Laserdisc: the Third Wheel to the Format War
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- Опубліковано 8 лют 2025
- I just picked up a LaserDisc player and it's actually super interesting! I decided to make a video going in depth and showing all the cool features!
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This video contains no paid promotion or paid product placement.
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LINKS
Laserdisc Intros Playlist: • Laserdisc Intro Bumpers
Laserdisc Clips Playlist: • Laserdisc Clips
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MUSIC
Chops - chernebeats.com
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Interesting, 4K in 4:3 aspect ratio, This is a true dedication to the legacy formats.
I know it's a weird combo haha
@@SimonVideo it's good because i can watch it on my crt monitor and have it fill the whole screen!
Laserdisc is the granddaddy of CD and DVD. It had chapters, commentary, widescreen, and 5.1 sound long before DVD. You’re right; it used an analog FM signal. So did analog satellite TV.
Oh that's cool. Analog satellite TV seems interesting. Sadly I'd need my own satellite to get into it 😂
But yeah the amount of features are mind blowing
@@SimonVideo You don't need your own satellite, it's really expensive to launch one. You just need your own dish and receiver.
It had 6.1 for a few titles.
Other than chapters and widescreen (which was really "letterboxing" and not true widescreen as we think of it today) The other features you mentioned weren't added to the format until after the introduction of the CD.
@stevebennett9750
Laserdisc was around for 22 years and CD showed up about 5 years after laserdisc.
Also Squeeze LD although rare did exist and IS anamorphic widescreen.
I have over 500 laserdiscs. Started collecting in 1993. Had them all in storage since a move 15 years ago and recently pulled everything out and the players still worked. I had to change the loading belts on the players now they're working perfect. The newer player has 2 side play and an AC-3 surround sound output. Nice video. Pretty accurate.
Wow, that's awesome! Good to hear everything still works. And thank you!
Did you get disc rot? Some plants had poor production standards.
You're lucky that disc rot skipped your collection.
I remember around 1999 the Camelot Music Superstore near me filling the floor with boxes of these clearancing them out, and even though I would never own a player, I couldn't resist buying a few at those prices. I ended up selling them all eventually but borrowed a laserdisc player from a cool local video store owner and I was able to watch them. Nice format with a real vibe of those times.
That's awesome!!
Great video! Many years ago, my high school biology teacher played content on a laser disc player and I remember being amazed at how clear the video was. I also remember the video being paused and being surprised at how clear the image was compared to what we were use to with VHS. I always knew that laser disc media was huge, but it never occurred to me that the content on the disc was analogue. I'd also assumed that the format being a disc, the media on it was digital, but now the large size makes total sense. Thanks again for the work you put into your videos.
That's awesome! Yeah, it still impresses me. Thank you for your comment!
Its a very fascinating format. You summed it up well. And That demonstration of the disk was cool, too.
Thank you!
The reason there’s no CD Text is because that was an addition to the audio CD (Red Book) standard in 1996.
One thing that was part of the CD standard from the beginning were graphics. CDs have the ability to display graphics on TV provided the player has a graphics decoder (Philips CDi players and Sega CD could do this). While they weren't sufficient for video, they were fine for still pictures, text, and running lyrics. Unfortunately, the only place where graphics were used was in karaoke machines to display the lyrics. If it had been fully implemented it could have taken the place of album art and liner notes.
The holy grail of Laserdisk and VHS is the original trilogy. If the disks had extra data like you Footloose that would be pretty cool to see.
So from what I understand how the signal is encoded, the height of the pits encoded the AM modulated sound, while the distance the pits encoded the FM modulated video. There's a threshold that the player knows about that allows it to see how "high" the pits are with the laser.
LaserDisc was around from the late 70's to the late 90's. I wouldn't say it "failed", but rather it was a successful niche format.
This video brought back some fun memories :) My family had a laser disc player between the late 80s and late 90s, most of the movies we bought, we bought on LaserDisc rather than VHS. It was especially worth it for limited edition versions of movies - big multi-disc sets with the movie usually in CAV and then behind-the-scenes featurettes in CLV. Being able to look at scenes closely frame-by-frame was HUGE for movie buffs.
They were also great source material for making silly video compilations by copying short moments to VHS, which my sister & I did a lot as kids lol. It was really easy to properly time things because of the precision you could get with LD.
Oh, and the player couldn't show track information on a CD because the technological standard for that information being encoded onto a Redbook standard disc (called "CD-Text") wasn't invented until VERY late in the CD's life span, around the time of the LaserDisc's death rattle, and even then most record labels didn't use it because Sony (who invented it) charged for use of it, and there wasn't much point in including the ability to access that info on a screen where titles would be cut off due to the resolution of the interface text. (And then by the time more visual interfaces that had plenty of resolution & screen space to show artist & title info were common, most people weren't even listening to physical cds anymore, and it was easy to retrieve that info from a database like Gracenote, so there was no reason to pay Sony for the functionality.)
That's awesome. Yeah, if you were into movies LD was the way to go.
Ha that's awesome. Yeah LDs would be good for that because of the precision.
Oh interesting! I never realized that, but it makes sense. Thanks a lot sony!
This is such a cool and informative video about Laserdiscs. I've always loved Laserdics, but I've never actually owned them... I actually only ever watched 3-4 movies on them back in the 1980's and 1990's... but they've always been super cool.
This video was so great, and had such awesome detail! Thanks for teaching me so much about this cool format!!!
Thank you for watching and for your comment!
I remember watching the D.A.R.E. presentation in 4th grade, in 1998. I'll probably never forget the looks on our faces when Mrs. Edwards rolled the TV cart in, then slid the "world's biggest CD" (that's what I thought it was, with my mouth hanging wide open😉) out of the sleeve and loaded it into the player. From what little I can remember, the picture and sound were crystal clear when compared to the VCR. That was the only time I've ever seen a laserdisc in person.
The first DVD I watched was Ghostbusters at my classmates house on his PlayStation he got for his birthday. 6th grade.
Haha that’s an awesome story!
I love Laserdiscs. I've never had the opportunity to interact with them in real life but I know everything about them and your explanations were all spot on
Thank you!
I happen to be a huge fan of this underrated medium. I found a Panasonic laserdisc player at a local Charity shop here in Australia. It’s NTSC, with an Australian power supply, so I have the best of both worlds. On occasion, I collect discs to play on. And for a three decade old system, it still works well.😊
That's awesome!
4:05: Your disc has a Paramount 75th Anniversary logo on it. Paramount was founded in 1916. 1991 was the 75th Anniversary. This disc is not as old as the movie.
Good catch
In 1991 there was no more laservison, only laserdisk (digital audio). Laservision ended mid eighties. Laservision (analogue audio) was Philips, and Laserdisc (with digital audio) was a relaunch / reboot of the system by Panasonic. In the nineties Philips tried again third time calling it CD Video, making the disc gold, and releasing 12 cm (cd size) hybrid laser/cd discs with an analogue videoclip and some cd tracks on them. Then came dvd and it was all over. I’m old enough to have seen all come to market when it was new.
Such a fascinating bit of history, and a really niche format. I would love to own one of these. Great video! 💿
I know! It's so cool. Thank you!
Correction: VHS videotapes were more expensive AT FIRST. But quickly became a LOT less expensive than LaserDiscs.
ah, the 80s, where every product made in japan used the “shippori gothic” font for anything
Even though harmony remotes are discontinued its amazing they kepts the servers up because these remotes are amazing they have 99.5% of remotes archived ready for use it even allows me to program service remotes sometimes which is amazing if you're fixing stuff
I know! I was surprised too. Half the stuff I have doesn’t have remotes so I use it all the time
Great video! I started collecting last year. My dad was a huge collecor back in the day, so he's got some last release films like X-men. Pretty crazy.Hope you make a couple more videos on LDs. There isn't enough content out there on the format compared to people who discuss VHS.
That’s awesome! That’s a good point!
I LOVE collecting these! I have a disc from back when the format was called DiscoVision.
The sound you hear is the Dolby Digital AC3 5.1 soundtrack added in the mid90s. They couldn't find more room after the PCM CD style digital sound they added in the mid 80s but they were able to fit it into the 2/R analog track.
Speaking of basic, I just got a player from the late 80s that doesn't have digital sound at all, which isn't a big deal until you try to play one of the discs with alternate/AC3 tracks and you're stuck with a mono version of the main soundtrack or none at all.
That's awesome!
Oh okay. That makes sense.
Wow! What brand/model? That's still kind of cool
@@SimonVideo It's a Pioneer CLD-1070. More fun to use the LD-1100 for analog only because it's a top loader from 1981.
Yes. There were educational laserdiscs full of photographs and other still images. The disc came with barcodes that you could scan and it would jump to that specific frame# in pause mode. Pressing play provided a very, very fast slideshow.
Ohhh that's cool!
This was also used for many special edition movie boxes. Could be text comments or production design paintings and such. There was also an auto pause code on discs. So it could be mixed with video and stop on the next image after the directors comment or so. Then just press play to continue to next comment.
The system was even used for games in various ways. Then again, so was VHS. "Just because you can do something doesn't mean.." ;D
I've read that in CAV discs the tracks are concentric circles like on a magnetic disc instead of spirals like on a CD. So in that demo your string would actually just be several nested rings.
I wonder if it would have been possible to record a laserdisc with 24fps (48i ?) and do the pulldown with tricks.
@@rolandpater2245 No. That would've required a framebuffer for at least two frames. Most LD players did not have a framebuffer at all -- they decoded the analog video straight from disc in real time.
There were some players that offered all the CAV trick-play features on CLV discs, which required a framebuffer for one frame, so it would've been halfway there. With twice the memory (no small ask for the time) and some digital switching to scan between the frame buffers on alternate lines (interleaved), then sure... it could've been possible. But it would've been an addendum to the existing format that would've been incompatible with any player that didn't have all the fancy digital video processing.
That's not impossible to imagine, given that the LD format added a few features over the lifespan of the format: IIRC, all discs were CAV at first, and CLV support was added later. I think I remember reading something about a PCAV variant at some point, but I'm not sure I trust that memory. Digital audio tracks were added later, and eventually became so commonplace that the analog tracks were optionally repurposed for commentary and AC-3 discrete digital surround, which made those discs essentially unusable on older analog-only players (unless you only want to hear the commentary.) At the very end, DTS support was added, replacing the digital tracks, leaving only analog audio for players that didn't support it natively and didn't have a digital output to an external decoder.
Laserdisc was an excellent format. One of the major advantages was that due to the picture quality it allowed for letterboxed movies. With VHS the video quality was so low that you couldn't make out what was happening when it was letterboxed, while you could see things clearly on Laserdisc version.
That's funny! I never thought of that
I wouldn't say clearly, but at least a lot clearer than VHS. Remember, we're talking about some 250 lines of resolution vs the 425 lines of resolution (440 with PAL discs in Europe), which is quite close to the resolution of DVD.
A lot of 90 minute movies were CLV on side A and CAV on side 2, so you had all frame features for the last 30 minutes of the movie.
Laservision was the system name inventor Philips gave the system in the seventies (discovision was the name in the usa), and laservision is always analogue audio (both player and disks). Digital audio is when the system got relaunched in early eighties as laserdisc. They tried to relaunch a third time as CD Video using gold discs and multiple sizes early nineties, but then dvd was launched and it was over for this system overnight.
Just subscribed because everytime i was like, ok now I want to see this and that was what ya did seconds later. Haven't seen some of that footage of operation.
Ha that's awesome! Thank you so much!
I still have my Pioneer Elite LD player -- though it hasn't been hooked up in ten years. I also have about 200 discs in the garage (the ones that survived the flooding a few years back) that I'd really like to see on a modern 4K HDTV. To this day, I think standard DVDs of films shot on film look better (and more like the 35 mm they were made to be seen in) than most the recently sanitized, digitally scrubbed Blu-rays and 4Ks, which look like CGI animation rather than photography to me.
LaserDiscs pioneered the use of letterboxing (for showing films in the proper aspect ratio) when VHS films were mostly pan-and-scan. Criterion was originally a LaserDisc company, doing things in the format (see their "reconstructed" version of Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons") that could only be done in LD.
I love laser disc so much, I love the idea of having to flip it over like a vinyl mid way through
It's easy to miss from a today's perspective, but VHS and Laserdisc were *not* positioned to compete against each other, at least not at first, not when they were released. VCRs were primarily marketed as time-shifting devices, precisely to do what you mentioned: record TV broadcasts and watch them at a different time. Laserdiscs (and CED, and VHD, and a couple of even more obscure formats) were a distribution format for movie studios and the like.
But then of course inevitably, commercial releases on videotapes happened. It was a fairly obvious development, but that's not what VCRs were invented for. Neither JVC nor Sony secured any deals with movie studios when releasing their first VHS and Beta machines - they were aiming at the home recording market. There were no launch titles, the "launch title" was the record button. The movie studios capitalized on the VCR boom themselves (or, through companies like Magnetic Video at first, but still, it didn't come from the format inventors).
i love laserdisc. got my one and only ld player in 1994 and still going strong. small collection of 50 live performance music discs only. replaced my first cd only player i bought in 1987. what never made sense to me is the fact that laserdisc,which is analog,can also play digital cds while car cd players can't play dvds as both formats are digital. very strange.
out of all times i see you uploaded its 5am but i need to watch video from 2 hours ago
Dang!
just finished it
prevue channel/tv guide channel used laserdiscs for something i dont know i just know they used it for something
HOLY digital that is so cool to see the inside of the LD player ... never seen that
I still have my Panasonic LX-1000. Top of the line unit back then. I like that I could connect a TOS link for the audio. This unit had much more features than the lower price models. I remember watching the Criterion edition of Blad Runner. It was the only disc I had that allowed me to use virtually all the features the unit had. Great times!
That's cool!
The first LaserDisk I experienced ,was the movie 'Aliens.' My uncle brought his player over to my dad's house, and I was so mesmerized how the disc shined in the light with the different colors . I remember thinking, this is the future.
Edit: I was playing Atari during that time. LaserDisk, was such a massive technological jump. There isn't words for how I felt when I saw how it worked.
Ohhh man that would've been such a cool experience.
I have repaired a lot laser disc players over the years Pioneer made some really nice ones !
An excellent exploration/explanation of a now redundant format. These were never big in the UK because disc prices were astronomical here.
Welcome to the land of Laserdisc, they are great. I am relatively new myself. About 2 years. And in those two years i have about 250 movies and 7 machines. And probably about 8 parts machines lol. I like the machines that automatically switch from A to B when side A gets done it rotates to side B. It is too bad that VHS killed off laserdisc.
Wow!!
I own a Pioneer CLD-1010 which was the first Pioneer model to support CD Video playback. It has two sets of RCA audio outputs and one giant tray where you slot the CD or CDV disc right in the middle of it. I have yet to come across a CD video disc to play.
It had a good run. I owned Laser Disc and loved it. It was much better than VHS, for picture quality and capabilities. Than, as with all electronics, an even better technology came along, DVD. Then came Bluray, etc, etc.
Your machine can do DTS from CDs and LaserDiscs that replaced the CD/PCM tracks with DTS tracks up to 5.1 or 6.1 ES (optical and coaxial SPDF digital plugs are both included in this model) and it also has an RF plug for Dolby Digital AC-3 from those discs (one of the two FM analog tracks was replaced with the compressed Dolby, also up to 5.1 or 6.1 EX) but you need a now-rare receiver to decode the Dolby with another RF plug.
Ohh, so you have it output the raw digital sound and have a separate decoder plugged into that to decode it?
@@SimonVideo For DTS, simple raw coax or optical cords will do, but the Dolby Digital also needs an RF converter at both ends for whatever reasons. It can sound good for its time and does on the AC-3 Dolby Digital ALIEN and ALIENS lasers. Only so many receivers were made for laser AC-3 and none for years id not decades, so you'll have to look up a list of them or maybe find an RF converter devoted to AC-3, as I think some got made.
Good to know! Thank you!
@@nicholassheffo5723 for sure many decoders were made. I have a Yamaha APD-1 attached to my Pioneer DLV-919. It receives the RF output from the player and outputs a coax or optional output. I set my AVR to use TOS input for AC3 and coax for digital from the player (stereo and DTS)
Pioneer also made the more expensive RFD-1. You feed the RF AC3 out to it and the player digital out (coax or TOS link) and it auto detects the AC3 signal and sends it top the output or passes through the digital in (but no passive passthrough so has to be turned on to work)
I don't think just the R analog out will work for AC3. Frequency limitation on the output. I may be wrong though. For sure I'd verify before spending money on a demodulator.
I couldn't make out the model number on the player @SimonVideo has but I didn't see an AC3 RF out. I didn't see digital out either so I don't think DTS is an option on that one either.
@@SimonVideo I couldn't make out the model number on the player but I didn't see an AC3 RF out. I didn't see digital out either so I don't think DTS is an option on that one either.
I've got a project for you that could get you a lot of views on youtube. If you could find a Laserdisc of Smokey and the Bandit (or even a VHS tape) all the newer versions and all the clips on youtube have the newer 5.1 audio, the original sound effects of the Trans Am have been memory holed. I know that seems silly, but the sounds that car made were everything in that movie, the re-dub sounds awful, I can't even watch the movie anymore because it is so distracting. If you made a video with just clips of the car with the original audio it would be a stand up thing to do.
Some laser disc wires could pause on the frame that you pause at
As Alec from Technology Connections pointed: Laserdisc (or Laservision, if you want to be nerdy) wasn't really a part of the format war. People didn't buy VHS or Beta to watch pre-recorded content, they used it to record TV broadcasts, something Laserdisc didn't do. LDs created the concept of Home Video that VHS and Beta did
Still a great format, a good player on a high end consumer crt can still look incredible imho.
Sound is amazing too, even if you just stick to the analog or pcm sound and a good sound system, you can have excellent surround.
I still watch a few movies on ld every week.
There are players that can play both side as there is a special mechanism to allow the laser assembly to travel on top of the disc and the player reverse the rotation of the disc. I had one of those machine but I gave up Laserdisc for DVD and later Blu-ray disc. There is a movie that you could try to find is "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" from the Criterion Collection. The full movie is on 4 discs CAV and you have to program the disc chapters to watch either the 1977 version and the 1980 version. There is also a doccumentary on the last side of the disc.
That's so cool that you can program it differently for different versions!
Not a "better" format overall, in my opinion, because you can only play a disc, you can't record your own. This was really important to people at the time as people were always recording TV programs to watch later. I think that's a big part of why the format failed to catch on. I also am a video professional, and was obsessed with video when LD came out when i was a kid. Our family had a VERY high end VHS deck which even had editing functions and the image quality was nearly as good as a laserdisc. Not nearly enough for even me to want one. Great video and its awesome to see young people exploring these formats
I just wanted to note that the noise on the Austin Powers LaserDisc is specifically the Dolby AC3 digital audio. The stereo digital audio doesn't use the analog tracks at all. Most movies include both stereo analog and stereo digital audio so people with early players can still get stereo sound.
Good to know!
I think I have the next model up from this. Mine has a recessed part in the back where the lazer can turn round and play the other side without needing to flip the disc.
Oh nice!
Although I don't have my Denon player anymore & really don't miss the format, I do have good memories about lining up at our Ken Crane's store for their semiannual LV sales. A laserdisc is an impressive item, not unlike a 12" LP record with glossy artwork, but the media output composite video (combining color & luminosity signals), so it was superior to 1/2" videocassette (better signal to noise ratio) but not as clear as DVD (which separates each primary color & luminosity). Those discs were costly & heavy, too-- a single season of an American TV series probably weighed about 20 pounds, as you could probably tell from the discs in your collection.Thumbs up for your report 😊
Yeah, just one disc weighs roughly 250 gram, so just 4 discs and you have 1 kilogram.
That's awesome! Oh man I never even thought about full TV show releases
CLV/CAV thing is still present in cd/dvds. but mainly in computer drives. the drives automaticly switch between modes depending what its doing, like reading it would be CAV while writing would be CLV (usaly)
CDs were CLV from the start to maintain a constant bitrate. Later they started using CAV for data speed and faster seek times, then some zone formats, like CAV on the inner tracks then CLV or different CLV speeds in zones as you go outward.
I was a supporter of Laserdisc mainly because I'm an anime fan. Laserdisc allowed you to have the original Japanese dialog, the English Dub, and subtitles all on the same disc. In fact, it is possible to get up to four audio tracks on one Laserdisc.
Although laserdisc was a bit more expensive that VHS, for anime fans it was an advantage. As an example, with the anime series "Ranma 1/2" for the same price (about $30) you had the option of either: (1) one subtitled VHS tape with three episodes, or (2) one dubbed VHS tape with two episodes. With many anime the cost of the laserdisc was only a little more expensive than VHS.
That's a good point. Laserdisc was the way to go then
Next time if you do this test, you could make a dot on the side of the disc so that you can better visualize the speed of the disc, but very cool technology! The grand daddy of modern optical discs.
Oh I should have done that! Thanks for the idea. If I feature this again I'll make sure to add that.
Maybe you already know this, but always use a 75 Ohm coaxial cable (RG59) for composite video (same thing as an SPDIF digital audio cable), the signal is RF (several MHz) and 'shoelace' wires cause a lot of ringing in the signal that messes up edges in the image. You can even go as far as making your own using RG59 cable and RCA connectors from a company like _Canare_ (I believe it's pronounced 'canary') which claim to be closer to 'true 75 Ohm' (IOW more like BNC).
interesting but it's crazy to think that it was peak technology 40 years ago while we have 8Tb SSD today...
what will be technology to see movies in another 40 years ?
Unless movies jump to a different medium which requires vastly more data to convey(holograms?), Blu-rays might be our last physical media for movies. There's diminishing returns for increasing resolution at this point, and you could fit a decent quality 8K video on existing Blu-ray discs. At best the video compression codec might change, but I doubt we'd change the actual discs or laser tech unless some new tech comes along that is somehow cheaper to manufacture.
Plus, at this point, besides preservation and ownership reasons, the advent of solid-state storage(SSDs/SD cards) and the Internet means that most people will stream or download their media in the future, making it really hard for any new formats to be profitable. Physical media is already a niche in many countries, and in places they are not niche is usually because of economic reasons where cheap DVDs are more popular than Blu-rays still.
That's true! I'll be interesting to see where we are in 40 years.
@@japzone That's a good point. To be fair, I'm sure people thought we wouldn't do much more than laserdisc at some point and here we are.
@@SimonVideo True, but in a way, the Internet is already the next media format. Rental stores are pretty much dead, RedBox is dead, more and more physical retailers are no longer even carrying DVDs and Blu-rays. We no longer need to individually package and transport media, as media can simply be sent on-demand near instantly over the Internet. Maybe the Internet itself will evolve? I doubt how the Internet works now is how it'll be in another couple decades.
Also, another reason laserdisc wasn't more popular is the need to flip the disc over. Even with CLV, you had to have a minimum of 2 sides for a movie, and movies over 2 hours required a second disc. I have a copy of Terminator 2 with 3 "sides", side B of the second disc is blank. Even if you had a higher end player that could play both sides, you still had a pause while it switched, which takes away from the experience. A single VHS cassette could hold a 2 hour movie.
The big benefit to laserdisc is that it doesn't degrade when you watch it, so if you compare a 40 year old laserdisc to a 40 year old former rental VHS the difference will be night and day lol
A lot of discs have what is known as laser rot. The lamination glue between the two sides will in a lot of cases destroy the aluminium reflective layer. Unrepairable unfortunately and the medium has no fault correction build in. so as soon as rot sets in it’s over, disc will in an early stage of rot show some drop outs until over time the whole image becomes unwatchable.
LaserVision was not supposed to compete with Betamax and VHS, Video2000 was
Yeah, Laserdisc is actually a lot older than all those tape formats. It just didn't really get going much before VHS anyway.
A format that was competing with Laserdisc is CED. It is a disc format like Laserdisc, but it consists of a disc that is read by a stylus. You would insert the entire disc package into the player, pull it out, and the CED disc would remain in the player. I've seen a little of it and I wasn't impressed by it.
The format was not a competitor to VHS OR Betamax.
@@AltCutTV That can't be right. I remember seeing a beta cassette somebody brought to my TV Production class in 1976 by mistake (he should have brought a 3/4" cassette). Wikipedia puts the date of consumer players at 1978.
@@patbarr1351 Yes, but there was a bit of naming and format confusion to it. The Laserdisc started under the original name Discovision which was presented in the late sixties, but as a mainly non recordable format it needed content. So it because of this and the finalisation deals (not really a format war) it took nearly to the late seventies for consumer players to actually release. Then of course it still really didn't take of before Pioneer stepped in and pretty much made it so synonymous with them most probably think it is a Pioneer format. So sure, one could say it started in the mid eighties then even. But then again, all the tape formats had much transformational evolution as well.
I think the PGM Edit functionality was more meant for Karaoke discs or discs containing multiple shorter programs like music videos where skipping and/or playing tracks out of order could make sense.
Oh yeah I could see that.
Or for arcade games like Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, Firefox, etc.... As for prices of discs, I found that laserdiscs cost quite a bit more than tapes back in the day. I paid a LOT for the Criterion Blade Runner disc (and the boxed CAV TRON set).
The LD player might have been released before CD Text was a thing. Also CDs and CD players made by Sony are most likely to have CD Text as they backed the format.
I used to look at laserdisc imports in London in the 90s, sixty quid a pop. Imagine what that's worth now, you'd have to love a film
No kidding
Always wondered what happens if you put a 45 rpm single in there
Imagine a new format with analog but with the track density of a 4k bluray but the size of a laserdisc
I'd love that
Back then i loved the format, happy on Blue ray now, we still need disks.
Have you looked at all into the domesday project and ld-decode for archiving LDs? Real interesting stuff
Yeah! It's actually really interesting and once I got the player I went back to see how much of an investment it would be. I also just watched a video on the domesday project and wow. That's actually crazy and very impressive!
Yeah I never knew anyone who had laser disk in the late 70s or 80s. I remenber seeing small display racks of them at some stores. Rental didn't become a big thing until 1984 (mostly vhs by far). Then large stocked rental stores were everywhere. Our city got a couple of them early that year, plus the much smaller ones that had been around for a year or two. I guess a ton of movies got the green light to be put on vhs and could be rented, so I assume.
Chapter edit, or pgm edit is for sorting tracks on a music CD, for recording onto tape. Thats why it says tape side a and b, and you may specify the lenght or the tape. 46, 60, 90, 74, and 120 minutes.... So the player knows how to sort the audio tracks and lenght of the program.
Ohhhhh that makes sense. Thank you
I never saw a laserdisc player until 1995 at a friend's house on the nice side of town. I always thought they were cool but was niche like a Beta player. I did not ever came across anyone who also owned one of those even in the 80's, but remember movie rental stores having them but in a very small section. I never saw laser disc as a rental, VHS galore lol.
That's awesome!
I came from an average income family so we only had a Akai VHS player. I remember seeing LD quality graphics in electronic shops playing movies such as Top Gun 1986 and even anime (eg Gundam 0083) and was really impressed. I think karaoke also uses tons of LD too.
at one point i saw an LD in a junk shop containing songs intended to be like karaoke. from what i can tell, karaoke LDs were then replaced by karaoke VCDs which i would grow up with, at least from where i am in the philippines
Got a vhs player this week. 100+ tapes ive not watched for 10+ years 😊
Oooh that's awesome!
Hey Simon, can you also talk about the SelectaVision one day? It’s a very interesting machine made by RCA.
Yeah I'd love to take a look into it!
At the time I remember conversation about these and you'd usually hear "but you can't record on them, so what's the point?" Most people wanted to record TV shows. For some reason DVDs didn't have that issue.
When DVD was brand new, VCRs could already do that and some combo players could record from your videotape to DVD. I don't know if you can record straight to DVD.
That makes sense
Yeah, I had a DVD recorder. There were 1 layer and 2 layer recordable DVDs, there were write-once and rewritable DVDs, you could get them from The Warehouse (NZ chain store). It came with a hard disk drive that you could record your programs to if you didn't want to buy blank DVDs.
There were recordable Laserdiscs though.
But, considering the price of them.. Let's just conclude failed CD burns pale in comparison. ;)
Pure nostalgia. Saw 2 Laserdisc players at a thrift store few years back. Panasonics. I would've bought them, but I was decluttering. I think they were $75 in mint condition, but unknown, if functional.
Wow!
@@SimonVideo Yes. The golden era was about 10 years ago, when I saw plenty of devices in good condition on the West Coast as well as shrinkwrap sealed Videodiscs showing up very often in the record section, normally for $6-12 each. Quite reasonable. But now all of that's been absorbed by collectors and it's been years since I've seen either a player or a disc in the wild. Even PS3 library that I still collect, has bottomed out and the prices are now double of what they were at the lowest point and climbing. All retro goes thorough a period where people are dumping and it feels really worthless, and hard to hold onto, but then it's followed by a total inventory drought. I am mostly into 90's hardware, and it went from garbage tier to antique level very quickly. Because no one makes those old things anymore.
With LaserDisc, disc rot and discoloration/delamination are common. They're not being made, and there is no burner option, to fill your own blanks. Sigh.
I really miss the past, when it seemed like these inventions were the future an would last 100 years. That's what the magazines proclaimed.... and I believed them. Silly me.
@@enilenisDisc rot can usually be tied to certain pressing plants. For instance, Sony's DADC pressing plant have become notoriously known for having produced quite a few rotters. Just getting a proper copy of, say, "Bad Boys" is quite a feat. I personally had to go through 5 copies to achieve a non-rotted edition of the movie.
The higher grade players could show still frames on the CLV discs.
What capture card did you use for the Laserdisc? It looks beautiful
I have the composite out going into an Insignia composite to HDMI (but I'm sure pretty much all of them are the same), then it's going into an Elgato HD60 pro
@@SimonVideo do you use OBS to record the footage and how do you de-interlace? I'm considering doing the same
The "cool knob" is the *jog shuttle*.
Laserdiscs are fun. Double-sided players make life easier if using that format. Really nice color reproduction (and -- or course -- way nicer-looking than VHS or Beta tapes). Oh, and they don't suffer from digital compression artifacts in the darker parts of images.
Yeah I wish mine was double sided. Its nice not having the blocky artifacts from digital and stuff!
Cool video :)
Thank you!
Can you play frisbee with it?
I wouldn't be opposed to it
Once or twice, unless you want to watch it again… 😂
For the Laserdisc 'Close Encounters Of The Third Kind' you could program chapters to get different cuts of the movie. This could be considered the predecessor of seamless branching on dvd.
That's cool!
Same for the movie Clue, it has the 3 different endings on the disc and you can program it to watch any cut of the movie you want.
This and Betamax are the only formats I never owned, and I'm kind of relieved. It's fascinating now but I cannot begin to fathom how expensive and cumbersome these must've been to actually buy and use, for an absolutely minimal quality upgrade. It's better than VHS in some regards, but let's face it, DVD was the night and day level upgrade. And fun fact: a 4K disc can spin at up to 5000 RPM. INSANELY fast. That's why they're so loud as well.
The jump in picture quality between VHS and DVD was just insane. Especially with PAL. The difference between laserdisc and DVD wasn't as dramatic, but DVD was better. Firstly it supported anamorphic widescreen, and secondly it stored video as RGB component (technically YPrPb, but that can be output as RGB with a simple transformation matrix). The biggest draw for DVD though was that you could finally watch a complete movie on one side of a disc, without having to keep flipping the discs or changing them halfway through a film.
5000 rpm is insane. Hope that thing never flies out of the player 😂
@@DelinquentSquirrel I do remember those early flipper discs from Warner Bros though in snapper cases 😂
@@rsolsjo True, but that was just studios being cheapskates. I didn't mind on titles like Lethal Weapon 4 where the movie was on side 1 and the extras on side 2, or even the South Park movie which had 4:3 on one side and 16:9 on the other, but having to flip a DVD halfway through the film was ridiculous.
The digital out doesn't work on your particular component because that model of Pioneer player doesn't support a digital output (no toslink or coaxial).
No it works, just on discs with digital sound. It's a little misleading, but it's in reference to the output volume of the digital to analog circuitry.
That player you have is a (somewhat) rare Pioneer "Educational Entertainment" Version of the CLD-S201. Pretty neat, the display is a different color and it supports the barcode scanner.
Oh really! Good to know!
@@SimonVideo I couldn't find the entire manual, but the essentials are here: manuals.lddb.com/LD_Players/Pioneer/CLD/CLD-S201/CLD-S201-EN_Extract_Scan.pdf
Onde eu posso encontrar esse aparelho novo. Existe ainda sim.
A higher quality player will have a digital frame buffer so even in CLV skipping ahead wif look better.
Did you record this off of a VHS camera? Then put it on a LaserDisc? Then record it from the player? Then edit it and upload it?
I had the output of the player going into a composite to HDMI converter (I used the Insignia one but I'm sure they're literally all the same). It outputs 1080p to my capture card on my PC
Always wanted a laser disc player .
Sadly I went with vhs then dove into DVD .
First videos of yours I watched already subscribed great video . Have to ask what are your top 5 movies you have on laser discs and are gonna get any old silent movies or Marx brothers movies .
I mention silent because September 29th is international silent movie day . And next year will be the 5th .
Thank you for subscribing! I've got home alone, karate kid, wizard of oz, and a few other big titles. I'm not a huge movie buff so I'm not really sure what to look for when I'm buying LDs. What about you?
Oh didn't know that!
@@SimonVideoI’m not a laser disc guy but the UA-cam channel oddity archive he’s big fan of the format and has done several videos showing his collection. I tend to collect movies mainly on dvd and blu-ray and have some old vhs tapes . And then I do some albums reviews with my brother on show do called paradise records but also review other things .
❤🔥
5:02 wow, the video is completely lossless and I would assume the audio as well while the VHS will look worn out overtime once it's played enough times.
“A lesser-known analog video format” 😂 You’re making shit up, they were everywhere in the 80s and 90s.
Are you interested in obtaining more laserdisks or even the 10" laser music video disks? I'll let all of mine go really cheap.
VHS came out in late 76; this came out in late 78. So 2 years later; I'm not sure where you got the "a year" thing.
You got CD syncro right but backwards. You que up the tape to where you want to start recording, pause the CD, then when you hit record the CD plays. Also side A and B length are flr the same thing. It allows you to enter the length of the cassette for each side, and the player can arrange the tracks by length so it fits properly on the tape. Just don't do that on a CD with tracks which merge into each other (ahem Pink Floyd ahem).
Oh that’s cool! Thank you!
@SimonVideo You're welcome. I'm 40, and thus old, and grew up with that sort of thing. Never had laserdiscs though. Keep on the lookout for some of the later versions from the early 2000s, they played DVDs and laserdics. The Japanese market back in 1993 released an analogue high definition version using their MUSE system like their BBS satellite broadcast from 1989.
laserdiscs are just simply gigantic CDs or DVDs or Blu-rays (all three are still plastic discs that save things) change my mind
I remember reading it failed because they wouldn't license Porn on laser disk...
"lesser known" to who? Now I feel old.
If it weren't for the fact Laserdiscs were the same size as a LP, the format could have evolved. But the development of Compact Disc-sized DVD's pretty much ended the Laserdisc format.
In certain cases it can be argued to be better than DVD. I've gotten DVD "upgrades" of some shows that I originally had on LD, which were either stuffed too mercilessly onto a single layer, or suffered greatly under the crush of MPEG2 due to the source being challenging (grainy or whatever). DVD is a better format only when it meets its ideal, and that is sometimes not conveniently possible, allowing LD's non-compressed nature to win out by default.
Yeah, I feel like some studios put absolutely no effort into their DVD releases at all. It seems like LDs had a good effort put into their releases.
Me too. The widescreen Empire Strikes Back theatrical cut laserdisc (the one with the heads on the cover) is nicer than the overly-compressed DVD of the same film.
@@SimonVideoEarly releases made use of the same masters used for LaserDisc, which were analog, so DVD would rudely expose the shortcomings of analog video. And since DVD mastering hadn't become much of an art yet at the time, you'd see a lot of compression artifacts as well. Studios were just busy to get SOMETHING outthere to avoid the format becoming dead on arrival due to a lack of available titles.
I'm surprised they never came out with a Digital HD ver
They did in Japan, no surprise there!
@@5roundsrapid263 I don't believe that's accurate. Please show you fact base. I was in the industry form the Intro and through all the production years for LD for that matter the intro of Beta through DVD. LD was an Analog format not digital, and was information capacity limited, so much that most movies were produced on multiple discs. Transitioning to a digital platform would have required an entire re-engineer of the system and render it incompatible, the vendors were already pouring money into the early platforms for the DVD war, LD was dead and would not have been worth the investment. ALSO, keep in mind, all optical platforms were not developed in Japan, they largely came out of the United States and Europe and Asian partners were brought in late in the game to secure adoption, Both CD and DVD in the time frame were developed by Phillips using USA tech and with Sony brought in late in the game to secure addoption with the other Asian heavyweights. Sony and most other Asian manufacturers are good at taking an EXISTING tech and reworking it, but not developing outright.
There was an HD version, but it was still analog.
Called MUSE they were only available in Japan and played at 1080i. Players are extremely rare and go for insane prices as do the discs. LD collecting in general has shot up over the last five years or so and prices have gone up along with the interest. Maybe prices have gone up way more than the interest.
Not sure what video it was, but there was a "murder mystery" LD where you had to program in the case. Yup, you had to put down all those numbers in a list of cases.
I had one of those laserdiscs. It featured Paul Gleeson (the teacher in "The Breakfast Club") and Lea Thompson (Marty's mother in "Back To The Future").
The way it worked was you would watch the movie and at certain points the player would pause. You would then be instructed to select the right channel audio or the left channel audio (each channel would be in mono). The solution would change based on what audio tracks you were listening to.
Oh that's cool!
@@Solitaire001 No WAY! That's so cool!
I also had the murder mystery disk and I recognized a few of the actors in it even then.