What are the Red, Yellow, Green, Orange, and White Books?
Philips and Sony jointly developed compact disc technology and they
co-own the patents. The two companies have written and now maintain a
set of specifications for the encoding and formatting of digital data
on compact discs. Each specification is referred to by a color
designation and the cover of the specification is that color. These
specifications detail the accepted industry foundation for
interplatform compatibility. A description of each of the color coded
specifications follows:
- Red Book
This is the specification for Compact Disc-Digital Audio. All audio CDs
adhere to specification in the Red Book, and are, thus, assured to play on
any CD audio player in the world.
- Yellow Book
This specification defines the computer-based CD-ROM standard. The
standard specifies the sector format on disc. There are two sector formats:
Mode 1, CD-ROM , 2048 byte sectors, and Mode 2, CD-ROM/XA, 2324
byte sectors. Mode 2 sectors also contain end-of-record markers, interrupt
triggers, data type specifications, etc. Other standards, such as ISO 9660 and
Apple HFS, which may be used in combination with the Yellow Book
standard, define the directory and file structures.
- Green Book
This specification builds on the Red Book and the Yellow Book and is the
specification for Compact Disc-Interactive (CD-i).
- Orange Book
This specification covers writable CDs, including CD Recordable
(CD-R), magneto-optical cartridge systems and single- and
multi-session recording.
- White Book
This specification covers the Video CD format.
These specifications are available from Bert Gall, Philips Consumer
Electronics in The Netherlands.
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