CD-i member Dizzy Dubs discovered an interesting detail again about a CD-i disc that has both a Video CD release as well as an (early) 'Digital Video on CD-i' release. We discussed before some early CD-i movies that were encoded according the Green Book standard (CD-i), simply because the White Book standard (VCD) was not ready yet. The full specification of Video CD was ready in 1993. Most other CD-i movies were released as Video CD (and these are compatible with more types of (VCD) players). In a recent article, we found Top Gun to be released as Digital Video on CD-i in 1993, but also in a re-pressing from 1994 in the VCD format. These two versions still have the same catalogue number, so it is difficult to catalogue these differences.
Dizzy Dubs: "Riding on the coattails of the Redbook CD-Audio, Philips continued to define and release a 'Rainbow Book' of format specifications. The end result was a barrage of complicated specs, often requiring different hardware, often employing immature compression formats which performed unimpressively. You could go down a wormhole analyzing the quirks associated with each format (and many preservationists have, including sarami's DiscImageCreator and claunia's Aaru dumping applications).
But an interesting takeaway I've found is that Philips was more interested in specifying how formats operated in their disc structure (TOC) than letting the software do the talking (DVD flavors). The Philips CD-i video releases were either CD-i DigitalVideo format (exclusive played on the CD-i console IF you had the expensive hardware add-on) or VCD - which were packed with Philips with some kind of "CD-i" logo attached to them - "CD-i Music" or "CD-i Video"."
[Thanks Dizzy Dubs from the Preserve CD-i blog]