I worked on the VideoDisc at RCA Labs in Princeton starting 1980. Around 1982 we were working out a solution to the skipping problem that involved gluing a little magnet to the aluminum stylus arm and "kicking" it with pulsed coils forwards and back to correct for skips. We pretty much got it working in the lab just as they announced the end of the product (and the sale of RCA to GE). It was a tech marvel. The video signal was modulated onto an FM carrier (like VCRs) and the audio FM carriers were added to the video carrier at 1/10 the amplitude. The video carrier was recorded on the copper master at an amplitude of 850 Angstroms, which made the audio carrier 85 Angstroms. The audio carrier needed a carrier to noise ratio of 100:1, or 0.85 Angstroms. Copper atoms are spaced 1.4 Angstroms apart, so that's only 60 copper atoms peak to peak! Fortunately the grooves were 10,000 per inch, or about 25,000 Angstroms wide, so the "copper atom noise" easily averaged out across the width of the groove. The original attempts at making discs conductive involved sputtering metal on them, and they were quite pretty. I still have one. I flinched at your opening clip as you fingered the disc, only to learn later that it was already thoroughly unplayable. Thanks for the memories!
If you haven't seen them, Alec on his Technology Connections channel has a series of videos where he goes into more depth about the development process and various other aspects of the whole thing.
I remember about 1979 going into a TV store in St. Petersburg, Florida and they had a BETA video cassette recorder. It looked great, they were showing the movie 'The Duel' on a screen with a projector type TV. The VCR alone was about $1200, that's back when I bought a new Mazda 626 car for $8,000, so $1200 for a recorder was quite steep. A year later in 1980 I walking through a mall in Pensacola, Florida and I saw movie flyers (billboards) in a TV store window. I walked in and they were playing the RCA Video Disc player. I bought a unit a couple of days later for $499. Movies were $25 - $30 and I ended buying about 30 movies that first year. Films like Chinatown, Heaven Can Wait, Airplane and Urban Cowboy were some of the titles. About 1983 they came out with a stereo version and I had just bought a stereo TV. I don't remember the price but it was about $200, so a lot cheaper than the original unit I bought two years earlier. About 1984 I went into a record store in Brunswick, Georgia they were closing out the video discs. They were all marked down to about $7 and they had a couple hundred titles to choose from. Over the next couple of months I ended up buying about 200 of those films. I never had too many problems with films skipping, the only nuisance I remember is having to get up and flick the disc over when you needed side 2 on longer films. I enjoyed that player, but by about 1986 I had bought a stereo VCR and like most people began renting moving. That's my history with the RCA Video Disc player and the associated films.
In the late 80s, I never understood why my parents had clung to the Betamax format until its dying breath-and why there were still mom-and-pop video rentals stores buying new Beta tapes. What I didn’t grasp was that for my lower-middle-class parents, that Betamax player, bought in the early 80s, had cost a fortune-easily the price of a used car (think $7K or $8K today). Hence the existence of VCR repair shops. When I finally talked my Dad into getting a VHS player, I think he found one on sale for a hundred bucks. They’d been cheap for years, but when you spend a fourth of your annual income on a movie player, you become emotionally committed to it. Unlike Techmoan Guy, I still kind of love watching garbage pan-and-scan movies on machines that should be in landfills-alongside streaming in HD. There’s something strange and nostalgic about it now. When I was young, it was so annoying not to be able to see good, complete versions of any of my favorite movies. Now that those movies are restored and looking great on dozens of platforms, I can appreciate the old-school charm of fixing the tracking while I try to watch a butchered pan-and-scan version on tape.
I was saying the same thing last week. My Dad got a VCR in 1985 right when they were becoming affordable. Paying $400 for a quality machine he knew would last a long time. My dad was going to school at the time and working as a cook at a resort so that was a LOT of money to him. It took him something like 6 months to save for it as a justifiable expense. Fast forward 13 to 15 years and he would yell at me to fix the thing even though he could now afford a new one or get a dvd player. He still remembered how long it took him to buy that thing and he refused to let it go. But the fond memories of VCRs never went away. Just started collecting VHS tapes again as I have been finding a lot recently along the side of the road.
Every time someone talks about the CID as a failed system, I have to raise a bit of an eyebrow. My dad brought one home at some point in '81, and I don't just remember these things being ubiquitous, but I remember rental stores (I used to rent episodes of He-Man frequently) that looked, for the most part, like any record store at the time. Come in, thumb through the titles, rent some movies. And it was for exactly this same reason that my dad went with the RCA system...the price vs VCRs. We had that thing for a good 3 or 4 years before VHS finally became affordable. We had one, my neighbors had one, like...everyone I knew seemed to have one. But no one remembers CID, and it's always talked about like only one or two people ever bought them when they did come around. Was this a regional thing?
My brother in law was an engineer at RCA in the early eighties when the CED was making it's debut. He had an engineering sample at his home, we watched a couple of movies. I was not too impressed with the quality, looked a lot like a VHS SLP recorded tape. Even with a new player and new discs, the system had problems with skips and freezes. I asked him if he thought the format would make it and he said flatly that RCA really had a turkey on its hands, but they were into to it so much, they had to give it a go. Of course, it flopped monumentally. Thanks for the video, it answered a lot of questions, especially about the format's impact in the UK.
+Quantum Leap That's a bit of interesting insight... I remember to this day my dad bought one of these when they first released at Sears. I still recall the movies: Dr. No, From Russia with Love and Goldfinger (he was a Bond fan). I still even recall the discs were skipping brand new. But it was the definitely the cheaper alternative to VHS or Beta.
I remember that dinosaur programme from childhood! Genuinely haven't remembered or thought about it for 25 years or so - thanks for the inadvertent massive hit of nostalgia.
Just a quick word. There are a lot of people recommending 'fixes' for my player when it comes to playing discs because they were skipping, but you may have skipped a section of my video, because it's the discs not the players that are at fault. 1) The first player and all the discs I received with it were *all badly stored...and had probably been in a damp environment* - I mentioned this by joking that the discs looked like they had been "Stored in a pond". 2) Because of the ruined discs to 'Show the format off at its best' I bought a *brand new unopened disc* "The Muppets Movie". This played fine and skipping perhaps two or three individual frames (that's the same a blinking your eyes) during the course of the whole film. 3) So looking at 1 & 2 above, we can see that when using a disc that is not ruined, the videodisc player will play the disc fine, so there is therefore nothing wrong with the player. 4) However even if all the films played as perfectly as the Muppets movie I have no intention of watching any more CEDs as I'm not interested in watching VHS Quality 4:3 ratio films from the UK's poor selection of third rate titles. I'd prefer to watch a blu-ray, I only made this video to demonstrate the format. I have since given the players and discs away.
+Techmoan It's interesting that Player 2 was brand new and the neutral in the plug wasn't wired. Could it have been sold like this due to predating the update of BS1363 (the British plug regulatory legislation) which required new devices to come with a fully wired plug? Some sort of convenience/liability workaround?
+Techmoan AARRRGGGGHHHH....well, disregard my post above...on another topic, ya wouldnt happen to have an Astatic x-26 record cutting head laying around, would u? i have 2 Montgomery Ward airliner record cutter tables from the 50s with burnt cutting heads, crystal based....perhaps u could help me get em running? mechanics r perfect, just need to restore the cutting heads....maybe we can make a deal and i will GIVE ya one if u help me get the other running!
This CeD Video player, it works in an IDENTICAL manner to an old "Bernoulli Box" PC storage device, doesn't it? It at very least seems to use a Bernoulli principle to pull the disk towards the read head. I do know that "Bernoulli Boxes" used PET Film for the disk.
Dysphoricsmile No, they're not quite the same. Bernoulli boxes were still based on magnetic storage, albeit very accurate storage. They used a laser to heat the metal to its Curie point, so it could be easily magnetized. These discs use capacitance, based on the distance between the media and the read head.
***** Because...he did a modicum of research on the medium, unlike everyone who keeps commenting on this video, and it was clear that they were ruined? Did you not hear about the grease coating that makes it impossible to clean?
My grandparents had one of these in the early 80s, here in Canada. I don't know where they got it from, and no one that I have ever mentioned it to knew what I was talking about - in fact, people would look at me like I was crazy. I've been writing down some memories from childhood, and this came to mind. Glad I was able to find it here so now I have proof I wasn't imagining things!
I still don't really understand why I find your videos so fascinating, but it seems like each time you release a new video with some old technology I gobble it up like some sort of candy. Keep up the good work!
+Sask Trail Rider It's the man behind the camera. Brilliant editing, comprehensive without being too long, sharing personal experiences, actually handles the equipment like a boss (not some 16 yr old going "lol dunno how to fix it") with a soothing genuine voice. Give this man a job on radio!
You know that when TechMoan says that a 40+ year old system is "relatively unheard of nowadays" it means that less than five people in the world are aware they exist. Splendid find as always, sir!
24:55 I think the cropped off version is called Pan and Scan in the movie industry. About 10 years ago I saw a short documentary on TCM about it, and how directors disapproved of it because it was essentially a redirecting of their movie and not what they intended. I think they mentioned it was done more for movies to be shown on TV and being able to fit the TV screen. Back in the TV box days, the Clint Eastwood movies were full of that. Thank god is over!
Only thing worse is windowboxing. When the footage originally fits natively to the aspect ratio of the screen, but the distributer adds bars to fit another aspect ratio and the TV then adds bars to fit it's native ratio again.
One of the worst examples I've ever seen was the original release of "Return of the Jedi." The scene where Han and Luke are talking on their way to the Sarlacc pit could easily make you sick with all the additional panning and scanning. But pan-and-scan wasn't the worst they could do. "Ghostbusters II" hit an all-time low. They letterboxed it for 1.85:1 (it was anamorphic 2.35:1) and still panned and scanned the reframing. And if that wasn't bad enough, the end credits were still presented with Anamorphic squeeze!
I only recently discovered your channel and am glad i did. between yours and the LGR channel i have spent hours watching videos on old tech. I have always been fascinated by older technology and how we have progressed to what we have today. being in my early 30's i'm still surprised by how much tech has been around in my lifetime i never new much or anything about. I look forward to watching more of your stuff it has been very informative and entertaining .
Very much enjoying your channel, absolutely loving your videos. It's like a virtual museum of my childhood .. I was a kid of the 80s (2 yo in 1980) .. , son of a VHS rental store owner & tech enthusiast. We owned it all , Laser Disc/Video Disc, VHS , etc and your channel is bringing back a major nostalgia high, making me want to collect this stuff again myself. Thank you!
Vinyl video discs have always fascinated me, especially the ill fated colecovision console add on, which could reproduce Dragon's Lair. it blows my mind how this technology works (or not)
There was going to be a VCD add-on for the colecovision? Well considering how many add-ons the intelevision and colecovision had... Wouldn't surprise me.
+Applied Science thanks Ben, your electron microscope footage added a lot to the video. I think the people who commented that this video wouldn't look out of place on the BBC were doing so because your footage made the whole thing seem a lot more professional.
My Mom was a district manager for AVON in the 80's and at one point the company sent CED players to all of the managers so they could lug them to sales meetings. AVON produced training and other various videos on CED after having used the old filmstrip & cassette player option for years. It was the first in a long line of hilarious mistakes the company made when it came to formats for their training videos. I don't think they finally got round to using VHS until around 1990. You can guess which formats (yes, plural) AVON tried to go with between CED and VHS. Somehow, they always managed to go with the absolute worst option possible. Also, those CED's (all of them, not just AVON's) were notorious for being knackered right out of the shrinkwrap. Great vids!
I loved the CED machines, short lived as they were, and was amazed at how smooth the fast-search (jog- shuttle) was even on the “low-spec” machines. I had never heard of the “TED” machines. Thanks for another great presentation!
That clip of the 70s dinosaur documentary scratched out an ancient memory of watching it on a recorded VHS in the 90s, retro dino stuff was the coolest.
Pink Floyd at Pompeii on CED! Very cool. We used to rent these machines and discs at the hardware store in our village. They were pretty much rubbish as the skipping problem made watching a movie very frustrating. Thanks for the memories.
"I've got an idea! Let's make a video disc player that has the same resolution as video tape but can't record, and uses discs so incredibly fragile that people can't be permitted to touch them under any circumstance otherwise the playback will be completely screwed up! We're gonna be rich!" :-) Excellent video, especially the lessons on how to repair mechanical machines. When in doubt, replace the belts!
Bottom line was RCA could stamp videos on disc rather then real time record videotapes...which at the time was a lot quicker and efficient...if it was perfected.
I have a huge collection of these CED machines and the discs and i still repair and use them to this day ... They really were awesome for the time .. i also have a lot of 16 MM films as well i watch .. Thank you for sharing this with us .... I really love watching your videos my friend, we have the same interests. :)
Whilst working in the HiFi industry in the 90s I had a day doing stock take and found one of these machines and some discs. There was a moment of intense interest as I looked at the stylus and wondered. DVD had not long been introduced and had made an immense impact on all who saw it, it's superiority over all that had come before was obvious. ..I spent some time cleaning the machine, a Toshiba I think, and played a disc. My interest instantly withered and it was stuck back on the shelf. My favourite phrase of the time, 'You can't polish a turd' applied. Love your videos, I think I have said before, they are simply the best on planet Earth for this sort of thing, immense kudos for that. Much deserved praise.
The mentioning of how the TED works by using a cushion of air to hold it steady reminds me of a piece of old computer tech from the early 80's to early 90's. It was called a bernoulli drive, and it used air pressure from the rapidly spinning disk to draw the IO head to the disk surface. Thing is, because if the way it worked, a head crash was practically impossible, making it the first successful removable media with built-in crash protection.
I am so happy that I never got "stuck" with this video format. Playing a video with a stylus just does not compute in my head. After watching this, my head computed correctly.
This is the most informative video I've watched so far. I just got my first CED from ebay just to see what it looked like, I'd love to have a small collection and a working player someday.
Aw, strangely nostalgic for me; not because of the CED, but because it’s the first Techmoan video I ever saw haha! Since then each video has been one of my highlights of the week for over 2 years! A very merry Christmas to any fellow Techmoan fanatics out there reading this!
You must be incredibly patient. Many people would have smashed the first or second player with a sledge hammer before moving on to the third. Thanks for sharing so much over the years.
I watched a video where he was trying to fix an old radio. The thing clearly wasn't designed with repairs in mind. It was an absolute nightmare to disassemble, and extremely fiddly. "I'm really starting to get cheesed off with this," he said in his calm, British way. Meanwhile, if it had been me, I would have lost my mind and flung that thing away from me so hard, it would have gone into orbit. People in the International Space Station would look out the window one day and just see this random mass of wires, circuit boards, and tuning dials floating by. To add insult to injury, he wasn't able to get it fixed and put it back together properly. He went through all that trouble and didn't even accomplish what he was trying to do. I can't help but wonder if behind the scenes, there was any cursing, or taking breaks during the process just to prevent insanity as the frustration increased.
Picked up about 15 of these discs at Goodwill yesterday - everyone in the store was asking me what they were. Thanks for making great informative videos about tech like this!
I knew someone in 1986 that had a CED player. I recall that it seemed old even in 1986. I specifically remember that he had MASH the movie on disk that I watched over and over again. It had a few skips in it which was frustrating.
Wow. Another amazing video. I really like your new style where you appear more on camera. You are a great presenter and do quite a good job at presenting - Keep up the good work Mat!
Love to hear more about the CED games only released in Japan. Cobra Command was one of the arcade laser disc games that was put on CED and worked in conjunction with an MSX computer.The interface of the two units (CED and MSX) allowed for scoring, controls, etc.
I had one of these growing up!!! We were given them by a family friend who didn't want it anymore (it was in the 90s), and included a bunch of free films - a lot of them in the discs you go through! I remember watching Time Bandits and that muppet movie many times! I had a memory of it actually being pretty good quality, better than VHS - except it suffered from skipping issues. Thank you for the video really enjoyed it!
8 років тому+10
I was secretly waiting for the RCA videodisc to be reviewed :) Thanks. This device knows how to remix those old movies :D
+Amir Pourghoureiyan If you're in the UK, Hitachi trains can be found working on the East Coast Mainline (The LNER "Azuma"), the Great Western Mainline (The "Super Express Train") and on High-Speed One (The SouthEastern "Javelin") :-) The first two are more or less identical to the 800 series Shinkansen, though with slight modifications to suit UK signalling systems and our smaller loading gauge. :-)
@@ddragon8154 In Japan they're known as the "Baby Shinkansen" and run in more "rural" areas. The 'proper' shinkansen is much faster, longer and wider (even standard class has 5-abreast seating with a wide aisle and acres of legroom), even though it still runs on standard-gauge track (albiet specially-laid, smooth track without sharp corners)
I grew up as a kid watching movies on CED and VHS in the 80s before CD and DVD came out. I will say I never saw the movies skip. Dad must have gotten a good player and never had issues back then.
i was born in 1992 and i extremely appreciate all your videos they are done well. In school you learn about "history" but not tech history. Your videos really give an appreciation for how far we have come. Im also a tech geek and audiophile. If your wondering what your doing is important... well it is. how us would a 18 year old know about a vhs/cassette tape and other aged medias. Thanks!
Amazing- thank you so much for uploading this! I had learned of CEDs existence a couple of years ago but never new much about them. And while I'm no expert on any media-related technology, I found your video to be very informative, interesting and entertaining. Subbed; proceeding to watch your entire upload history.
great video! I remember spending all day trying to win a radio contest giving away a videodic player back when i was 11 years old, the wound still feel fresh. keep the goodness rolling.
My uncle had one of these machines. He owned several discs, but the one I watched most was Star Wars. This was back in the early 80s, and the only way for me to see that film then was to visit my uncle. Loved this release.
That skipping Poltergeist disc made me chuckle for some reason, because I just imagined the ghosts are screwing up time and reality every time the video jumps around. "GO INTO THE LI-LI-LI-LI-vrrp vrrp bzzt-NUMBER TWO!"
I'm really happy you mentioned aspect ratio. It's one of the things I hated about VHS and even television up until the mid-late 90s when it started changing. I grew up on Pan and Scan and only in my teenage years did I realize how it ruined not only the picture quality and what you could see, but the director's/DP's vision as well. Nowadays we have another opposite problem - people zooming in or stretching older 4:3 TV into to 16:9 as 99% of TV was shot in that ratio until the late 90s early 2000s...
Hi, just wanted to say, thanks for all the trouble you go through, just to teach us about a forgotten format. I can tell you enjoy it, like most of your fans do but it's still a lot of time spent. For that, and your sense of awe, enjoyment and discovery, thank you :) Cheers from Canada
Growing up in a small town in Northern Minnesota, USA, we had 1 TV repair shop & he happened to also be an RCA Factory Authorized dealer who rented these machines & the discs & so that was all there was for us as far as being able to rent a video back then! And even then, they skipped & had the little black "streaks" that run across the screen occasionally. They NEVER worked quite right, but it was our only way of renting a movie to watch at home, so we put up with it.
Damn, I've watched Poltergeist on DVD but considering the film's context it seems quite fitting. It's as if the TV is possessed, or something. Good Video, very informative.
Fascinating video. I was one of the people who bought one of these players after it had flopped. I think it came with 20 disks and it cost me a song and my attitude was that I was buying the films at a greatly reduced price. The machine worked perfectly and I was happy to have bought the films. It's all long gone now but seeing you wrestle with three machines simply tells me that I am not missing anything by no longer having my player. It would probably be dead by now anyway. I have a bluray player in any case and and there is no going back. I visited a friend's house and saw one of the machines and commented that RCA must have been crazy to release something so obviously inferior to Laservision in every way, only to find that the man of the house worked for RCA. Ooops. I will never forget that sullen pout but then it was a barmy release and an appalling waste of R&D funds.
Physical media, IMO, will always be necessary to have, as places like Netflix, and hulu really suck when it comes to older movies and TV shows. I have to have all of my movies and TV shows archived on a form of physical media, so that I'll always have them. Netflix has one 10th the stuff it used to have, and that has driven me away from it.
Even if services like Netflix were to never fulfill your needs, you can digitize whatever content you have on physical media and upload it to the cloud. If that's a little impractical with today's tech/prices, eventually transfer speeds and storage space won't be an issue. Neither is copyright, if it's private storage. Then you'd be able to watch your videos anywhere, on any device, share them, and all the other advantages. You may _want_ to keep your physical media, just like people keep vinyls or whatever retro stuff they like, but it's hardly _necessary_ even today. I haven't used physical media beyond the occasional USB drive in years.
Diego C. You are right, but keep in mind if towers, satellites and such go down , will have no cloud, no wifi, no service. Plus I like the nostalgia of the case, booklets, posters, etc that a dvd, vhs, ced, vinyls, tapes and such have. When we have storms and power goes out, we get the batteries out, light candles, turn on our home generator and pop in a dvd, blue ray, or put on a cd, vinyl, or mp3 player and play board games.
Mike's Explorations I agree I have fiber to internet. But the company always want to sell me a combo this means have tv and everything via fiber. Well tv I have via sattelite (I dont want to be on hands of one companys tv services pay a lot of 15-30 channels when sattelite offer me around 1000-2000 channels mostly for free), then there is this that if fiber got cut somewhere then nothing works! This is also in physicalformat there are no limits. But like we in Sweden have 4 big stream services everyone buy different rights. I mean in sports one broadcast hockey other buy all rights to send football third one buy all rights to formel 1 and golf. To sport sattelite is so good! Always some channel or uplink that broadcast it for free. Same thing in movies and series. And like said if I miss see a movie in time it get deleted since these streamservices only have it limited time. Why pay like 50-70$ each month to have movies and music. You can buy a lot of Blueray, Dvd, CD, Vinyl...for that money and guess what you own them if you some month run out of money no problem I can still listen to that old music since I have it in my self 😂 Even if the power got cut I can still use batteries, solarpanels etc 😂 This is the scary thing with todays technology Swedish goverment wats for example to close down FM transmitters for radio since we already so digital. But digital radio needs you to have internet since we do not have DAB everywhere..... 4G is really expensive in Sweden and it has datalimits. In someway I hope there will be a big error with some big internetprovider that closes the whole net for sometime. Lets see then who laughs and says "these streamservices are the future" there would be panic when no tv no radio no movies no sports no newspapers no books no music nothing in entertaitment would work 😆 Ofcouse internet and smartphones fantastic. But me personal do not only relay to that and I do not pay anything for services that is online only. Only online service I pay is my fiber and cellphone.
The argument for wether they’re necessary is arbitrary, however there will always be a demand for physical media albeit however small from subject to subject.
I bought a CED video player in 1983. Later at an apartment I lived in, I had a video store downstairs below the apartment building. There you could rent Beta, VHS, and CED discs. I had a mono BETA recorder. I'd rent CED discs and copy them to BETA. It worked.
The CED discs did skip a bit after a while. That was another reason to copy them to tape, even they we're skipping already. At the time, I didn't know about laser disc.
Well, once you've committed to something, you have to see it through. And if things get difficult, that's where the stubborn streak comes into play. You can get a lot accomplished by sheer tenacity.
+Techmoan I know I felt exhausted for you with all the work and expense you put into it. But I'm sure after all was said and done your audience with appreciate the educational value of it (I know I do) even those like myself who have never heard of a CED Video Disc before this video. Cheers!
I'm in America, and I had the rca set 400 model(or whatever the one you show is lol) when I was a kid. We had the Goonies and a few others. We rented them mostly. The Goonies had a bunch of skips from bumping it while playing. It skipped at the part where sloth eats the ice cream and the candy bar lol. It was too funny
I worked on the non-contact disc called VHD. In 1981, the technology was being transferred from Matsushita, JVC, GE and EMI to VHD in Irvine, California. At the last minute, they decided not to market it in the US, while it was used in Japan for many years in educational applications.
26:06 "What was once seen as high tech is pretty much unwatchable" Um, beg to differ. CED was never considered to be high tech even when it was new. If anything, it was only barely passable as a technology. The skipping was just something the players could never get past. Even with brand new players playing brand new discs, you could see black dropouts and skips. CED technology was just not that viable. In the 80s, I was already invested in the Laserdisc format when I worked at Sound Warehouse selling CED players. Believe me, these discs and players were pretty much crap from the go. The only benefit CED had was cost. The players were far less expensive and the movies also cost less than a Laserdisc counterpart (at least in the beginning). Of course, consumers pretty much figured out its junk status when they skipped and skipped and skipped. I can't tell you how many of these CED disks were returned as defective. Videophiles at the time would not invest in CED due to its inherent flaws: skipping, dropouts and overall VHS-like image quality. Laserdisc, on the other hand, offered a much higher quality video experience and was the format videophiles adopted for a home theater experience. This left CED in a bad sales position. For standard home use, VHS was already a standard and worked for rentals and everyday use. For videophiles, Laserdisc was the technology choice. CED really had no sales demographic to go after. While RCA may have bet the farm on it, they shouldn't have. Technologically speaking, both the Laserdisc players and Laserdisc technology were light years ahead of CED in quality and functionality. While Laserdiscs could skip if they got too scratched or too dirty, you could at least clean them. You could also get plastic polish and clean off scratches most of the time. With CED, if the disc started skipping, you just had to toss it.
As an early VHS user, there were two things that made it vastly superior to all other formats for me. They are: 1. The ability to record. Purchasing movies in the late 70s, early 80s was not practical for regular folk. They cost over or about $100.00 per title. Its hard to envision, but recording and having your own copy of Spy Who Love from TV was a real treat. And, 2. The video rental stores had vast libraries of VHS- more so even than betamax. VHS was already at the outer limits of my budget, so it was not reasonable to purchase a more expensive machine only to have less titles. Over time, I purchased used copies that the video store would sell, new titles and especially I purchased many titles new but for about $4.99 as consumers went over to dvd. As you can imagine, over time I had quite a library of titles. Several years ago, I moved and my family convinced me not to take the VHS which I mostly trashed. However, there are titles I miss (i. e. my belived Faulty Towers) and will have to purchase on dvd or blue rae. Also, I bought a combo vhs/dvd player recorder (I found one virtually new at low cost) so I could get the home movies off VHS to dvd which was a real treat at a recent holiday gathering. The new trend as you noted is to purchase digital only content. Id rather have something physical in case there is a technical snafu. I have friends that need to move etc vast movie and music libraries when they get a new device or when a hard drive dies. I dont see the point. One last thing is I just bought my first blue rae player but not because I was hungry for a new format (actually the reverse) but rather because it allowed UA-cam on my regular tv. I’m sure Sony will have a new format in a few years, but I’d rather they spend their money on buy first class scripts rather than a flavor of the month new format.
My mother went with VHS so she could record soap operas when she was a work. Mom bought me Star Wars when it first came out in 1982 for Christmas, to this day she has never told me how much she paid. I bought my first tape, a copy of the Spy Who Loved Me on layaway, it took me 6-8 months to pay it off!
Not only the video is quite entertaining following the adventures to get the CED to work, but the comments of the narrator... I had to keep pausing the video and looking up what the references were: "Bob's your uncle"? "The Blipverts"? Haha it did look like the Blipverts after watching a scene on UA-cam 😂 Interesting and entertaining content! Thank you...
In the days before our first VHS VCR, we used to rent one of these for occasional family movie night. The local appliance store rented them and must have had about every disk available in the U.S. It seemed like a the neatest thing ever back then. But then, we got a VCR and never looked back.
So from what I can tell the CED produced a picture slightly sharper than a VHS tape but was effectively the same resolution. And much more prone to contamination and damage than VHS - at least if you have a dodgy old tape you can adjust the tracking on your VCR to try make it watchable - on the CED unless your disc has been unopened since new (like the Muppet movie disc you managed to get off ebay) it will probably be almost unplayable and there's nothing you can do about it. Next you should try get hold of the RCA tape cartridge player - almost twice as big again as an Elcaset.
When you said it was left in a shed for 20 years and therefore youre not going to be able to get it running, it made me realize that the channel that made the video about repairing a commodore 64 that had been left outside for 10 years wasnt this one (or 8-bit guy) lol
I worked on the VideoDisc at RCA Labs in Princeton starting 1980. Around 1982 we were working out a solution to the skipping problem that involved gluing a little magnet to the aluminum stylus arm and "kicking" it with pulsed coils forwards and back to correct for skips. We pretty much got it working in the lab just as they announced the end of the product (and the sale of RCA to GE).
It was a tech marvel. The video signal was modulated onto an FM carrier (like VCRs) and the audio FM carriers were added to the video carrier at 1/10 the amplitude. The video carrier was recorded on the copper master at an amplitude of 850 Angstroms, which made the audio carrier 85 Angstroms. The audio carrier needed a carrier to noise ratio of 100:1, or 0.85 Angstroms. Copper atoms are spaced 1.4 Angstroms apart, so that's only 60 copper atoms peak to peak! Fortunately the grooves were 10,000 per inch, or about 25,000 Angstroms wide, so the "copper atom noise" easily averaged out across the width of the groove.
The original attempts at making discs conductive involved sputtering metal on them, and they were quite pretty. I still have one.
I flinched at your opening clip as you fingered the disc, only to learn later that it was already thoroughly unplayable.
Thanks for the memories!
If you haven't seen them, Alec on his Technology Connections channel has a series of videos where he goes into more depth about the development process and various other aspects of the whole thing.
That's awesome I'd love to know more about this lost tech
Incredible!
Any chance you could upload a picture of the sputtered metal disc somewhere for posterity.
Maaaybe on wikipedia.
You have a picture of that prototype disc?
I remember about 1979 going into a TV store in St. Petersburg, Florida and they had a BETA video cassette recorder. It looked great, they were showing the movie 'The Duel' on a screen with a projector type TV. The VCR alone was about $1200, that's back when I bought a new Mazda 626 car for $8,000, so $1200 for a recorder was quite steep. A year later in 1980 I walking through a mall in Pensacola, Florida and I saw movie flyers (billboards) in a TV store window. I walked in and they were playing the RCA Video Disc player. I bought a unit a couple of days later for $499. Movies were $25 - $30 and I ended buying about 30 movies that first year. Films like Chinatown, Heaven Can Wait, Airplane and Urban Cowboy were some of the titles. About 1983 they came out with a stereo version and I had just bought a stereo TV. I don't remember the price but it was about $200, so a lot cheaper than the original unit I bought two years earlier. About 1984 I went into a record store in Brunswick, Georgia they were closing out the video discs. They were all marked down to about $7 and they had a couple hundred titles to choose from. Over the next couple of months I ended up buying about 200 of those films. I never had too many problems with films skipping, the only nuisance I remember is having to get up and flick the disc over when you needed side 2 on longer films. I enjoyed that player, but by about 1986 I had bought a stereo VCR and like most people began renting moving. That's my history with the RCA Video Disc player and the associated films.
In the late 80s, I never understood why my parents had clung to the Betamax format until its dying breath-and why there were still mom-and-pop video rentals stores buying new Beta tapes.
What I didn’t grasp was that for my lower-middle-class parents, that Betamax player, bought in the early 80s, had cost a fortune-easily the price of a used car (think $7K or $8K today). Hence the existence of VCR repair shops.
When I finally talked my Dad into getting a VHS player, I think he found one on sale for a hundred bucks. They’d been cheap for years, but when you spend a fourth of your annual income on a movie player, you become emotionally committed to it.
Unlike Techmoan Guy, I still kind of love watching garbage pan-and-scan movies on machines that should be in landfills-alongside streaming in HD. There’s something strange and nostalgic about it now.
When I was young, it was so annoying not to be able to see good, complete versions of any of my favorite movies. Now that those movies are restored and looking great on dozens of platforms, I can appreciate the old-school charm of fixing the tracking while I try to watch a butchered pan-and-scan version on tape.
I was saying the same thing last week. My Dad got a VCR in 1985 right when they were becoming affordable. Paying $400 for a quality machine he knew would last a long time. My dad was going to school at the time and working as a cook at a resort so that was a LOT of money to him. It took him something like 6 months to save for it as a justifiable expense.
Fast forward 13 to 15 years and he would yell at me to fix the thing even though he could now afford a new one or get a dvd player. He still remembered how long it took him to buy that thing and he refused to let it go.
But the fond memories of VCRs never went away. Just started collecting VHS tapes again as I have been finding a lot recently along the side of the road.
Like, so retro!
@@paul8926 4 years ago, 1 year ago, 8 months ago, 1 month ago, 16 hours ago, and now I'm commenting. What a weird timeline for a comment chain.
Every time someone talks about the CID as a failed system, I have to raise a bit of an eyebrow. My dad brought one home at some point in '81, and I don't just remember these things being ubiquitous, but I remember rental stores (I used to rent episodes of He-Man frequently) that looked, for the most part, like any record store at the time. Come in, thumb through the titles, rent some movies. And it was for exactly this same reason that my dad went with the RCA system...the price vs VCRs. We had that thing for a good 3 or 4 years before VHS finally became affordable. We had one, my neighbors had one, like...everyone I knew seemed to have one. But no one remembers CID, and it's always talked about like only one or two people ever bought them when they did come around. Was this a regional thing?
My brother in law was an engineer at RCA in the early eighties when the CED was making it's debut. He had an engineering sample at his home, we watched a couple of movies. I was not too impressed with the quality, looked a lot like a VHS SLP recorded tape. Even with a new player and new discs, the system had problems with skips and freezes. I asked him if he thought the format would make it and he said flatly that RCA really had a turkey on its hands, but they were into to it so much, they had to give it a go. Of course, it flopped monumentally. Thanks for the video, it answered a lot of questions, especially about the format's impact in the UK.
+Quantum Leap That's a bit of interesting insight...
I remember to this day my dad bought one of these when they first released at Sears. I still recall the movies: Dr. No, From Russia with Love and Goldfinger (he was a Bond fan).
I still even recall the discs were skipping brand new. But it was the definitely the cheaper alternative to VHS or Beta.
Oh boy
Thank you for your post. I appreciate commenters who can add information to the subject.
If these had been released in the early to mid-70s, I wonder if they would have at least had a brief period of popularity though.
Macaroni cheese is epic 👍😄
I remember that dinosaur programme from childhood! Genuinely haven't remembered or thought about it for 25 years or so - thanks for the inadvertent massive hit of nostalgia.
Considering it's read by a bloody stylus, the picture is pretty impressive.
There was blood on the stylus? 🤔
@@Formula1Madx you're not British aren't you?
Holy shit?! Theres blood?
@@farhanatashiga3721 shhhhh go drink me tea and crumpets
@@farhanatashiga3721 british stylus have blood on them? Kinda weird.
Just a quick word. There are a lot of people recommending 'fixes' for my player when it comes to playing discs because they were skipping, but you may have skipped a section of my video, because it's the discs not the players that are at fault.
1) The first player and all the discs I received with it were *all badly stored...and had probably been in a damp environment* - I mentioned this by joking that the discs looked like they had been "Stored in a pond".
2) Because of the ruined discs to 'Show the format off at its best' I bought a *brand new unopened disc* "The Muppets Movie". This played fine and skipping perhaps two or three individual frames (that's the same a blinking your eyes) during the course of the whole film.
3) So looking at 1 & 2 above, we can see that when using a disc that is not ruined, the videodisc player will play the disc fine, so there is therefore nothing wrong with the player.
4) However even if all the films played as perfectly as the Muppets movie I have no intention of watching any more CEDs as I'm not interested in watching VHS Quality 4:3 ratio films from the UK's poor selection of third rate titles. I'd prefer to watch a blu-ray, I only made this video to demonstrate the format. I have since given the players and discs away.
+Techmoan It's interesting that Player 2 was brand new and the neutral in the plug wasn't wired. Could it have been sold like this due to predating the update of BS1363 (the British plug regulatory legislation) which required new devices to come with a fully wired plug? Some sort of convenience/liability workaround?
+Techmoan AARRRGGGGHHHH....well, disregard my post above...on another topic, ya wouldnt happen to have an Astatic x-26 record cutting head laying around, would u? i have 2 Montgomery Ward airliner record cutter tables from the 50s with burnt cutting heads, crystal based....perhaps u could help me get em running? mechanics r perfect, just need to restore the cutting heads....maybe we can make a deal and i will GIVE ya one if u help me get the other running!
This CeD Video player, it works in an IDENTICAL manner to an old "Bernoulli Box" PC storage device, doesn't it?
It at very least seems to use a Bernoulli principle to pull the disk towards the read head.
I do know that "Bernoulli Boxes" used PET Film for the disk.
Dysphoricsmile No, they're not quite the same. Bernoulli boxes were still based on magnetic storage, albeit very accurate storage. They used a laser to heat the metal to its Curie point, so it could be easily magnetized. These discs use capacitance, based on the distance between the media and the read head.
***** Because...he did a modicum of research on the medium, unlike everyone who keeps commenting on this video, and it was clear that they were ruined? Did you not hear about the grease coating that makes it impossible to clean?
A video that chronicles one man's journey in to becoming the owner of the worlds largest collection of CED players!
I like this channel.
Join the CED Club! ;D
Dorsia
your dedication to fixing this thing is admirable.
This format radiates an aura of 'it seemed like a good idea at the time'
Development on the CED was delayed until it was already obsolete when released,
It was a good idea when they started working on it... unfortunately by the time it actually released it was completely obsolete.
My grandparents had one of these in the early 80s, here in Canada. I don't know where they got it from, and no one that I have ever mentioned it to knew what I was talking about - in fact, people would look at me like I was crazy. I've been writing down some memories from childhood, and this came to mind. Glad I was able to find it here so now I have proof I wasn't imagining things!
wow for something that lasted only a few years got 30 minutes of very quality educational footage this is why i subscribed i loved it
I still don't really understand why I find your videos so fascinating, but it seems like each time you release a new video with some old technology I gobble it up like some sort of candy. Keep up the good work!
+Sask Trail Rider He's good at what he does!
+Sask Trail Rider
It's the man behind the camera. Brilliant editing, comprehensive without being too long, sharing personal experiences, actually handles the equipment like a boss (not some 16 yr old going "lol dunno how to fix it") with a soothing genuine voice. Give this man a job on radio!
@@Paiste402 can't it be both?
You know that when TechMoan says that a 40+ year old system is "relatively unheard of nowadays" it means that less than five people in the world are aware they exist.
Splendid find as always, sir!
I was born in the 80s and he talks about stuff in the 80s which i never ever heard of
i find the visual image on the ced has a nice warmth too it that makes me appreciate watching the movies more than on a digitally downloaded video.
24:55 I think the cropped off version is called Pan and Scan in the movie industry. About 10 years ago I saw a short documentary on TCM about it, and how directors disapproved of it because it was essentially a redirecting of their movie and not what they intended. I think they mentioned it was done more for movies to be shown on TV and being able to fit the TV screen. Back in the TV box days, the Clint Eastwood movies were full of that. Thank god is over!
Only thing worse is windowboxing.
When the footage originally fits natively to the aspect ratio of the screen, but the distributer adds bars to fit another aspect ratio and the TV then adds bars to fit it's native ratio again.
One of the worst examples I've ever seen was the original release of "Return of the Jedi." The scene where Han and Luke are talking on their way to the Sarlacc pit could easily make you sick with all the additional panning and scanning.
But pan-and-scan wasn't the worst they could do. "Ghostbusters II" hit an all-time low. They letterboxed it for 1.85:1 (it was anamorphic 2.35:1) and still panned and scanned the reframing. And if that wasn't bad enough, the end credits were still presented with Anamorphic squeeze!
I only recently discovered your channel and am glad i did. between yours and the LGR channel i have spent hours watching videos on old tech. I have always been fascinated by older technology and how we have progressed to what we have today. being in my early 30's i'm still surprised by how much tech has been around in my lifetime i never new much or anything about. I look forward to watching more of your stuff it has been very informative and entertaining .
Very much enjoying your channel, absolutely loving your videos. It's like a virtual museum of my childhood .. I was a kid of the 80s (2 yo in 1980) .. , son of a VHS rental store owner & tech enthusiast. We owned it all , Laser Disc/Video Disc, VHS , etc and your channel is bringing back a major nostalgia high, making me want to collect this stuff again myself.
Thank you!
Vinyl video discs have always fascinated me, especially the ill fated colecovision console add on, which could reproduce Dragon's Lair. it blows my mind how this technology works (or not)
There was going to be a VCD add-on for the colecovision?
Well considering how many add-ons the intelevision and colecovision had... Wouldn't surprise me.
You!
instablaster...
@RainLauncher85TheVHSCollector2007 makes more sense.
I have never heard of these discs in my life till today. Mental
This is by far my favorite Techmoan video. My first viewing of Poltergeist (my favorite film) was on CED. Many thanks for this one and the rest!
Excellent video, as always. Your love for A/V tech, and research into the topics is second to none! I'm glad that I could help out.
+Applied Science Really cool to see two of my fave content creators collaborate!
+Applied Science thanks Ben, your electron microscope footage added a lot to the video. I think the people who commented that this video wouldn't look out of place on the BBC were doing so because your footage made the whole thing seem a lot more professional.
My Mom was a district manager for AVON in the 80's and at one point the company sent CED players to all of the managers so they could lug them to sales meetings. AVON produced training and other various videos on CED after having used the old filmstrip & cassette player option for years. It was the first in a long line of hilarious mistakes the company made when it came to formats for their training videos. I don't think they finally got round to using VHS until around 1990. You can guess which formats (yes, plural) AVON tried to go with between CED and VHS. Somehow, they always managed to go with the absolute worst option possible.
Also, those CED's (all of them, not just AVON's) were notorious for being knackered right out of the shrinkwrap.
Great vids!
I loved the CED machines, short lived as they were, and was amazed at how smooth the fast-search (jog- shuttle) was even on the “low-spec” machines. I had never heard of the “TED” machines. Thanks for another great presentation!
That clip of the 70s dinosaur documentary scratched out an ancient memory of watching it on a recorded VHS in the 90s, retro dino stuff was the coolest.
Pink Floyd at Pompeii on CED! Very cool. We used to rent these machines and discs at the hardware store in our village. They were pretty much rubbish as the skipping problem made watching a movie very frustrating. Thanks for the memories.
"I've got an idea! Let's make a video disc player that has the same resolution as video tape but can't record, and uses discs so incredibly fragile that people can't be permitted to touch them under any circumstance otherwise the playback will be completely screwed up! We're gonna be rich!" :-)
Excellent video, especially the lessons on how to repair mechanical machines. When in doubt, replace the belts!
Bottom line was RCA could stamp videos on disc rather then real time record videotapes...which at the time was a lot quicker and efficient...if it was perfected.
I was completely unaware of this technology, and I lived through that era. Thank you.
Reminds me of how I lived through the HD-DVD-Blu-Ray format war, yet I'd never heard of HD-DVD until well over a decade after it'd happened. Lol.
I have a huge collection of these CED machines and the discs and i still repair and use them to this day ... They really were awesome for the time .. i also have a lot of 16 MM films as well i watch .. Thank you for sharing this with us .... I really love watching your videos my friend, we have the same interests. :)
Someone should make a 5 part trilogy about the history of these.
@@electrictroy2010 yes, i think that what the commenter was making a joke about.
technology connections did
@@DerMBen ha ha
@@weegie3343 Yes, that is the joke
"five part TRIlogy"
Whilst working in the HiFi industry in the 90s I had a day doing stock take and found one of these machines and some discs. There was a moment of intense interest as I looked at the stylus and wondered. DVD had not long been introduced and had made an immense impact on all who saw it, it's superiority over all that had come before was obvious.
..I spent some time cleaning the machine, a Toshiba I think, and played a disc.
My interest instantly withered and it was stuck back on the shelf.
My favourite phrase of the time, 'You can't polish a turd' applied.
Love your videos, I think I have said before, they are simply the best on planet Earth for this sort of thing, immense kudos for that. Much deserved praise.
Upload that Poltergeist footage on a separate channel, call it a YTP and you'll be golden.
Do it
I was going to comment exactly it. These jumps makes it look like the anscestor of ytp
I WAS THINKING THE SAME THING!!! 😂 (Especially with that Taxi Driver and Rocky movie!)
The mentioning of how the TED works by using a cushion of air to hold it steady reminds me of a piece of old computer tech from the early 80's to early 90's.
It was called a bernoulli drive, and it used air pressure from the rapidly spinning disk to draw the IO head to the disk surface. Thing is, because if the way it worked, a head crash was practically impossible, making it the first successful removable media with built-in crash protection.
Except the floppy of cause, which couldn't crash because it wasn't flying.
Never heard of CED until your fine video. Still RCA did a fine job with the good old RCA connecter, still very relevant after all these years.
I am so happy that I never got "stuck" with this video format. Playing a video with a stylus just does not compute in my head. After watching this, my head computed correctly.
This is the most informative video I've watched so far. I just got my first CED from ebay just to see what it looked like, I'd love to have a small collection and a working player someday.
Aw, strangely nostalgic for me; not because of the CED, but because it’s the first Techmoan video I ever saw haha!
Since then each video has been one of my highlights of the week for over 2 years!
A very merry Christmas to any fellow Techmoan fanatics out there reading this!
Storming episode! You just keep raising your game. Hats off to you
"Community" brought me here. I'm glad you have a video on CED.
You must be incredibly patient. Many people would have smashed the first or second player with a sledge hammer before moving on to the third. Thanks for sharing so much over the years.
I watched a video where he was trying to fix an old radio. The thing clearly wasn't designed with repairs in mind. It was an absolute nightmare to disassemble, and extremely fiddly.
"I'm really starting to get cheesed off with this," he said in his calm, British way. Meanwhile, if it had been me, I would have lost my mind and flung that thing away from me so hard, it would have gone into orbit. People in the International Space Station would look out the window one day and just see this random mass of wires, circuit boards, and tuning dials floating by.
To add insult to injury, he wasn't able to get it fixed and put it back together properly. He went through all that trouble and didn't even accomplish what he was trying to do. I can't help but wonder if behind the scenes, there was any cursing, or taking breaks during the process just to prevent insanity as the frustration increased.
My grandparents CED never skipped like yours. It's been in semi continuous use for over 40 years and still works near flawlessly.
Always amazed by the quality of your videos. Can't imagine how long it took to edit this.
+googleboughtmee the short answer is, way too long. I'm going to have to make a few simpler videos for a while while I regain some sanity.
- We thank you for you insanity!
Another excellent video, I especially love these retro tech and old hi-fi videos!
That Pink Floyd Live At Pompeii disc could actually be worth something. Pink Floyd collectors tend to search for odd little curios like that.
one on ebay costs 250 pounds..
@@TheWeirdAlley wow bro, 250 quid on a potentially busted CED, what a steal
Picked up about 15 of these discs at Goodwill yesterday - everyone in the store was asking me what they were. Thanks for making great informative videos about tech like this!
I knew someone in 1986 that had a CED player. I recall that it seemed old even in 1986. I specifically remember that he had MASH the movie on disk that I watched over and over again. It had a few skips in it which was frustrating.
Wow. Another amazing video. I really like your new style where you appear more on camera. You are a great presenter and do quite a good job at presenting - Keep up the good work Mat!
Love to hear more about the CED games only released in Japan. Cobra Command was one of the arcade laser disc games that was put on CED and worked in conjunction with an MSX computer.The interface of the two units (CED and MSX) allowed for scoring, controls, etc.
"Looks like it's been stored in a pond" is going straight into my lexicon
+Old Machines & Such That was just when I took a sip of my coffee which almost went out via my nose.
I had one of these growing up!!! We were given them by a family friend who didn't want it anymore (it was in the 90s), and included a bunch of free films - a lot of them in the discs you go through! I remember watching Time Bandits and that muppet movie many times! I had a memory of it actually being pretty good quality, better than VHS - except it suffered from skipping issues. Thank you for the video really enjoyed it!
I was secretly waiting for the RCA videodisc to be reviewed :) Thanks.
This device knows how to remix those old movies :D
'I'll never buy a CED player'
/buys three CED players
:D
their hard drives are dreadfully slow
Though in fairness to Hitachi, their trains are *almost* as fast as Alstoms, so they're definitely good at certain things!
Just goes to show how they've shafted the West, as I imagine they're in operation only in their home turf, Japan.
+Amir Pourghoureiyan If you're in the UK, Hitachi trains can be found working on the East Coast Mainline (The LNER "Azuma"), the Great Western Mainline (The "Super Express Train") and on High-Speed One (The SouthEastern "Javelin") :-)
The first two are more or less identical to the 800 series Shinkansen, though with slight modifications to suit UK signalling systems and our smaller loading gauge. :-)
@@ddragon8154 In Japan they're known as the "Baby Shinkansen" and run in more "rural" areas. The 'proper' shinkansen is much faster, longer and wider (even standard class has 5-abreast seating with a wide aisle and acres of legroom), even though it still runs on standard-gauge track (albiet specially-laid, smooth track without sharp corners)
Excellent video, you can tell the amount of work that goes into your videos, thumbs up
Another cracking video of a format I did not know existed... And the quality on The Muppet's looked fantastic.
This has become one of my favorite UA-cam channels-just one fun, interesting video after another.
You sure do put a lot of work into these videos, very entertaining also.
Thanks.
Poltergeist there just looked like a crappy YTP
I was just about to say that myself!
Was just thinking that. lol
But it works! I laughted hardly.
See my thought was it looked like if it was a generic ghost horror movie made today. lol
My thoughts exactly lmao
I remember buying one of these cheap in Tottenham Court Rd when they were clearing them out - came with a Jefferson Starship live concert disc.
I grew up as a kid watching movies on CED and VHS in the 80s before CD and DVD came out. I will say I never saw the movies skip. Dad must have gotten a good player and never had issues back then.
i was born in 1992 and i extremely appreciate all your videos they are done well. In school you learn about "history" but not tech history. Your videos really give an appreciation for how far we have come. Im also a tech geek and audiophile. If your wondering what your doing is important... well it is. how us would a 18 year old know about a vhs/cassette tape and other aged medias. Thanks!
Amazing- thank you so much for uploading this! I had learned of CEDs existence a couple of years ago but never new much about them. And while I'm no expert on any media-related technology, I found your video to be very informative, interesting and entertaining. Subbed; proceeding to watch your entire upload history.
+Kilgore Trout good luck, things get a bit ropey if you go back too far.
Blimey! That whole episode was TV broadcastable as a complete production.
+mooog1 Yep. Ten years ago some channels might air such material. Ten years ago even Discovery Channel had some science in it.
+mooog1 Honestly, if he became a half-hour equivalent of topgear but about electronics and HiFi, I would watch it.
I waited for so long... this review from you!!!!
great video! I remember spending all day trying to win a radio contest giving away a videodic player back when i was 11 years old, the wound still feel fresh. keep the goodness rolling.
My uncle had one of these machines. He owned several discs, but the one I watched most was Star Wars. This was back in the early 80s, and the only way for me to see that film then was to visit my uncle. Loved this release.
That's a really professionally made video. I love weird formats like this.
That skipping Poltergeist disc made me chuckle for some reason, because I just imagined the ghosts are screwing up time and reality every time the video jumps around. "GO INTO THE LI-LI-LI-LI-vrrp vrrp bzzt-NUMBER TWO!"
It was almost like a YTP (UA-cam Poop) in some ways!
@@NathanDavisVideos *some* ? that's how *good* *dank* YTPs are
@@TauGeneration YEAH!!!
I'm really happy you mentioned aspect ratio. It's one of the things I hated about VHS and even television up until the mid-late 90s when it started changing. I grew up on Pan and Scan and only in my teenage years did I realize how it ruined not only the picture quality and what you could see, but the director's/DP's vision as well. Nowadays we have another opposite problem - people zooming in or stretching older 4:3 TV into to 16:9 as 99% of TV was shot in that ratio until the late 90s early 2000s...
Hi, just wanted to say, thanks for all the trouble you go through, just to teach us about a forgotten format.
I can tell you enjoy it, like most of your fans do but it's still a lot of time spent.
For that, and your sense of awe, enjoyment and discovery, thank you :)
Cheers from Canada
Growing up in a small town in Northern Minnesota, USA, we had 1 TV repair shop & he happened to also be an RCA Factory Authorized dealer who rented these machines & the discs & so that was all there was for us as far as being able to rent a video back then! And even then, they skipped & had the little black "streaks" that run across the screen occasionally. They NEVER worked quite right, but it was our only way of renting a movie to watch at home, so we put up with it.
What a cool format! It's sad that the discs have deteriorated.
Damn, I've watched Poltergeist on DVD but considering the film's context it seems quite fitting.
It's as if the TV is possessed, or something. Good Video, very informative.
We had one of these in the early 80's. The disks always skipped even when new.
@@electrictroy2010 nice
Fascinating video. I was one of the people who bought one of these players after it had flopped. I think it came with 20 disks and it cost me a song and my attitude was that I was buying the films at a greatly reduced price. The machine worked perfectly and I was happy to have bought the films. It's all long gone now but seeing you wrestle with three machines simply tells me that I am not missing anything by no longer having my player. It would probably be dead by now anyway. I have a bluray player in any case and and there is no going back.
I visited a friend's house and saw one of the machines and commented that RCA must have been crazy to release something so obviously inferior to Laservision in every way, only to find that the man of the house worked for RCA. Ooops. I will never forget that sullen pout but then it was a barmy release and an appalling waste of R&D funds.
3 machines later....
All in all, your videos are a real joy to watch!
This was a very informative video. Absolutely top notch. I can't wait for the video about the next player going into your home cinema setup.
Man, you really went all out here! Very excellent presentation. Thank you for going through all the trouble to show us this.
Physical media, IMO, will always be necessary to have, as places like Netflix, and hulu really suck when it comes to older movies and TV shows. I have to have all of my movies and TV shows archived on a form of physical media, so that I'll always have them. Netflix has one 10th the stuff it used to have, and that has driven me away from it.
Even if services like Netflix were to never fulfill your needs, you can digitize whatever content you have on physical media and upload it to the cloud. If that's a little impractical with today's tech/prices, eventually transfer speeds and storage space won't be an issue. Neither is copyright, if it's private storage. Then you'd be able to watch your videos anywhere, on any device, share them, and all the other advantages. You may _want_ to keep your physical media, just like people keep vinyls or whatever retro stuff they like, but it's hardly _necessary_ even today. I haven't used physical media beyond the occasional USB drive in years.
Diego C. You are right, but keep in mind if towers, satellites and such go down , will have no cloud, no wifi, no service. Plus I like the nostalgia of the case, booklets, posters, etc that a dvd, vhs, ced, vinyls, tapes and such have. When we have storms and power goes out, we get the batteries out, light candles, turn on our home generator and pop in a dvd, blue ray, or put on a cd, vinyl, or mp3 player and play board games.
Mike's Explorations I agree I have fiber to internet. But the company always want to sell me a combo this means have tv and everything via fiber. Well tv I have via sattelite (I dont want to be on hands of one companys tv services pay a lot of 15-30 channels when sattelite offer me around 1000-2000 channels mostly for free), then there is this that if fiber got cut somewhere then nothing works!
This is also in physicalformat there are no limits. But like we in Sweden have 4 big stream services everyone buy different rights. I mean in sports one broadcast hockey other buy all rights to send football third one buy all rights to formel 1 and golf.
To sport sattelite is so good!
Always some channel or uplink that broadcast it for free.
Same thing in movies and series.
And like said if I miss see a movie in time it get deleted since these streamservices only have it limited time.
Why pay like 50-70$ each month to have movies and music.
You can buy a lot of Blueray, Dvd, CD, Vinyl...for that money and guess what you own them if you some month run out of money no problem I can still listen to that old music since I have it in my self 😂
Even if the power got cut I can still use batteries, solarpanels etc 😂
This is the scary thing with todays technology Swedish goverment wats for example to close down FM transmitters for radio since we already so digital.
But digital radio needs you to have internet since we do not have DAB everywhere.....
4G is really expensive in Sweden and it has datalimits.
In someway I hope there will be a big error with some big internetprovider that closes the whole net for sometime. Lets see then who laughs and says "these streamservices are the future" there would be panic when no tv no radio no movies no sports no newspapers no books no music nothing in entertaitment would work 😆
Ofcouse internet and smartphones fantastic. But me personal do not only relay to that and I do not pay anything for services that is online only. Only online service I pay is my fiber and cellphone.
The argument for wether they’re necessary is arbitrary, however there will always be a demand for physical media albeit however small from subject to subject.
Krunchy The Clown physical media will always be superior in quality. That is why it is necessary
I bought a CED video player in 1983. Later at an apartment I lived in, I had a video store downstairs below the apartment building. There you could rent Beta, VHS, and CED discs. I had a mono BETA recorder. I'd rent CED discs and copy them to BETA. It worked.
The CED discs did skip a bit after a while. That was another reason to copy them to tape, even they we're skipping already. At the time, I didn't know about laser disc.
Video Discs were way ahead of its time. They are like Blu-Ray quality for picture.
Wow, I never knew about those machines, play videos with a stylus, insane!, thank you for the fantastic review and insight in that now ancient tech.
Really fascinating video - I had no idea these things even existed! Many thanks for all your hard work.
This review was spot-on. History of a monumentally failed-format explained. Good job :D
@21:38 In the US we got machines late in the life span that had a 3 or 4 frame... frame buffer for pause so it wasn't just a blank screen.
>Is 't interested in the format
5 minutes later...
> so I purchased a 3rd machine...
Loved the video, I never heard about this format.
Well, once you've committed to something, you have to see it through. And if things get difficult, that's where the stubborn streak comes into play. You can get a lot accomplished by sheer tenacity.
This was as fantastic video! Many thanks for your hard work in making this video!
+Ryan Officer Thanks, this one nearly beat me....but I think we got there in the end.
+Techmoan I know I felt exhausted for you with all the work and expense you put into it. But I'm sure after all was said and done your audience with appreciate the educational value of it (I know I do) even those like myself who have never heard of a CED Video Disc before this video. Cheers!
RCA CED Videodisc: UA-cam jump cut editing before it was cool.
Whoa. Those disks skipping really look like youtube poop. :D
Congrats though. Those videos are a total joy to watch!
I'm in America, and I had the rca set 400 model(or whatever the one you show is lol) when I was a kid. We had the Goonies and a few others. We rented them mostly. The Goonies had a bunch of skips from bumping it while playing. It skipped at the part where sloth eats the ice cream and the candy bar lol. It was too funny
I worked on the non-contact disc called VHD. In 1981, the technology was being transferred from Matsushita, JVC, GE and EMI to VHD in Irvine, California. At the last minute, they decided not to market it in the US, while it was used in Japan for many years in educational applications.
Thank you so much for this video! Never even heard of the CED.
26:06 "What was once seen as high tech is pretty much unwatchable"
Um, beg to differ. CED was never considered to be high tech even when it was new. If anything, it was only barely passable as a technology. The skipping was just something the players could never get past. Even with brand new players playing brand new discs, you could see black dropouts and skips. CED technology was just not that viable.
In the 80s, I was already invested in the Laserdisc format when I worked at Sound Warehouse selling CED players. Believe me, these discs and players were pretty much crap from the go. The only benefit CED had was cost. The players were far less expensive and the movies also cost less than a Laserdisc counterpart (at least in the beginning). Of course, consumers pretty much figured out its junk status when they skipped and skipped and skipped. I can't tell you how many of these CED disks were returned as defective.
Videophiles at the time would not invest in CED due to its inherent flaws: skipping, dropouts and overall VHS-like image quality. Laserdisc, on the other hand, offered a much higher quality video experience and was the format videophiles adopted for a home theater experience. This left CED in a bad sales position. For standard home use, VHS was already a standard and worked for rentals and everyday use. For videophiles, Laserdisc was the technology choice. CED really had no sales demographic to go after.
While RCA may have bet the farm on it, they shouldn't have. Technologically speaking, both the Laserdisc players and Laserdisc technology were light years ahead of CED in quality and functionality. While Laserdiscs could skip if they got too scratched or too dirty, you could at least clean them. You could also get plastic polish and clean off scratches most of the time. With CED, if the disc started skipping, you just had to toss it.
As an early VHS user, there were two things that made it vastly superior to all other formats for me. They are:
1. The ability to record. Purchasing movies in the late 70s, early 80s was not practical for regular folk. They cost over or about $100.00 per title. Its hard to envision, but recording and having your own copy of Spy Who Love from TV was a real treat. And,
2. The video rental stores had vast libraries of VHS- more so even than betamax. VHS was already at the outer limits of my budget, so it was not reasonable to purchase a more expensive machine only to have less titles. Over time, I purchased used copies that the video store would sell, new titles and especially I purchased many titles new but for about $4.99 as consumers went over to dvd. As you can imagine, over time I had quite a library of titles. Several years ago, I moved and my family convinced me not to take the VHS which I mostly trashed.
However, there are titles I miss (i. e. my belived Faulty Towers) and will have to purchase on dvd or blue rae. Also, I bought a combo vhs/dvd player recorder (I found one virtually new at low cost) so I could get the home movies off VHS to dvd which was a real treat at a recent holiday gathering.
The new trend as you noted is to purchase digital only content. Id rather have something physical in case there is a technical snafu. I have friends that need to move etc vast movie and music libraries when they get a new device or when a hard drive dies. I dont see the point.
One last thing is I just bought my first blue rae player but not because I was hungry for a new format (actually the reverse) but rather because it allowed UA-cam on my regular tv. I’m sure Sony will have a new format in a few years, but I’d rather they spend their money on buy first class scripts rather than a flavor of the month new format.
My mother went with VHS so she could record soap operas when she was a work. Mom bought me Star Wars when it first came out in 1982 for Christmas, to this day she has never told me how much she paid. I bought my first tape, a copy of the Spy Who Loved Me on layaway, it took me 6-8 months to pay it off!
Not only the video is quite entertaining following the adventures to get the CED to work, but the comments of the narrator... I had to keep pausing the video and looking up what the references were: "Bob's your uncle"? "The Blipverts"? Haha it did look like the Blipverts after watching a scene on UA-cam 😂 Interesting and entertaining content! Thank you...
In the days before our first VHS VCR, we used to rent one of these for occasional family movie night. The local appliance store rented them and must have had about every disk available in the U.S. It seemed like a the neatest thing ever back then. But then, we got a VCR and never looked back.
Brilliant video, very educational.
So from what I can tell the CED produced a picture slightly sharper than a VHS tape but was effectively the same resolution. And much more prone to contamination and damage than VHS - at least if you have a dodgy old tape you can adjust the tracking on your VCR to try make it watchable - on the CED unless your disc has been unopened since new (like the Muppet movie disc you managed to get off ebay) it will probably be almost unplayable and there's nothing you can do about it.
Next you should try get hold of the RCA tape cartridge player - almost twice as big again as an Elcaset.
5:51 То чувство, когда уже в 86 году появились псевдорусские надписи.
I have a nearly brand new Hitachi CED system here, with about 20 discs. It's a lot of fun to have a retro night and hook it up to the old TUBE TV.
When you said it was left in a shed for 20 years and therefore youre not going to be able to get it running, it made me realize that the channel that made the video about repairing a commodore 64 that had been left outside for 10 years wasnt this one (or 8-bit guy) lol
what are you gonna do with the players?
+cody kamminga I'm going to try and give them away to someone local...it's not really feasible to send them anywhere.
Ok.
+Techmoan give me money
Why not resell the working player for the price they wanted for those working ones?
+FlyingSurprise Because it kept skipping five minutes ahead and wouldn't be worth it