[HN Gopher] VHS, VCDs, and Laserdiscs in Southeast Asia
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VHS, VCDs, and Laserdiscs in Southeast Asia
Author : mikece
Score : 89 points
Date : 2025-07-11 16:02 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (rubenerd.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rubenerd.com)
| Svip wrote:
| What's the usage of the word 'factoid' when its use is clearly to
| just say 'fact'; considering the word 'factoid' actually means
| something that looks like a fact, but is - in fact - false? The
| fact that it should mean 'false fact' but _may_ be used as 'true
| fact', makes the opening of this piece rather confusing.
| thunderbong wrote:
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid
|
| I was only familiar with the second definition -
|
| - a briefly stated and usually trivial fact
| happymellon wrote:
| I was only familiar with the first for a long time, until I
| realised that other people were using it in the same manner
| as literally.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _What 's the usage of the word 'factoid' when its use is
| clearly to just say 'fact'_
|
| What's the use of the word "usage" when its use is clearly to
| just say "use?"
| jnaina wrote:
| Brings back memories of VHS copies of bootleg and other
| questionable content (Pr0n) being sold in certain shops in
| Singapore (if you know where to find them) in 80s.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Were bootlegs popular?
|
| The first time I traveled outside the western part of the world,
| I was (naively or not) surprised by the sheer amount of bootleg
| tapes sold in regular stores. Same with DVD when that time came
| around.
| goosedragons wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they're still popular outside of the western
| world. At least for some things. eBay is filled with bootleg
| DVDs of Anime, TV shows, etc. There is no official Simpsons
| Season 21+ DVDs for example and yet they are not very hard to
| find...
| idontwantthis wrote:
| TFA
| fidotron wrote:
| Bootlegging of everything is a huge business.
|
| Back in the 90s Singapore was such a big market for this that
| it acted as the major driver for motivating globally
| synchronized releases. i.e. for Reader's Digest magazine* in
| the US in 1995 if you did not release it on the same day in
| Singapore it would be easily available in pirated form within
| days, removing any ability to make money in that market for the
| legitimate product.
|
| In UK pubs circa 2000 it was notorious that certain people
| would approach your table to sell you bootleg DVDs, and that if
| you indulged them you'd then get access to their "special"
| selection.
|
| * And yes, that example is totally serious.
| GlassOwAter wrote:
| https://youtube.com/shorts/EodajlNi0k4
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Very popular. Even Seinfeld got caught up in it.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Kicks
| joeblubaugh wrote:
| Bootlegging was massive in Malaysia. Whole floors of some of
| the high-rise malls in Johor Bahru were VCD shops.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Rainbow Centre in Karachi was a highlight of my childhood.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| My friend that lived in Iran said you basically would have a
| guy that goes around and basically opens his trunk and offers
| bootlegs.
|
| Sometimes they'd disappear for a while and you'd have to work
| with your existing collection or find a new guy.
|
| But that was pre ubiquitous-ish high speed internet.
| cgh wrote:
| In Thailand in the '90s, there were street vendors selling
| every dvd and cd you could think of, all bootlegs, complete
| with copied artwork and packaging. It was completely out in the
| open.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| same in Mexico. i remember buying a ton of nu-metal CDs from
| street vendors on vacation as a kid.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Even in the States, there were computer swap meets in my town,
| and VCDs were everywhere in the 90s at them. I remember the
| first time I saw one, and asked where the VCR was, but realized
| it looked _different_ than a VHS would look. I had no idea at
| the time, but I would later go to work for a company that
| started with making interactive CDs, VCDS, and eventually DVDs.
| Not sure the bootleg market had anything to do with it, but I
| was at least knowledgeable about the format when asked in job
| interview. So evidence of one, bootlegging isn 't all bad!
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, some of the best places to get bootlegs even into the
| 2000s were swap meets and other small businesses. It wasn't
| until decently later (and even then) that torrents and
| trackers would have a similar breadth. Everything had the BIG
| releases, but the swap meets had also sorts of strange things
| you'd never heard of.
| CYR1X wrote:
| Copy protection for physical media was so rudimentary back
| then. VHS tapes literally just have a piece of plastic you
| could break off that acted as copy protection. Everyone had
| CRT's so no one was a quality freak either, really.
| criddell wrote:
| > VHS tapes literally just have a piece of plastic you could
| break off
|
| I think that made the tapes read-only.
|
| VHS copy protection was mostly some flavour of Macrovision
| (at least in Canada).
| magnio wrote:
| Funnily enough, the article spent a paragraph explaining the
| initialism and acronym, only to refer to VCD as an acronym later.
| OneFriend2575 wrote:
| Loved this, such a good reminder that for a lot of us in SE Asia,
| VCDs weren't just a format, they were basically the bridge
| between VHS bootlegs and early DVDs. Karaoke, bootlegs, family
| movies... it was all mixed in.
|
| What's interesting is how much the timing of official releases
| shaped all this. If you had to wait months for a cinema run or
| home video, the "street version" was too tempting to pass up.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > the bridge between VHS bootlegs and early DVDs
|
| What about DivX/XviD?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _What about DivX /XviD?_
|
| VCDs had broad hardware support, and were more mainstream.
|
| I used to travel around Southeast Asia a bit, and whenever I
| was in Hong Kong, I'd load up on VCD movies at mainstream
| stores like HMV.
|
| I still have VCD copies of The Incredibles and On Her
| Majesty's Secret Service I bought at HMV.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| VCD were a format that put compressed video and sound onto
| a standard CD. That is where Mp3s sort of come from. The
| VCD actually used MPEG1layer2 for sound, but layer 3 came
| along and computer enthusiasts used that for audio in the
| mid 1990s. SVCDs came out in the later 90s They used the
| MPEG2 like Dvds and were often spread over multiple discs.
| DIVX came from a Microsoft program that had MPEG4 inside of
| the software, this and the wrapper AVI came together for
| the first internet distribution focused format. There was a
| Chinese DVD player and some mainstream ones that supported
| VCD and SVCD and later avis. There was an active scene
| modding certain Phillips DVD players in the early 2000s.
| dylan604 wrote:
| You left out the DIVX pushed by Circuit City with the DRM
| crap limiting the number of plays. I never truly looked
| into the format, but I once heard that the format would
| use IPB long-GOP encoding, but left out the B-frames and
| used in their place the code that made it locking. It's
| demise couldn't come fast enough. I seem to recall it
| needing a phone cable to work as well, but the wiki page
| does not mention that, but does mention something
| implying connectivity "The player's Security Module,
| which had an internal Real-Time Clock, ceased to allow
| DIVX functions after 30 days without a connection to the
| central system."[0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX
| ptaffs wrote:
| DIVX/XVID is ambiguous, it is a video format and
| separately a crappy DRM ecosystem from defunct Circuit
| City. The format DIVX would compress a full length movie
| to about 700MB (a CD capacity), where VCD MPEG-1 only got
| 75-80 minutes. LaserDisc owners were already trying to
| solve the disc-change interruption problem with premium
| two sided players. The format was also better to watch,
| in that the compression artifacts were less obvious. But
| the Rights Holders at the time, like for music, were more
| concerned with piracy, even though everything they did
| would make the consumer experience worse and drive more
| piracy. DIVX the DRM is a great example of an anti-
| consumer consumer format, and environmentally wasteful
| too as the plastic disc became "spent" after 30 days.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Don't forget the discs that had the special coating on
| them so that they would become unplayable after 30 days.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| As I thought I reall should had specified what I meant
| DivX ;) 3.11 and the later derivatives. No restrictions
| and from a some year - even a built-in support in the
| hardware CD/DVD VCRs
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| You can buy a vhs cleaner that accepts some alcohol and then fast
| forwards and rewinds through the tape. The alcohol would soak
| into a sponge bit and wipe the tape.
|
| At least this is my recollection.
| mlinhares wrote:
| Memory unlocked, incredible. I just clearly remembered doing
| this to re-record some stuff.
| dylan604 wrote:
| At the VHS dub house I worked, each of the recorders would be
| taken down once a month to have all of the rollers, head drum,
| and other parts of the tape path that made contact with the
| tape cleaned by hand by the engineering department. In the head
| end where the masters were played, we'd do the same thing on
| the master playback equipment at the beginning of each shift
| and possibly more frequently if the masters were of less
| quality or really old. The 1" machines were easy to clean, but
| the cassette formats were more difficult in having to pull the
| units out of the racks, remove the cover, blah blah.
|
| At least this is my recollection. <shivers/> the really bad ol'
| days
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Memory partially valid.
|
| An important part of using a head cleaning tape was to use play
| mode, not FF or RW. Only play (or record) modes would have the
| tape wrapped around the head while FF/RW would disengage the
| tape completely from the head. This is done to save head wear,
| and to help prevent magnetizing the head.
|
| (Except on examples like this weird, late-model Sony deck I
| have: On it, the tape is always engaged with the head from the
| time it is inserted to the time it is ejected. And the head
| itself is "self-cleaning.")
| esafak wrote:
| It's interesting that LaserDiscs were popular. They were quite
| niche in the West so I imagine they must have been expensive to
| produce. Who even made the machines?
| CharlesW wrote:
| Pioneer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc_player
| esafak wrote:
| Did they make writers?
| ghaff wrote:
| I think they existed for (doubtless very expensive) niche
| professional purposes though formats were probably
| different. But not for consumers. Have a stack of lasdiscs
| in my garage which I sort of hate to just chuck but
| probably will someday.
| elliottcarlson wrote:
| A decade or so ago, we got rid of a huge collection of
| about 350 laserdics - a guy drove from two states over to
| pick them up for his small towns community center where
| they would play movies for the town.
| ghaff wrote:
| One of the frustrations about things like that is that
| you pretty much know _someone_ would want them but I 'm
| pretty much not going to go to the effort of connecting
| with that someone.
| Loughla wrote:
| We call the local public library and ask if they know
| anyone who would be interested in x-x media we are
| getting rid of.
|
| They always panic slightly thinking we're trying to give
| it to them (most libraries are inundated with out of date
| materials people donate), and are happy to give us names
| and numbers of churches and elderly centers who might
| take them.
|
| It's not a ton of work and worth it overall.
| convolvatron wrote:
| I had a Panasonic writer at work for doing vis. there was
| (I think) an rs232 interface, I wrapped it up in library an
| made a network api, so I don't remember. the cool thing was
| from a vis perspective that you could record a single frame
| at a time. we had everything hooked up to a rs232
| controller analog matrix switch that did rs-170. so with
| that an an rs-170 -> svideo encoder you could put a record-
| frame call in your animation loop.
|
| the lab I was working at had an internal cable-tv network
| (which also ran ethernet on some of the channels), so we
| got a channel and hooked that to the output of the switch.
|
| so you could get live visualization outputs from your
| office, or route them to the recorder to store your frames,
| and play them back at a smooth 30fps interleaved whenever
| you wanted.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Criterion Collection. nuff said
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > It's wild to me to think people can simply move overseas and
| interstate now and watch the same intertube programming, but
| that's a different post.
|
| This is still not easy without piracy, at least for liveTV.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Not easy, but not hard either. Same for the physical media. It
| just takes different ways/methods of skirting the same rules.
| xxr wrote:
| I'm a little surprised that one of the supposed advantages of
| Laserdisc over tape is resistance to humidity. Wasn't
| delamination/corrosion (LaserRot) a not-uncommon problem for LD?
| I'm guessing humidity issues (particularly mold) were much more
| pronounced with tape.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > Wasn't delamination/corrosion (LaserRot) a not-uncommon
| problem for LD?
|
| It comes down to the glue (and distribution of said glue) used
| to bond the sides at the pressing plant.
| maxglute wrote:
| One of my neatest Beijing finds was an usually eloquent huckster
| (i.e. not a country bumpkin) leading me through maze of alleys
| and hallways to a VCD shop that repackaged discs into really nice
| matching spines and covers. Kind of like criterion collection /
| Nintendo switch games. Like analogue custom plex art - they had
| service where you can colorize your collection.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I remember burning SVCD (Super Video CD) which were encoded in
| mpeg2 for shows and movies I was recording with my Pinnacle
| aquisition card. That was a bit before DivX then Xvid codec
| became popular enough for any DVD player to support it.
|
| SVCD provided a near indistinguishable quality difference with
| DVDs when using most CRT TVs and had the advantage of being
| supported by any DVD player dinxe the same video and audio
| formats were used. You could burn the movie into 2 CDR if you
| wanted to maximize the quality, 2CDR were still cheaper than 1
| DVDR.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > SVCD provided a near indistinguishable quality difference
| with DVDs when using most CRT TVs
|
| From what I remember, SVCD uses roughly the same MPEG-2 video
| compression as DVD-Video, but with a much lower maximum bit
| rate. Even with a movie split onto two CDs, the bitrate was
| still less than half the bitrate of a professionally mastered
| DVD. I always found the quality of SVCDs to be noticeably poor.
| naravara wrote:
| It's a shame the evolution to DVD and later Blu-ray went with the
| VCD/CD size rather than Laserdisc sized discs. It was the right
| call for the time, that makes them much easier to transport and
| store and allowed the players to double as CD players and let
| game consoles double as blu-ray/HDDVD players. All huge perks to
| encourage adoption.
|
| But now that we are entering a world where physical media is
| largely an enthusiast past-time I think something laserdisc sized
| is much better suited for appealing to geeky collectors as a
| "trophy" or collectible item. It's more pleasing to flip through
| them, the size of the sleeve ends up functioning as a display
| poster. Commentary about "warmth" aside, it's the same reason
| music nerds have revived vinyl, with even half the vinyl market
| consisting of people who don't even own turntables and just
| listen to the music off the included digital download codes that
| come with the records. Plus, the sheer size would mean you can
| encode a LOT onto this hypothetical next-gen laserdisc before
| having to resort to compression and exotic layering tricks to
| increase data density like they do with these 8k Atmos releases
| now.
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