CD-ROM in 2011

[Chris Tompkins]

This was very popular in the 90’s ~ an authored CDROM
MacroMedia had the market on this.
I found the programming to much for me and hired out this service.
Probably could be done with Adobe Flash now.
You can also create this with HTML. Basically a website on a disc.

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey John,

It sounds crazy, but there are still places on this planet where they cannot view a DVD or use a USB stick – hence why we just before Christmas delivered 50 CD-Roms for a charity, all destined to be distributed in Africa.

Make sure that any programming that you do can be read on old operating systems.

All the Best
Mads
London, UK

Please do visit our faceBook page here: https://www.facebook.com/MacMillionProductions

Mac Million Ltd. – Digital Media Production
Blog: https://macmillionltd.blogspot.com

[Noah Kadner]

Yeah I’d just do this in HTML. It seems really pointless in 2011 to spend the time/money to author an ‘interactive CD-ROM’ when you can achieve precisely the same effect using web authoring and just place the results onto a shiny disc.

Noah

Unlock the secrets of 24p, HD and Final Cut Studio with Call Box Training. Featuring the Canon 5D Mark II and 7D.

[Cory Petkovsek]

You can create a VCD, that will be playable on computers or DVD players.
https://www.vcdeasy.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_CD

Cory

—
Cory Petkovsek
Corporate Video

[John Young]

Thanks everyone.
In order for the disc to start up automatically on insert, you would need an AUTORUN program, right? What is the best was to make sure that your CD is cross-platform?

http://www.johnathanyoung.com

[Chris Tompkins]

You can google that one easy enough. On the WIN side it’s real easy. For Macs, not as easy – As far as I know anyway.

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC

[Mark Suszko]

The Big Gun for developing one of these is Macromedia Director. The program has a legendary level of complexity because of all the stuff it can do, and it is hard to find people who are really good at it these days, which means when you find them, they are expensive.

There are some less fully-featured tools for building these kinds of CD-ROMS, that have taken the functionality of Director and boiled it down to some canned pre-programmed templates. Last time I saw one of these was done for one of our clients by an outside consultant a couple years back. I can ask for the name of the program if you’re really interested. In the case of that client, their stuff wasn’t anything that couldn’t have been done about as well by making an interactive DVD or just a very complicated Powerpoint presentation with a lot of branching. I think those two options are why the Multimedia Director type projects are not more widespread these days. And as has been said, you can also do this a a hyperdocument using html and an offline browser.

Trying to figure out why the client needs it like this, they might have banned DVD drives as a policy to prevent abuse like watching movies at work. They just may have no budget for upgrades for the computers, or a very slow and retro IT network management, or as in my client’s case, they know their market, and know that the things have to be playable on a lot of legacy equipment that doesn’t have anything like a DVD drive. You can find pockets of oddball users like this in many fields of work, and that’s one reason there are still mutimedia developers out there.

[Stephen Smith]

[Chris] Probably could be done with Adobe Flash now.

Yes it can be done on flash. It even has / had a feature to export out your project to a CD-ROM. I made one back in collage with Flash MX and I’ve never touched flash since. We did all of our CD authoring in Macramedia director.

As for the Auto run on a windows. It is a simple line of code that you can copy into a text document. As recommended Google it. There was a way to do it on a mac but I recall it was really hard. I haven’t done one of these in 10 years. Best of luck.

Stephen Smith
Utah Video Productions

Check out my Motion Training DVD

Check out my Motion Tutorials

[Martin Curtis]

[Stephen Smith] ” I made one back in collage with Flash MX and I’ve never touched flash since.”
Common story that one…
[Stephen Smith] “o run on a windows. It is a simple line of code that you can copy into a text document.”
Kind of. You can autorun an exe file using a single line dropped into a .ini file at the root, which is fine for running a Flash executable, but not much good for trying to launch, say, an HTML-based presentation. There are programs you can buy that will generate the necessary file, codes and executables to do this, but they cost something. Not much, IIRC, but something.

Can’t do autorun on a Mac. Quicktime had an autorun feature yeeeeaaarrrrs ago, but the autorun feature actually enabled one of the few Mac viruses to propagate (link) so the feature was quietly dropped.

My advice to the OP would be to

• find out what systems you are dealing with. no point in packaging something that won’t run
• do it in Flash if they know how (don’t forget to export the Windows exe and the Mac Projector) but pay attention to the running systems, especially for video encoding. Older systems may not cope with h.264 and CD drives may not be fast enough to deliver the bitrate you want
• alternatively, do it in HTML. I’d do this one but, once again, you need to know what machines you’re dealing with. I love a simple tree menu for making navigation easy, but if you only have a few navigation points you can do something even easier.
• package it on those “Business Card” CD-ROMS. Everyone loves those. Just kidding. Hate them.

[Noah Kadner]

There’s a reason CD-ROMS are no longer with us: they are obsolete…

Noah

Unlock the secrets of 24p, HD and Final Cut Studio with Call Box Training. Featuring the Canon 5D Mark II and 7D.