The Commodore Dynamic Total Vision or CDTV player is the first of a new breed of computerised home entertainment systems. These systems are commonly termed Multi Media delivery systems or `infotainment' systems. They have the ability to not only entertain via games but also to inform and educate with the use of photographs, video, text, computer pictures, animations, music and narration.
The CDTV is based on two common technologies, the computer, in the case of CDTV, an Amiga, and a compact disc player. The compact disc player may be used in the traditional fashion for playing standard music CD's, however, it can also be utilised as a mass storage medium for use by the built in computer. One compact disc is capable of storing 540 MBytes, the equivalent of over 500 floppy disks or 250,000 pages of text!
The information is stored on the CD as a sequence of millions of 1's and 0's. The computer decides how these 1's and 0's or BITS (Binary Digits) are utilised to rebuild them into all of the components of a CDTV title, be they pictures, text, sound or any other media the system is able to handle.
