This was used in Karaokes in Japan. I have met somebody who used to run a Karaoke Bar. He said they have a giant LaserDisk changer, and people select songs with the barcode.
There was a 14-room karaoke near where I live. Behind the front desk was a wall of ~20 LaserDisc decks. Customers would request songs using a code catalog entered into another device. The boss and a helper are doing things all manually at the front.
When I was in elementary school in the early 90s we had this. I remember the disc would come with a huge book filled with barcodes. We did use it in the classroom setting.
I remember this LaserDisc barcode scanner from school! About 1998, my 5th grade teacher used it for 1 or 2 lessons, I can’t remember what the subject was, I was way too interested in the disc player and the barcode reader. Imagine my delight when the teacher let me use the remote to scan a couple barcodes from the lesson book! So there was me, yelling at the screen when you were trying to scan. Getting the speed right was tricky on longer codes. Both me and teacher had to retry a scan often. Great memory, Thank you!
Many "industrial" LD players had an RS-232 port which would take commands from a computer to select frames, etc. In fact that's how the few laserdisc games like Dragon's Lair worked, it was a video game that would send commands to a laserdisc player to show specific sequences. Then it had a "genlock" circuit if it needed to overlay its own video for stuff like a high score list. Of course not just anyone could make a game like that, because the hard part is getting the actual disc made. The perfect freeze-frame on CAV was because it was intentionally designed to have two 60hz "fields" per rotation, which is one "frame" of interlaced video. Then just like a CD player on pause, the laser tracking mirror would skip back by one track every rotation. Freeze-frame on CLV was done by a frame grabber, which had a lot less picture quality because the necessary amount of RAM for higher resolution was too expensive. And it only happened in the 90s when that much RAM became affordable at all in a consumer product. By the time more frame memory would have become affordable, it was also affordable enough to make a DVD player with, and nobody was buying LD any more. CAV showing frame numbers on the display instead of time was a thing about CAV. Or maybe it was that you could select one or the other display, but CLV had no frame numbers, so you always saw time.
Quite a few arcade games employed LD in varying degrees of implementation too, some ashamedly cheap. As a kid I came across one Ferrari simulation game in an arcade in Butlins (A chain of British holiday camps) which played an authentic driver PoV video on the screen the exact same way each time. The way the game worked is that the more accurate your steering the longer the game continued, but even flipping the wheel to deliberately steer yourself off the road didn't change the video display beyond possibly stepping back a few frames. Basically; The thing was simply a coin box, an LD player, a rear-projection TV, and possibly the cheapest electronics they could find to read the steering wheel input, control the LD player, and burn „Game Over“ into the TVs phospher layer! 🤣
we used the barcode feature in grammar school in the 80's. we had laserdisc encyclopedias with news clips. historic video. technical explanation. Made for fun book reports when you could scan the codes you want to put in the playlist and go.
Holy crap this brings back memories. We used these in the early 1990's in class when I was a kid. I was always pretty calm so my teacher gave me the honor of being the scan person. The school had one of these on an AV cart that was rolled around the school to the classrooms. I don't remember exactly what LaserDiscs we used but I do remember that they were about science. The LaserDiscs has "slides" which were just pictures, and video clips. On the days when we were using it in our classroom she would give me a sheet of paper with the disc number on it, the corresponding barcode pages, and the list of the order she was going to talk about. I sat at the front of the classroom next to the whole setup and would scan, in order, the barcodes when she pointed to me in between talking about the slides or after the video clips. I got to show a few other teachers how to use it, which I though was funny because I was in 2nd grade, and I got to use it in front of my whole grade in the library once. I was pretty proud. This single thing started my obsession with video. I now have my own LaserDisc collection, 300+ VHS tapes, bizarre formats like HD DVD-RW, and a bunch of other video related stuff. Thank you SO MUCH for doing this video. I had forgotten all about this.
We had a reader like this to program the video recorder. The TV-guide had barcodes to tell the device when to start and stop recording. I owned a reader with my MSX. It decoded any barcode but the fun thing was, there was a small BASIC-program to generate barcodes yourself.
I was just wondering if this came before the barcode remotes on VCR's or it was the other way round. To be fair though, they were used for different things
I've honestly never heard of this before! I do remember there was one made for VHS recorders, where the barcode was printed in a TV guide, and you'd scan the code in if you wanted to record the show.
@@SimonVideo Yeah, I can see it being a more practical use of the technology. I can see this being useful for schools Etc. but was this tech before chapter selection screens existed?
That was employed in the UK as the _VideoPlus_ feature, and VCR remotes of the time often had the same tip-type barcode scanner seen here concealed in one of the rear corners of the remote. This meant you had to hold the _remote_ like a pen to scan in the barcode, and IIRC the barcodes were very short lived. VideoPlus also supported the use of five-digit codes for recording shows, and many found punching the number from the TV guide into the remote was a lot easier than awkwardly scanning a barcode with a very cheap design of scanner! 😁
Don't worry, that's not for long. With the modern day streaming codecs optimizing for motion estimation and all that, the freeze frames are almost always a mush worse than it was on VHS already.
The fact that you had no idea about pen-style barcode scanners probably gives a clue about your age. You used to see them all over the place in the early 90s. Then they rapidly disappeared, replaced by handheld 2d scanners (which might have been reasonably new?) I also have a vauge memory of seeing a VCR remote that had one of these barcode scanners on a corner. You could scan a barcode, and it would program the VCR to record a time/channel. The idea was that newspapers would include the barcodes in their TV listings, but I'm not sure they ever did.
Yeah definitely shows my age 😂 I’m not sure when the new 2d scanners came along, but those things are impressively fast and can read at the weirdest angles. I’ve been spoiled by those. Yeah, the TV guide thing is a really good idea. That would make programming a VCR realllly simple.
The Honda HDS scantool tablet still used one in the mid 2000's for reading VINs, before they started coding them int the PCM. Never worked great, even on a brand new car.
What your thinking of was likely an early system that predated the VCR Plus/Video Plus encoding system. A few (Japanese) manufacturers experimented with something similar around the late 80s but it never was mass adopted for inclusion into TV guide listings as the numeric VCR Plus system was cheaper to implement and the codes didn't require special printing or as much space for newspapers TV listings. The barcode programmed VCRs included sheets with channel numbers, dates, length and times for programming but (at least outside of japan) they never got premade codes.
@@Alexlfm I managed to find some panasonic VCR barcodes from an Australian TV week in 1992. You were right, the format isn't VCR Plus. It's a string of numbers (for example "02100322002300", wastefully encoded as ASCII bytes in the ITF format. That one will record channel 2, on the October the 3rd from 10pm to 11pm, and get you "The Late show". Not the American late night talk show (that didn't start until 1993), but an Australian sketch comedy show with the same name. There are so many wasted bits in that encoding, it's painful.
I remember using the barcode reader in school around 1992. We had a book with barcodes that we would use to answer questions and progress on video lessons. It was pretty cutting-edge stuff back then and I remember having a lot of fun with it.
@@wadec7 Was it the one where you have to try to identify the mystery blob that washed up on the beach using the scientific method and it ends up being whale shit?
Memory unlocked. Seeing that page with all the barcodes on it reminds me of the little store next door back in the early 90s they used a similar system to manage their video rentals. You scanned barcodes to do different things as well as scan the ones on the videotape cases.
@@SimonVideo Wish I could have kept it. Not what I'd use it for. I think it was a 386 pc back in the day. The same store upgraded their security cameras and I wish I could have taken their old ones.
I have a chemical plant safety Laserdisk that required a barcode reader for you to choose the scene and "what do you do now?", kinda like playing Space Ace or Dragon's Lair.
Impressive technology! So simple, yet really clever. I liked when we had things like that. When there was no microcontrollers for any job and devices were unique.
We had a book of barcodes that went with a WWII documentary Laserdisc in school still around 2003. The barcodes took you to certain chapters and topics. I thought it was amazing.
Panasonic used that barcode on their remote control or a separate barcode scanner for their video recorders to program the timer and adjust the clock on quite a few machines nvj45-47 and f77
Are you able to feed an unmodified barcode in to your generator and get something that looks to be the same barcode as the original? Does it scan? If so then I'd be willing to bet your problem on the modified codes is a check digit that needs to be updated when you change the content.
I've never come across this feature before, but what you say about some of the barcodes being _long_ suggests an open-ended format like Code-128 that encodes an instruction set. I've never played with LaserDisc (Even if I'm old enough to predate it! 👴) but if the frame count for a CAV disc could exceed 8100, that suggests frame encodings might be 16-bits each. Oh, forgot to mention: The way one uses those scanners will be closely familiar to anybody who worked in any British library in the 1970s-90s, when the _Plessy_ pen-style barcode readers were in use. The tip-type scanner (Simply an LED and a photocell, the tip acts as a light guide) was much cheaper to implement compared to the conventional handheld type, and this is why such scanners were often seen in low cost and large-rollout implementations. The codes you tried making might've been incorrect because it _looks_ like you might've scanned the originals on the assumption they were numeric codes and generated your own on that basis. This is an interesting rabbit-hole for me and data encoding is one of my dark arts, so I might have a look and if I find anything useful I'll edit this to let you all know! 😇👍
I had a teacher that used laser disc for teaching, in about 2005. Its the only reason i know about it. Now that i think about it, maybe he did use a scanner. I never paid close attention.
As far as I know it's the way to tell the reader to start and end the data info.
9 днів тому+1
By the way, we used to have a Panasonic VHS that had this kind of barcode reader. I used to scan those codes in order to record my favourite TV shows. But there was a big problem those days, and nowadays, at least here in Spain: TV Shows never started when they should and many times I found out I couldn't record the whole show. I always had to edit the schedule on our VHS recorder and add some extra time at the end of it 😁😁😁
When I was in hs they used the barcodes with a multi disk laser disc set and computer control interface for a virtual frog dissection .. the binders came with pages with the barcodes for use with the contact reader wand
Well that website you showed would let you get the software by mail , right? Also it would be very cool for you to upload it on Internet archive or something. Thanks
I have a National NV-G20 VCR that has a barcode scanner and a barcode sheet. You scan a few barcodes and can set a timer that way. Sadly the barcode sheet may have gone missing.
Ioved my laser disc player bought it for 5 bucks but then someone offered me crazy money for it and my movies but I still miss it but I got it at the right time everything thing was cheap and the movie s then like 2 yrs later it was crazy money
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
This was used in Karaokes in Japan. I have met somebody who used to run a Karaoke Bar. He said they have a giant LaserDisk changer, and people select songs with the barcode.
That’s awesome
There was a 14-room karaoke near where I live. Behind the front desk was a wall of ~20 LaserDisc decks. Customers would request songs using a code catalog entered into another device.
The boss and a helper are doing things all manually at the front.
When I was in elementary school in the early 90s we had this. I remember the disc would come with a huge book filled with barcodes. We did use it in the classroom setting.
That's awesome
I remember this LaserDisc barcode scanner from school! About 1998, my 5th grade teacher used it for 1 or 2 lessons, I can’t remember what the subject was, I was way too interested in the disc player and the barcode reader. Imagine my delight when the teacher let me use the remote to scan a couple barcodes from the lesson book! So there was me, yelling at the screen when you were trying to scan. Getting the speed right was tricky on longer codes. Both me and teacher had to retry a scan often. Great memory, Thank you!
Yeah it took me a while to figure it out 😂 That's awesome! I wish I could've experienced that!
Many "industrial" LD players had an RS-232 port which would take commands from a computer to select frames, etc. In fact that's how the few laserdisc games like Dragon's Lair worked, it was a video game that would send commands to a laserdisc player to show specific sequences. Then it had a "genlock" circuit if it needed to overlay its own video for stuff like a high score list. Of course not just anyone could make a game like that, because the hard part is getting the actual disc made.
The perfect freeze-frame on CAV was because it was intentionally designed to have two 60hz "fields" per rotation, which is one "frame" of interlaced video. Then just like a CD player on pause, the laser tracking mirror would skip back by one track every rotation. Freeze-frame on CLV was done by a frame grabber, which had a lot less picture quality because the necessary amount of RAM for higher resolution was too expensive. And it only happened in the 90s when that much RAM became affordable at all in a consumer product. By the time more frame memory would have become affordable, it was also affordable enough to make a DVD player with, and nobody was buying LD any more.
CAV showing frame numbers on the display instead of time was a thing about CAV. Or maybe it was that you could select one or the other display, but CLV had no frame numbers, so you always saw time.
Quite a few arcade games employed LD in varying degrees of implementation too, some ashamedly cheap. As a kid I came across one Ferrari simulation game in an arcade in Butlins (A chain of British holiday camps) which played an authentic driver PoV video on the screen the exact same way each time. The way the game worked is that the more accurate your steering the longer the game continued, but even flipping the wheel to deliberately steer yourself off the road didn't change the video display beyond possibly stepping back a few frames.
Basically; The thing was simply a coin box, an LD player, a rear-projection TV, and possibly the cheapest electronics they could find to read the steering wheel input, control the LD player, and burn „Game Over“ into the TVs phospher layer! 🤣
this is something cathode ray dude would make a video on
we used the barcode feature in grammar school in the 80's.
we had laserdisc encyclopedias with news clips. historic video. technical explanation. Made for fun book reports when you could scan the codes you want to put in the playlist and go.
Holy crap this brings back memories. We used these in the early 1990's in class when I was a kid. I was always pretty calm so my teacher gave me the honor of being the scan person. The school had one of these on an AV cart that was rolled around the school to the classrooms. I don't remember exactly what LaserDiscs we used but I do remember that they were about science. The LaserDiscs has "slides" which were just pictures, and video clips. On the days when we were using it in our classroom she would give me a sheet of paper with the disc number on it, the corresponding barcode pages, and the list of the order she was going to talk about. I sat at the front of the classroom next to the whole setup and would scan, in order, the barcodes when she pointed to me in between talking about the slides or after the video clips. I got to show a few other teachers how to use it, which I though was funny because I was in 2nd grade, and I got to use it in front of my whole grade in the library once. I was pretty proud. This single thing started my obsession with video. I now have my own LaserDisc collection, 300+ VHS tapes, bizarre formats like HD DVD-RW, and a bunch of other video related stuff.
Thank you SO MUCH for doing this video. I had forgotten all about this.
We had a reader like this to program the video recorder. The TV-guide had barcodes to tell the device when to start and stop recording. I owned a reader with my MSX. It decoded any barcode but the fun thing was, there was a small BASIC-program to generate barcodes yourself.
That's a really good idea!
I was just wondering if this came before the barcode remotes on VCR's or it was the other way round. To be fair though, they were used for different things
Sadly I can not find the product in a timely manner. The period I used the barcode reader is quite a broad estimate; between '86 and '91.
For vhs 90s was quite common. Or a number string you put in.
I've honestly never heard of this before! I do remember there was one made for VHS recorders, where the barcode was printed in a TV guide, and you'd scan the code in if you wanted to record the show.
Yeah that's a really cool idea
@@SimonVideo Yeah, I can see it being a more practical use of the technology.
I can see this being useful for schools Etc. but was this tech before chapter selection screens existed?
Hi there)
That was employed in the UK as the _VideoPlus_ feature, and VCR remotes of the time often had the same tip-type barcode scanner seen here concealed in one of the rear corners of the remote. This meant you had to hold the _remote_ like a pen to scan in the barcode, and IIRC the barcodes were very short lived. VideoPlus also supported the use of five-digit codes for recording shows, and many found punching the number from the TV guide into the remote was a lot easier than awkwardly scanning a barcode with a very cheap design of scanner! 😁
I'll never forget the first time I paused a LaserDisc. I was so amazed by the crisp and perfect still frame. We take that for granted now a day.
Don't worry, that's not for long. With the modern day streaming codecs optimizing for motion estimation and all that, the freeze frames are almost always a mush worse than it was on VHS already.
Very interesting to see the barcode scanner featuring a small laser which makes it sorta like a laser pen.
The fact that you had no idea about pen-style barcode scanners probably gives a clue about your age. You used to see them all over the place in the early 90s. Then they rapidly disappeared, replaced by handheld 2d scanners (which might have been reasonably new?)
I also have a vauge memory of seeing a VCR remote that had one of these barcode scanners on a corner. You could scan a barcode, and it would program the VCR to record a time/channel. The idea was that newspapers would include the barcodes in their TV listings, but I'm not sure they ever did.
Yeah definitely shows my age 😂 I’m not sure when the new 2d scanners came along, but those things are impressively fast and can read at the weirdest angles. I’ve been spoiled by those.
Yeah, the TV guide thing is a really good idea. That would make programming a VCR realllly simple.
The Honda HDS scantool tablet still used one in the mid 2000's for reading VINs, before they started coding them int the PCM. Never worked great, even on a brand new car.
What your thinking of was likely an early system that predated the VCR Plus/Video Plus encoding system. A few (Japanese) manufacturers experimented with something similar around the late 80s but it never was mass adopted for inclusion into TV guide listings as the numeric VCR Plus system was cheaper to implement and the codes didn't require special printing or as much space for newspapers TV listings. The barcode programmed VCRs included sheets with channel numbers, dates, length and times for programming but (at least outside of japan) they never got premade codes.
@@Alexlfm I managed to find some panasonic VCR barcodes from an Australian TV week in 1992.
You were right, the format isn't VCR Plus. It's a string of numbers (for example "02100322002300", wastefully encoded as ASCII bytes in the ITF format. That one will record channel 2, on the October the 3rd from 10pm to 11pm, and get you "The Late show". Not the American late night talk show (that didn't start until 1993), but an Australian sketch comedy show with the same name.
There are so many wasted bits in that encoding, it's painful.
I remember using the barcode reader in school around 1992. We had a book with barcodes that we would use to answer questions and progress on video lessons. It was pretty cutting-edge stuff back then and I remember having a lot of fun with it.
Same, I remember this from Jr. High School Science in '91-92. The teacher had a binder with the barcodes. I recall using it a total of once.
@@wadec7 Was it the one where you have to try to identify the mystery blob that washed up on the beach using the scientific method and it ends up being whale shit?
Memory unlocked. Seeing that page with all the barcodes on it reminds me of the little store next door back in the early 90s they used a similar system to manage their video rentals. You scanned barcodes to do different things as well as scan the ones on the videotape cases.
Wow.. that's cool!
@@SimonVideo Wish I could have kept it. Not what I'd use it for. I think it was a 386 pc back in the day. The same store upgraded their security cameras and I wish I could have taken their old ones.
I have a chemical plant safety Laserdisk that required a barcode reader for you to choose the scene and "what do you do now?", kinda like playing Space Ace or Dragon's Lair.
I noticed the video's captions are manually placed as well, which is nice attention to detail - great video!
Thank you!
Impressive technology! So simple, yet really clever. I liked when we had things like that. When there was no microcontrollers for any job and devices were unique.
Glad to see more LazerDisc videos!
We had a book of barcodes that went with a WWII documentary Laserdisc in school still around 2003. The barcodes took you to certain chapters and topics. I thought it was amazing.
Panasonic used that barcode on their remote control or a separate barcode scanner for their video recorders to program the timer and adjust the clock on quite a few machines nvj45-47 and f77
Oh interesting!
Their remotes had a barcode scanner in the corner.
@ Yes that's it and a barcode plastic card that we scanned representing hours, mins and channel numbers along with amouunt of days
@ ua-cam.com/video/Qqs3kMW1caA/v-deo.html
Are you able to feed an unmodified barcode in to your generator and get something that looks to be the same barcode as the original? Does it scan? If so then I'd be willing to bet your problem on the modified codes is a check digit that needs to be updated when you change the content.
super neat video, would love to see a follow up on the players that can be controlled via a serial port on a PC
Thank you! I’ll keep my eye out for one of those players
@@SimonVideo totally, they are usually the “professional” laserdisc players with the less pretty exterior and more outputs on the back like BNC, etc.
I wondered how this was used on my LD player.
Thank you
I've never come across this feature before, but what you say about some of the barcodes being _long_ suggests an open-ended format like Code-128 that encodes an instruction set. I've never played with LaserDisc (Even if I'm old enough to predate it! 👴) but if the frame count for a CAV disc could exceed 8100, that suggests frame encodings might be 16-bits each.
Oh, forgot to mention: The way one uses those scanners will be closely familiar to anybody who worked in any British library in the 1970s-90s, when the _Plessy_ pen-style barcode readers were in use. The tip-type scanner (Simply an LED and a photocell, the tip acts as a light guide) was much cheaper to implement compared to the conventional handheld type, and this is why such scanners were often seen in low cost and large-rollout implementations.
The codes you tried making might've been incorrect because it _looks_ like you might've scanned the originals on the assumption they were numeric codes and generated your own on that basis. This is an interesting rabbit-hole for me and data encoding is one of my dark arts, so I might have a look and if I find anything useful I'll edit this to let you all know! 😇👍
Wonder how long until this shows up on technology connections or the eight bit guy.
whoa new retro channel found!
Welcome!
I had a teacher that used laser disc for teaching, in about 2005. Its the only reason i know about it. Now that i think about it, maybe he did use a scanner. I never paid close attention.
@Simon When you create your barcodes, enclose the numbers in asterisks (*). So *2000030020* becomes **2000030020**
That's what I used to do when I had to code them at my first project.
Thank you. Good to know! Why does that matter?
As far as I know it's the way to tell the reader to start and end the data info.
By the way, we used to have a Panasonic VHS that had this kind of barcode reader. I used to scan those codes in order to record my favourite TV shows. But there was a big problem those days, and nowadays, at least here in Spain: TV Shows never started when they should and many times I found out I couldn't record the whole show. I always had to edit the schedule on our VHS recorder and add some extra time at the end of it 😁😁😁
When I was in hs they used the barcodes with a multi disk laser disc set and computer control interface for a virtual frog dissection .. the binders came with pages with the barcodes for use with the contact reader wand
That’s awesome!
It would be really cool for you to actually buy the disc
Yeah I couldn't find many online
Well that website you showed would let you get the software by mail , right? Also it would be very cool for you to upload it on Internet archive or something. Thanks
I have a National NV-G20 VCR that has a barcode scanner and a barcode sheet. You scan a few barcodes and can set a timer that way. Sadly the barcode sheet may have gone missing.
About to make this same comment LOL but sold the player a long time ago.
LaserDisc had so much potential
(something about crd goes here)
Speaking of the old Pioneer logo, does anyone know what that logo is supposed to look like?
To me it looks like a Greek letter omega with a tuning fork inside it.
@8bitwiz_ Ah cool. I can see that. Loved Pioneer back then.
Dude have to do the floppy thing for sure !!!!
woah! might buy this!
I think my school used to use a mac and some kind of space disc that had multiple choice endings .
Wow!
Disappointing it seems to be a diffuse LED/Bulb style output more than a Laser... I was hoping for a laser-controlled-laser 😅
Ioved my laser disc player bought it for 5 bucks but then someone offered me crazy money for it and my movies but I still miss it but I got it at the right time everything thing was cheap and the movie s then like 2 yrs later it was crazy money
Imagine one of those video board games using one of these, like rap rat or what have you
Haven’t you used a barcode reader before?
Only the modern ones that you can hold a foot or more away and scan in a tenth of a second. They can even read 2D codes
I can't be the only person who thought there was a Paperclip sticking out? lol
Welcome to the early 90s.
Simon You Should Do More Radio And Tv Stuff. also can you say hi to me? :)
But why do you have barcodes? Where do they come from? Are they part of the disc package?
Weren’t you paying attention?
hey! you sound like a kid. how old are you?
what… this is like if you scan a product barcode. You pause and stop the video