, but as far as I know this level of sophistication isn't possible within the DVD format. Maybe Bluray could do it, but i doubt anyone ever bothered, and even if they did, that would make this thirteen years ahead of its time.
And it doesn't stop there. The disc also includes a raft of additional DVD-style extras: production photos, cast list (including unchosen candidates), contemporary reviews, and a whole trivia game.
I mean - does anyone care this much about It's A Wonderful Life? How should I know, I'm an alien on this earth, but what matters is that this is some Criterion shit. I think Kinesoft may have gone with this film, not just because of it's presumably-quite-low licensing fees (not zero - the movie is not in the public domain due to disney-grade ratfuckery), but also because it was incredibly well documented, in ways that most other movies weren't at the time. That's total speculation, but I think it's very possible.
So - this is all very cool. But I wasn't really able to verify any of it at first, because the disc was not archived online. That didn't stop someone from claiming to have archived it, though.
When I searched on Internet Archive, sure enough, I found a listing that claims it's the Kinesoft product. But it isn't. You can clearly tell, from the disc label, that this is,
A) Not by Kinesoft, but by some unknown "Alpha & Omega"
B) A SINGLE disc version, whereas Kinesoft's spanned two discs.
This was of course very intriguing to me right away. TWO companies released the same dull christmas movie, for viewing on a PC, in the same year, but one of them fit it onto a single disc?
In my mind, there is no way this is not a response to Kinesoft's release. How could it not be? What are the chances that someone else happened to think, at the exact same moment, "hey, maybe we should put this tired holiday flick on CD"? Especially given the emphasis on the label that it's "on one CD," I think that this is someone who saw the limitations of Kinesoft's release and said "hey, I can do better."
They could not.
The Alpha & Omega version of the film is delivered as a set of AVIs (five of them, for some reason) in beautiful 160x120 resolution, uncompressed (!), at an astounding and incredibly lifelike four frames per second.
For a comparison, the last two images attached to this post are the same frame, first from the Kinesoft version, then the Alpha & Omega version. As you can see, it's... rough. I would say unwatchable. And it gets worse when you hit play, because 4FPS is just... not fast enough. The illusion of motion is simply not present, there isn't enough detail for your brain to reconstruct the events. The audio sounds fine enough, but if you wanted a radio play you'd have bought that.
And it gets worse: there is no player app, no script, no extras; nothing except the files themselves, and a perfunctory copy of Video For Windows in case you don't have it. This is barebones, and I suspect that's because it's a flex.
I think the entire point of this disc's existence was to "prove" that one could fit a whole movie onto:
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One disc
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That could play in a 1X CDROM
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On a very old computer
In that respect, I think they nailed it. The total bitrate is only about 700 kilobits, or 87 KB/s. That would have worked fine on a 1X drive, and I'm guessing the video is uncompressed because a slow 386 - or even 286 - wouldn't have been able to decode any real codec, but could shove the pixels into VRAM as long as the drive was fast enough to spool them off. And that forced the resolution down to 160x120, because that was the only way to fit it all on one disc.
This is kind of a shame, because if they hadn't been obsessed with the single-disc stunt, they could have rendered it at some intermediate res and still delivered something that worked on low-end hardware, but was far more watchable. As-is, this is... nothing. And I don't think it was meant to be anything. In fact, I wonder if it was even a real "product."
I can find no info about the producers of this disc, and I suspect that's because they weren't actually a company. It was VERY common in those days for warez groups to release actual pressed CDs, particularly in Europe, full of stolen software. "Alpha & Omega" sounds like a pirate group, and this is exactly the kind of "pointless, but cool" flex typical in those circles.
I ultimately did buy a copy of Kinesoft's version - the only one available anywhere online, for $25 from some Amazon seller - which I've ripped and uploaded to IA. I think it's pretty cool, and I'll hopefully do a video about it sooner or later, but I do wish it was a movie I actually wanted to watch.
The "CD Cinema Collection" badge on the CD case suggests that Kinesoft had hoped to make a whole series of these. I can imagine a whole galaxy of reasons they gave up: Maybe they ran into licensing issues they didn't expect. Maybe the impending VideoCD standard convinced them that they'd be wasting their time. Maybe they found out that most movies were much harder to deliver in this incredibly feature-rich format - or that, after putting in all this effort, the profit margins were next to nothing, especially since so few people owned PCs with the necessary hardware, and even fewer wanted to watch a movie in less-than-VHS-quality on their 14" VGA monitor.
For whatever reason they gave up, I consider it a shame. When VideoCD came out, it ended up being little more than "a VHS tape, but on a CD." There were no special features whatsoever, and the quality was not much better than this. Philips' CD-I was supposed to deliver some or all of the above, but didn't really pan out, and it would be another four years before anyone owned a DVD, let alone one with a comparable feature set. RIP to Kinesoft's grand ambitions.
