[HN Gopher] The LaserDisc
___________________________________________________________________
The LaserDisc
Author : rbanffy
Score : 95 points
Date : 2024-05-01 12:19 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abortretry.fail)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abortretry.fail)
| Maximus9000 wrote:
| The photos aren't great at showing the scale. It was like a CD
| but it was as big as a vinyl record. like this:
|
| https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3833/9373539522_a3065346b8.jp...
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| >On the convenience front, the discs were a foot across, about
| half a pound, easily damaged, and had to be flipped half way
| through a film.
|
| there is one picture near the end of the article ("Domesday")
| that does show the scale relative to a standard
| keyboard/monitor.
| detourdog wrote:
| I have never felt older than ready these comments. I started
| working with interactive media exhibits right in between
| laserdiscs and mpeg files.
|
| I loved the tension between the quality of analog devices and
| the convenience of digital.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| Same. When I was born, optical storage did not exist in
| _any_ form. It was vinyl, cassette tapes & floppy disks.
| Lasers were SoTA things that scientists worked with. Not in
| consumers' hands.
|
| Then (besides LD & VHS) came the CD, which has gone a bit
| out of fashion lately.
|
| Then the DVD. Which was popular in its heyday, but also
| over the hill.
|
| Then Blu-Ray. Not to mention a truckload of recordable &
| rewrite formats, DVD-RAM, MO discs & what have you. On the
| computer side, flash & TB hdd's for cheap.
|
| Disclaimer: and I'm not even _that_ old yet! Neither
| retired or owner of a gray beard.
| js2 wrote:
| Behold, the epsilon turn:
|
| https://youtu.be/t34dj8m1UGw?si=qh0JB48bmcpxY26B
|
| The player stops spinning the disc, rotates the laser around
| to the other side, then starts spinning the disc in the
| opposite direction.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Later high end players had lasers on both sides and would
| "auto-flip" for you.
| userbinator wrote:
| Also double-sided. AFAIK there weren't any single-sided LDs,
| which meant the unused side had to be filled with something
| else, like this memorable graphic:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwTDdyZTX48
| itisit wrote:
| The dead side of _A Video Standard_ [0] was white opaque
| plastic. Still a physical side, but not a readable one
| obviously. Closest I've seen to a single-sided disc.
|
| [0] https://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/10498/LD-101/Video-
| Standard-A...
| crtasm wrote:
| I wonder why they didn't stamp the same data on both sides?
| toast0 wrote:
| > It was like a CD but it was as big as a vinyl record
|
| Vinyl records are just black laserdiscs that are audio only :P
| Well, some records are jell-o colored, but you know.
| acuozzo wrote:
| FWIW, over the past ten years I've pieced together the largest
| collection of MCA DiscoVision LDs in the world.
|
| My goal all along has been to digitally preserve it for all.
|
| I have a background which lies at the intersection of embedded
| programming, broadcast engineering, and video restoration, so I
| definitely have the technical chops to do so, but what I lack is
| time since I have three young children at home.
|
| It's somewhat stressful having what would otherwise be a neat
| retirement project hanging over your head in your 30s, but I feel
| fortunate enough to possess so many rare pieces.
|
| I just wish I had someone passionate about it to share it with in
| order to give me drive when my drive is low.
| itisit wrote:
| As a lifelong laserdisc aficionado, I would love to lend a hand
| here if you're in the tristate area!
| bluejekyll wrote:
| I found it funny to see "tristate area" since I used to hear
| it growing up so much.
|
| For reference though, the term actually doesn't refer to
| anywhere specific, there are many tristate areas,
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-state_area
| itisit wrote:
| I should have said " _the_ tri-state area. " :)
| CalRobert wrote:
| Solid, liquid, gas?
| dylan604 wrote:
| It is video related, so plasma could be valid as well
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| As a European, I'm confused and would love to know more
| about _this specific_ area.
| bluejekyll wrote:
| As an American, I'm equally confused. I will say that
| based on my experience, the tristate areas I often see
| referred to are around New York and Philadelphia.
|
| New York: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut.
|
| Philadelphia: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware.
| svieira wrote:
| And if you're from a little-further-south it is
| (naturally) Washington DC's version of the same thing
| (Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia)
| tmm wrote:
| I guess that's true if you're west of DC. Otherwise it's
| Delmarva (DELaware, MARyland, VirginiA).
| bluGill wrote:
| Tristate is used in things like radio where you are
| covering 3 states. "Here is the news/weather in the
| tristate area". They mean specifically the 3 states that
| the radio signal reaches, which is clear to everyone.
| Since they reach 3 states there is no other name that can
| be used for their coverage area. The people in question
| regularly cross state lines.
|
| It isn't a useful concept to bring up when you are not
| physically in a tri-state area.
| epcoa wrote:
| Chicago: Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin
| itisit wrote:
| Much like residents of _the bay area_ [0], I 'm playfully
| suggesting there's only one tri-state area of
| significance [1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
| toast0 wrote:
| California has _three_ regions known as the 'South Bay'.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Bay_(Los_Angeles_Coun
| ty)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Bay_(San_Francisco_Ba
| y_A...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Bay_(San_Diego_County
| )
| vel0city wrote:
| Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana?
|
| Oh, you must be talking about the tri-state area with the
| Tri-State Airport: Kentucy, Ohio, West Virginia.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-State_Airport
| gosub100 wrote:
| Everyone being pedantic would change their tune instantly
| if it were an even money family-feud style bet for the
| top answer.
| acuozzo wrote:
| I'm in Maryland, but I grew up in NY/NJ, so I almost
| accidentally replied saying that I am, haha.
| itisit wrote:
| Bummer! Fun project to have.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Oregon-Washington-California?
| bluedino wrote:
| I remember them being comically large and making fun of the
| loading process. Meanwhile we are just throwing VHS tapes
| across the room to someone else and they plop them into the
| player.
| metadat wrote:
| Yes, but LD was nearly twice the resolution:
|
| _> LaserDisc had several advantages over VHS. It featured a
| far sharper picture with a horizontal resolution of 425
| television lines (TVL) for NTSC and 440 TVL for PAL discs,
| while VHS featured only 240 TVL with NTSC._
|
| Even still, there is no arguing that Laser Discs looked
| comically large and are an awkward dimension compared to VHS
| tapes.
|
| https://encrypted-
| tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQs29ra...
| stavros wrote:
| That's four times the resolution, no?
| metadat wrote:
| I meant twice the vertical resolution :) you're correct.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Analog video resolution is only measured vertically, as
| lines.
|
| Measuring horizontal resolution gets fuzzy (literally),
| though it's not hard to believe that the LaserDisc's
| extra bandwidth gave it more horizontal resolving power
| than VHS.
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| I can't help you for this, but it feels good to have
| passionate/crazy people out there doing what they like. My only
| advice would be to take care of your family first, take your
| time, and have fun. Never be in a stressful situation because
| it's not worth it, you're supposed to live your life after all.
| metadat wrote:
| I hope you create a mega torrent of it all!
|
| Have you considered contacting the Internet Archive? They might
| be keen to assist you in your efforts or in at least stably
| hosting the blobs.
|
| https://archive.org/about/contact.php
|
| In fact, they already have quite the LD compendium:
|
| https://archive.org/details/laserdiscs
| LocalH wrote:
| ld-decode is such a fascinating piece of software
| metadat wrote:
| To save folks the search query:
|
| ld-decode - https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode
|
| Also worth mentioning the fork, vhs-decode -
| https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode which was discussed
| here previously.
|
| _VHS-Decode - Software defined VHS decoder_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942490 - September,
| 2022 (81 comments)
|
| Edit: Thank you @LocalH for the link typo correction.
| LocalH wrote:
| you left an e off the first link, friend, hope you catch
| this before you can't edit :)
| jonhohle wrote:
| You _do_ keep it copacetic!
| detourdog wrote:
| I want to do the same sort of thing. I thinking a high quality
| the laserdisc version of the black & white videos may be as
| good as it gets.
|
| I have a pretty good mpeg encoding workflow from that era. My
| ultimate plan is to create a local media archive for an 8 unit
| apartment building.
|
| I think streaming is pretty inefficient without gaining any
| real selection advantage.
| jonhohle wrote:
| I'm sure you're aware of the Domesday Duplicator[0] and related
| projects.
|
| There's several MegaLD/LDROM2 discs that need preservation that
| I hope I can help with one day.
|
| 0 -
| https://github.com/simoninns/DomesdayDuplicator/wiki/Overvie...
| sumtechguy wrote:
| The use of multiple copies to remove dropouts has been
| interesting there too. Think MAME just added some of the
| games in a couple of months ago that have been thru this
| process. So even if they have a copy your copy could be of
| use.
| pkroll wrote:
| Not just dropout: the disc stacker will set each pixel to
| the median (if there are enough copies) or an average (if
| there are just two) so even slightly off pixels on one disc
| of three, will be caught/fixed. (You can do the same thing
| with VHS, but not with their stacker software. You'll need
| to resort to VapourSynth or Avisynth/Avisynth+.)
| dylan604 wrote:
| how would one get in touch with you regarding this? i worked on
| a site that never took off archiving DJ mix tapes as I had
| several professional cassette players. the main reason it
| didn't take off was from DJs not following through with sending
| me the cassettes. also, nobody wanted to fund the site, and
| nobody wanted to deal with potential copyright crap.
|
| we have similar, but different, backgrounds. i was in
| film/video post house at the transition from film to digital,
| from analog tapes to digital tapes, built a couple of machine
| rooms for different companies, made a career for knowing the
| film-to-video stuff that's no longer taught nor properly
| understood. being able to code is the kicker
| acuozzo wrote:
| Awesome!
|
| I'm pretty flexible. Do you have a communication platform you
| prefer?
| dylan604 wrote:
| my username here at the googly email service works for me
| acuozzo wrote:
| E-mail sent!
| iancmceachern wrote:
| You are awesome!
|
| I already bought my brother his Christmas gift (shhh, don't
| tell him). It's a Braveheart laserdisc signed by Mel Gibson.
|
| I never had one, but some of my fondest memories from childhood
| is me at the video store wondering if I would ever have a
| laserdisc player. Someday.
| reaperman wrote:
| passthepopcorn.me has an 'archive team' with a lot of redundant
| storage available and they also have 'encoding teams' with
| quite a few passionate, motivated people each with decades of
| experience in video restoration. They've got the free time that
| you lack and generally would be quite happy to learn new
| techniques from you and take critical feedback into account.
| behringer wrote:
| There's dozens of us. Check out the laserdisc forever group on
| Facebook.
| acuozzo wrote:
| I'm there. My username here is just [first letter of given
| name] + [surname] and my surname is pretty unique, so if you
| search for it there you'll find posts I've made in the past.
| ghaff wrote:
| I have a Pioneer LaserDisc player and 200-300 discs in my garage.
| Hate to throw them out but also no interest in dealing with
| shipping. I live about an hour west of Boston. If interested
| email me at the address in my profile _after June 1_. Address in
| profile. No charge but ask you to make contribution to an open
| source project of your choosing.
|
| Hopefully not inappropriate but seemed a good forum to rehome.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I put my player and collection out for bulk pickup and labeled
| it as to what it was and that it worked. It was picked up by
| some random stranger before I got back from walking the dogs. I
| really hope they enjoyed it.
| ghaff wrote:
| I've had good luck with furniture and non-functional lawn
| equipment. I'm in a semi-rural location but at the end of a
| long driveway off a fairly busy road.
| detourdog wrote:
| I would email you but I don't see your address. I'm in western
| mass and have some interest.
| ghaff wrote:
| Ah. You have to put in your about box. To keep it fair wait
| for June as I'm out of the country and don't want to shut off
| inquiries for a month because someone said they were
| interested.
| busseio wrote:
| The scene in SLC Punk where Mark (Til Schweiger) is giving a tour
| of his home, the LaserDisc part is one of my favorites.
| asveikau wrote:
| Last year I found a laserdisc player on the sidewalk in San
| Francisco in 100% working condition. I took it in and got a few
| discs at local record stores.
|
| It was the second time I saw a discarded laserdisc player on a
| San Francisco sidewalk. I can't recall when the other time was,
| maybe 2019ish.
|
| Edit: If anyone reading this is in the Bay Area looking for a big
| laserdisc haul, the owner of the Video Room in Oakland is
| retiring and has a large inventory that you would need to contact
| him privately for. I spoke to him once. He said he opened the
| store in the early 80s as a LaserDisc rental place, and he has
| thousands of discs in his garage.
| duxup wrote:
| I remember as a kid seeing a neighbor showing off his LaserDisc
| and at the time thinking "This is really cool, but we just got
| rid of records.... surely this can be done better and soon."
|
| Soon wasn't very soon, but it was certainly one of those very
| capable, very cool, and yet tangibly not exactly what it could be
| type of technologies.
|
| It's interesting how sometimes there's tech that absolutely is
| very cool and yet seems to just not quite be there just yet.
| voxadam wrote:
| Technology Connections has a decent five video series on the
| history of LaserDisc. It's some of his earlier work so the
| production quality isn't quite where his newer videos are today
| but it's still worth a watch.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFUoByWSHHoS...
|
| He also has a newer series on the far more obsucre CED
| (Capacitance Electronic Disc) from RCA that's really interesting.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVP0SGNlBiB...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc
| ljf wrote:
| Back in about 2008 I found a huge load of UK CED discs for
| sale, plus about 10 different players. As someone who'd been
| fascinated by vcd, I was interested in this other appendix
| media - sadly I didn't buy it all, but for the best, looked
| like a massive lot!
| ljf wrote:
| Actually man would have been 2004 - it was this site that I
| lost days to - https://www.cedmagic.com/selectavision.html
| Tokkemon wrote:
| I love Alec's work on the CED. So good and really nicely
| narrative-driven, which is kinda rare in this "let's review old
| technology" genre.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| The article glosses over LaserDisc's use in arcades and
| videogames. It probably would've been worth mentioning its use in
| the popular arcade game, Dragon's Lair:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Lair_(1983_video_ga...
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I think half my paper route money went to that game... that and
| Gauntlet (Wizard needs food badly).
| dylan604 wrote:
| Gauntlet was the first simultaneous multi-player game I
| remember. The first time playing it with 3 other friends was
| "one of those things" growing up that I'll never forget.
| Something different about it with all four people crowding
| around the same screen vs playing with many more people
| isolated at home across a network
| CharlesW wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:LaserDisc_video_games
| rikthevik wrote:
| I still feel burned about how I put a hard-earned loonie into a
| Dragon's Lair machine and immediately died. At least at Street
| Fighter I got a few rounds in.
|
| Dragon's Lair was beautifully animated, innovative, and
| absolutely not for me. I'm not sure if it's a game, to be
| honest. :) It's fun to look back at old tech, seeing the ideas
| that didn't quite land.
| metadat wrote:
| Interesting vocabulary alert:
|
| indefatigable; _adj._
|
| _incapable of being fatigued : UNTIRING_
|
| --
|
| What a fun word, though I had to check the pronunciation
| (available via a button @ https://www.merriam-
| webster.com/dictionary/indefatigable).
|
| p.s. David Paul Gregg was a real hacker, what an impressive
| story. I like how he stuck to his guns and accepted termination
| rather than give up the patent to his employers, first Westrex
| and then again at 3M/Mincom.
| grose wrote:
| There's a small, CD sized version of the LaserDisc called CD
| Video (also a related format called Video Single Disc). I've
| always wondered whether it would be possible to use CD-Rs to make
| one. Could CD burners somehow be coaxed to write the analog data
| for the video? It can only fit 5 minutes of video but I think
| vaporwave artists would love it, and it could keep the format
| 'alive' with the first new content in decades.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Video
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Single_Disc
| bonton89 wrote:
| Way back in the early 2000s before DVD burners were cheap my
| buddy downloaded what appeared to be a handicam rip of the
| Fellowship Of The Ring off limewire (or kazaa or whatever was
| popular at the time) and burned it on 7-8 or 8 CD-Rs which we
| could watch on his DVD player in the living room. The quality
| was poor but watchable, but I think this had more to do with
| the clandestine source than the medium. He had above average
| computer literacy but probably just used a common program in a
| way I've never used before to do this. DVD burners became
| cheaper later and I never saw or thought much about this stunt
| again.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Video CDs employ MPEG encoding. Resolution is 320x240, IIRC,
| and bandwidth is the same as an audio CD.
| Symbiote wrote:
| That would be a Video CD, which has MPEG data lille a DVD,
| but lower capacity.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_CD
| shagie wrote:
| My family had a laser disk... while we had some of the standards
| (Star Wars) there was one that we had that took the media to an
| interesting place. I want to say it was "Kids Disk" but I could
| be wrong.
|
| It had _many_ chapters that you could jump to with different
| things. Some of them were things like "learn to dance the Irish
| Jig". That chapter had music in one channel and instructions in
| another - so you could turn one of them off and get just the
| music, or music and instructions, or just instructions.
|
| Another chapter was jokes (and another was puzzles) where you
| could step frame by frame (it used constant angular tracking if I
| recall right) and fit dozens of them in a few seconds of time.
|
| It was one of the "I wish they did more with that format."
|
| The Star Wars one I later used in a computer graphics project in
| college with another guy in the lab. We were able to get the
| frame by frame video capture of the Death Star blowing up and
| then use that to map to a user controlled rotating cube. The key
| thing was getting a frame by frame image capture since we didn't
| have the compute to be able to capture a live stream and capture
| off of VHS would have resulted in inconsistent durations for each
| frame.
|
| Anyways... some memories of laser disks.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Previously/Related:
|
| The Person Saving The Media You Love Is You
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40177657
|
| https://aftermath.site/the-person-saving-the-media-you-love-...
| riffic wrote:
| there's probably room for another analog format to return but
| with updated manufacturing process and todays materials.
| fendmark wrote:
| I started collecting Laserdiscs a few years ago after having
| grown up with them as a kid in the 90s (we only rented them,
| because new laserdiscs were expensive!) - With the inflated cost
| of used Vinyl these days, it's been fun collecting Laserdiscs of
| my favorite movies for their artwork and form factor to display
| alongside my record collection at a fraction of the cost of
| Vinyl. Also it's a weird hobby that I find hilarious to tell
| people and see their reaction. Most people don't even know or
| remember what a laserdisc is/was. Anyone else love Seinfeld's
| Laserdisc joke on the last episode of Curb? Who says Laserdiscs
| aren't cool?
| MisterTea wrote:
| > we only rented them,
|
| I dont remember many, if any mom&pop video stores carrying
| them. Was it Blockbuster?
|
| And I had a friend with a small LD collection and Pioneer
| player who shit-canned the whole thing when he moved few years
| back. I told him why didn't he ask if anyone wanted them and
| his response was it was worthless junk...
| fendmark wrote:
| There were a number of smaller rental shops in the Chicago
| area that carried them. Family Video comes to mind. I don't
| believe the Blockbusters by us ever had them.
|
| I still have my laserdisc player, they are becoming a harder
| to find item for reasonable prices for sure.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Not long ago, maybe 5-6 years, a friend moved and in the
| process canned his small LD collection including a working
| Pioneer player. He said it wasn't worth keeping them and
| didn't think anyone would want them :-( I forget all the
| titles he had but they included GoldenEye and Terminator 2.
| electrosphere wrote:
| I have a similar relationship to MiniDisc. I will never sell my
| collection and I still use it now and again when the urge strikes
| me.
|
| I remember in the mid-1990s a friends brother was a big film
| buff, he showed us RoboCop on LaserDisc - the original directors
| cut. I remember being very shocked at the scene of Clarence
| Boddicker and his cronies shooting up Officer Murphy. But on the
| upside, I do remember being impressed with the sharp picture and
| Dolby Surround mix compared to VHS tapes.
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's a shame MD Data was too little too late.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| And just such a pointless distinction - why not allow regular
| audio MDs to also store arbitrary data, and then push the
| format as a competitor to Zip disks?
| dstrand wrote:
| I love my minidisc player. My first real reason to own an
| optical cable - 12 year old me was very cool.
| mattl wrote:
| I always remember the back alley scenes in Back to the Future
| part 2 where you can see stacks of them in the trash.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/rWkJRSa
| mikepavone wrote:
| I find LaserDisc to be a fascinating format. The base format is
| analog, but the surface of the disc only has two possible states:
| a pit or a land, just like CDs. To make this work, the various
| analog signals (composite video, left analog audio and right
| analog audio) are frequency modulated with different carriers.
| This moves all the information into the frequency domain so the
| amplitude is no longer significant. The combined RF signal is
| then used to determine which areas should be a pit or land based
| on whether the signal is above or below zero.
|
| The way digital audio was added is also interesting. It's based
| on audio CD technology which is a purely digital format using EFM
| (eight to fourteen modulation) to encode bits on the disc as pits
| and lands in a way that can be reliably recovered (direct
| encoding is problematic because you need a sufficient number of
| level transitions in order to do clock recovery and probably for
| some other reasons I"m not aware of). It turns out that there is
| a bit of unused RF spectrum below the lowest carrier of the
| analog signals. On NTSC discs this gap is almost big enough to
| fit CDDA EFM when viewed as an analog signal, so they basically
| just reduced the sample/data rate slightly to make it fit and
| then mix in the EFM to the analog RF as if it were another analog
| FM signal. On PAL discs, the gap was too small so one of the
| analog audio channels is sacrificed to make room.
| FiddlerClamp wrote:
| I'm surprised there's only a single mention of RCA's Select-A-
| Vision. Basically a video record encased in a hard plastic sleeve
| that used a needle to read the analog data.
|
| Clever concept, but doomed to failure by digital formats.
| pmlexa wrote:
| Ahhh, I miss the early 90's and these being in classrooms....
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