Compact disc standards: an introductory overview

The success of the compact disc (CD) as a storage medium for digital audio has, over the last ten years, resulted in a number of initiatives to use the CD for other applications as well, e.g., as read-only memory for computers, as a storage medium for audio-visual material for multimedia applications, and as a storage medium for photographs. Each of these applications poses additional requirements on how the corresponding information is stored and retrieved, resulting in a range of different CD standards. The functional specifications of these standards are each given a specific color for ease of reference: the Red Book for CD-DA, the Yellow Book for CD-ROM, the Green Book for CD-I, etc. This paper aims at giving an overview of the various CD standards by explaining what is specified in each of the colored books and by indicating how they relate to one another.