MIL-HDBK-9660 Dod Produced Cd-Rom ProductsThis document was prepared by the Defense information Systems Agency DISA, in cooperation with the services and other activities within the Department of Defense DOD. The goal of this document is to provide information and guidelines to support the creation and interoperability of Compact Disc-Read Only Memory CD-ROM development and use within DOD. This document specifies core compact disc fundamentals for the DOD community. It is strongly recommended all DOD components comply with the fundamentals established within this document. Specialized functions within DOD may require expanded internal guidance to meet their own mission needs. All other Government entities are invited to use this document.

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MIL-HDBK-9660B

A.4.2  CD Standards.  All CD "standards" (are actually specifications which define the Physical Level: Media and Device) are proprietary to Philips and Sony Corporations.  Only licensed manufacturers of CD players and discs or holders of Information Agreements may purchase the specifications.  The standards are bound in different colored books:

A.4.2.1  The Red Book.  The first CD specification/standard developed jointly by Philips and Sony Corporations was the Red Book.  Written specifically for the audio/music industry, the CD-DA (Compact Disc-Digital Audio, or simply CD-A) was designed as read-only (or rather "listen" only).  For mass distribution/sale, a master disc was created first and copies were inexpensively replicated by a manufacturing facility.  The Red Book is the common thread that exists in all CD discs.

A Red Book CD can contain up to ninety-nine tracks which are arranged one after the other in a spiral leading out from the innermost part of the disc near the center hole disc hub.  The Red Book describes what the pits and lands are that make up the information, their arrangement, the speed at which they are read, the error correction, and the sector size.

A sector, or block, is the smallest addressable unit of information on a CD.  A block consists of 98 frames.  One frame equals 24 bytes.  One block, therefore, contains 2,352 bytes.

The location of an address on a Red Book CD is based on time' i.e., minute:second:sector/block.  Most audio CDs use a 60-minute spiral (270,000 sectors), although 74 minutes are possible (333,000 sectors) if the difficult outer 5mm of recordable area on the disc is used.  A 60 minute audio disc (without extra

error correction) can hold 601 MB of user data (630 MB maximum) and a 74 minute disc, 742 MB of user data (777 MB maximum).  Interestingly, the 74 minute maximum playing time was based on the exact length of Herbert von Karajan's recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony

A.4.2.2  The Yellow Book.  The Yellow Book, also by Philips and Sony, extended the Red Book to add the additional error correction code (ECC) necessary for storing computer data and text on a CD. The basic Yellow Book architecture breaks data into two types:

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