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CED Caddy Slide Show

In late 2002, DVD players began to enter the market with firmware capable of playing CD's containing JPG images like the CED Magic CD-ROM. Some players limit the number of JPEG's to 500 per disc, while others have a limitation well in excess of the thousands of images on the CD-ROM. Consult your owner's manual or the DVDR Help site to determine if a specific DVD player model is JPG-compatible, or simply pop the CD into your DVD player to see what it displays on the attached television set.

• Some DVD players will start the slide show alphabetically with the first JPEG image found on the disc, meaning over 400 images of players, CED manufacturing, etc. will be displayed before the player gets to the folder containing the caddy images.

• If the slide show simply stops at the caddy image "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," you have a DVD player limited to 500 images per disc and will need to use a unit without this limitation to view all the caddy images.

• Many DVD players let you navigate to a specific folder on the disc to start the slide show. In this case go to the folder title-database to start the caddy slide show.

• Some images on the disc, such as the thumbnail pictures of CED players, will look bad due to their small size. But at 1024 x 1146 pixels, the caddy images will fill the television screen top-to-bottom with good resolution.

• The compression used on the CD-ROM JPEG images is an advantage for DVD playback, as the images load quickly. If you play a CD-R containing your own digital camera photographs, the load time may be excruciatingly long if the images are uncompressed.

• The title-database folder on the CD-ROM contains 31 sub-folders which each contain about 124 images. When a DVD player finishes playing all the slides alphabetically in one folder, there may be a long pause as it reads the directory structure of the next folder. The names of the sub-folders provide a clue as to when this pause will occur. For example, on the sub-folder dark there may be a pause after Side 2 of the "Dark Victory [RCA]" caddy is displayed.

• Since DVD players display the images alphabetically and the files on the CD are named to sort alphabetically by disc title, the caddy slide show displays images in the same order as they are listed in the CED Title Database.

These downloads allow you to display a slide show of all the front sides of the caddies in the Visual CED Title Database and require the RCA VideoDisc Collector's Guide to be loaded in your CD-ROM drive. There are actually two different ways to enable a caddy slide show from the CD-ROM. One way is to use a macro program to automatically click the mouse button while viewing the caddy images in your web browser. By leaving the mouse pointer over the "Next Title" link, a new caddy image will be displayed each time the computer generates a mouse button click. The disadvantage of using a macro is that the web browser frame and menu bar remain visible and may be distracting. The CD-ROM Support Page explains the use of shareware macro programs in detail.

The other way to enable a caddy slide show, as explained on this page, is to use any of a number of freeware or shareware programs available for download on the internet. These programs often have features unavailable via the macro method, including displaying the caddies against a background pattern, dissolving the slides from one to another with various effects, or even playing the slides to accompanying music. The main disadvantage of using slide show programs is that there is no easy way to select just the front sides of the caddies. Thus the slide show will consist of every image in the title-database folder on the CD-ROM. The slide show would have the most visual impact if just the front sides of the caddies are displayed, as these were designed to grab your attention from a distance, whereas the rear sides were designed for reading details on the movie while holding the caddy in your hands. Some programs also only allow you to select files in a single folder, so the slide show would be limited to just a small portion of the Visual CED Title Database. And some programs have to analyze every file in the folder regardless of whether or not it is an image before the slide show will begin. This can greatly slow down the process as there are several thousand files in the title-database folder that are not image files. The downloads on this page address these issues by allowing you to setup and display a slide show of just the front sides with little effort.

The download for the Macintosh Operating System consists of a folder named CED_MAGIC Aliases containing 1,713 aliases pointing to the actual files on the CD-ROM. The MacOS will recognize aliases as image files, so you can use this folder of aliases with any of the freeware/shareware slide show programs available for the Macintosh. There are actually only 1,709 titles in the Visual CED Title Database, but the slide show has four extra images for Part 2 of "Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines" and Parts 2, 3, and 4 of "Jesus of Nazareth." These are the only CED titles that have substantially different artwork on the front sides of the additional discs. To enable the slide show, download and unstuff the ced-aliases.sit.hqx archive below, then select the newly created CED_MAGIC Aliases folder from within the slide show program. If you wish to eliminate any slides from the show, the aliases can simply be dragged out of the folder. The long file names make it easy to identify the CED title from the name of the alias. I tested this with several slide show programs and personally prefer Apimac Slide Show, which allows the show to be displayed on a number of different backgrounds built into the program. Other slide show programs for the MacOS include GraphicConverter, the freeware Jade, and Screen Gear.

For Windows 95/98/NT/2000/ME/XP enabling the slide show requires a different method as Windows will not recognize Shortcuts as image files, and it identifies the CD-ROM by a drive letter rather than a volume name. This means the path to the images on the CD-ROM will be different depending on whether your computer assigns CD-ROMs the drive letter D:, E:, or F:. For these reasons, I chose one Windows shareware slide show program Simple Viewer and made configuration files specifically for this program. The ZIP archive def-ced.zip contains three Simple Viewer slide show files d_ced.svs, e_ced.svs, and f_ced.svs. Unzip the archive after download to extract the three files, then use the appropriate slide show file with Simple Viewer depending on whether you CD-ROM's drive letter is D, E, or F. These files also contain entries pointing to 1,713 files on the CD-ROM for the reason stated above, and can be easily edited from within Simple Viewer to eliminate images or change the order in which images are displayed. I looked at several Windows slide show programs and preferred this one. Others can be found by searching on "Slide Show" at any of the Large Shareware Archives available on the internet.

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