Subj : Movie formats To : Bob Worm From : Nightfox Date : Tue May 20 2025 14:44:43 Re: Movie formats By: Bob Worm to Dumas Walker on Tue May 20 2025 10:31 pm BW> A friend of mine bought a Laserdisc player in the 90s, it was pretty BW> obscure by then and he was the only person I've ever known to own one. His BW> still works and is in semi-regular use, though, so I'm not sure if it's BW> inherently unreliable. BW> The video is analogue on Laserdisc, though, so I guess that would not cope BW> well with scratches. OK for enthusiasts who put them back in their dust BW> sleeves, not so great for people with kids :) BW> To be honest I think they were just a bit unwieldy compared to VHS and BW> definitely DVD. Plus a lot of them were mastered in constant angular BW> velocity, which only did 30 or 36 minutes per side, so you're into turning BW> over and swapping discs multiple times to watch a film :\ Yeah, my high school had at least one Laserdisc player they used for one of my classes. We'd watched a couple movies with it (in the late 90s), and I remember them flipping it and switching discs. I remember reading that the video was analog, but I've heard it was capable of storing digital audio (maybe encoded as analog tracks?). Also, IMO it wasn't just unwieldy, but the discs were fairly expensive. I remember seeing Laserdiscs at a local store in the early 90s, and many of them were around $60 or $70 per disc, or more. I don't think many people were willing to pay that much for a movie. When DVDs came out, I remember their initial prices being around $20 to $25 for a movie, which was much more reasonable. Now DVD prices have come down. I've heard DVDs still generally outsell newer formats such as blu-ray and 4K blu-ray. I'm a little surprised, but from what I've heard, blu-ray and 4K blu-ray haven't caught on as much as DVD and a lot of people still kept on buying DVDs as they got cheaper and cheaper. Nightfox --- SBBSecho 3.25-Linux * Origin: Digital Distortion: digdist.synchro.net (21:1/137) .