In an era shortly after the introduction of CD-ROM drives and before low cost
MPEG decoding hardware became available the CDXL format was created, primarily for the
Commodore CDTV, to permit playback of video from CD-ROM. CDXL is tailored for the
Amiga chipset and takes advantage of
DMA transfers, thus achieving playback with a low
CPU load. As a result, CDXL can only support weak
video compression and therefore relatively low video resolutions and moderate
frame rates. CDXL is a simple streaming format, consisting of linear concatenated chunks (packets), each with an uncompressed frame and associated audio data. There is no overall file header, just a header per chunk. The frame rate is constant but not stored in the file, so it is necessary to set the playback speed in the player
software manually. The CDXL format initially allowed playback of up to 24 frames per second with up to 4096 colors encoded in
HAM-6. Audio support allows for 8-bit mono or stereo sound. With the advent of the
Amiga CD32, the CDXL format has been extended to support
AGA color modes (up to 262,144 on-screen colors from a 24-bit color palette) and higher display resolutions. ==Usage==