Laserdisc: Features, Follies, & Evolution
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ก.พ. 2018
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While Laserdisc certainly wasn’t the most successful format, it was among the most interesting. This video explores the evolution and features of the format, with a wide variety of sample clips.
Here's a link to the entire playlist on Laserdisc:
• The Story of Laserdisc
All clips used in this video are copyrighted by their respective owners. Their usage in this video falls under Fair Use, as they are used for critical and educational purposes in regards to Laserdisc, the format.
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![TREASURE - 'KING KONG' COMEBACK SPECIAL [THE TREASURE SHOW]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Jx1wyMaQzf0/mqdefault.jpg)
This LD series has been the best explanation I've seen of the format's successes and shortcomings. Excellent work!
Nice to see you here LGR!
LGR and Alec from Technology Connections! Two of my three TH-cam idols! Awesome!
has every popular youtuber commented on technology connections video?
Do you remember the format DivX that came out a little bit after the DVD it was a form where you would go and buy a DivX movie for like $3 and you get it home and you hook the play it and if you wanted to watch it again you have your DivX system hooked up to I guess your phone line and you will pay a fee and they would activate the disc to play it again or permanently I would like you to do a video on that subject
But he dissed wood grain!
I love those old computer animation demos. I think the newness of the medium, combined with the fact that many of the people working in it didn't have a background in traditional animation led them to imagine a lot of weird, fantastical scenes that you don't see anywhere else, before or since. The limitations of the technology probably played a role too; you got characters made of cylinders, spheres, and cones because those shapes were easier to render. Watching them today, they have a kind of funky retro-future vibe that instantly transports me back to my childhood.
The commentary isn't mastered poorly. You're hearing the effects of laser rot, which usually takes out the audio tracks first.
Most of the stuff on those Disney box sets did end up getting ported to their dvd counterparts. Criterion laserdiscs on the other hand, are a treasure trove of content that didn't see the light of day elsewhere as in a lot of cases they weren't able to later license the films for dvd or blu-ray.
Michelle D as soon i heard the little bit of commentary i immediately thought laser rot too
Michelle D How can one combat or prevent laser rot?
Short of keeping your discs in a vacuum, nothing. It's a problem inherent in the manufacturing process of certain discs itself. Plus it's been so long since the discs were manufactured that any that would rot likely already are.
I kind of think that's unlikely. Laser rot tends to eats the digital track first, and I'm pretty sure he'd noticed that.
I heard the Lion King CAV box set still has exclusive extras. ET has more deleted scenes in a collector's set. The 1993 THX transfer of the star wars trilogy did get ported to dvd as the original theatrical versions. But the Definitive Collection extras are still exclusive to that set, even the audio commentaries.
LaserDisc was so advanced, it could make "Fargo", a film released in 1996, look like it was a VHS tape released in 1987!
At some point in the early 1980s, I remember Sears experimenting with interactive electronic catalogs on laserdisc. They had one at their store at Fair Oaks Mall in northern Virginia; I remember playing with it. It was in a back area of the store, the desk where you could make and pick up catalog orders for items not available on the floor. They had some sort of console built around a videodisc player, and you could page through the whole catalog on a TV screen and I think even queue up orders somehow.
At that point, there wasn't a huge advantage over using a paper catalog. But I think about that sometimes when I ponder how completely Sears missed the train on online sales. They *were* the Amazon of the 20th century, really, and they could have conquered the Web if they were on the ball--they even had people who were thinking about that kind of thing all the way back in the 80s, but somehow they didn't.
I must congratulate you on your scope of knowledge about the history of video development. I have learned a lot from your presentations. Our school district bought a LaserDisc player integrated with a Macintosh computer. They bought a program about American Political history. I had access because I was the Mac and Video guy. It was fun to use but I backed off because I saw myself in a new role teaching teachers. I bought a couple of discs, one Jurassic Park that could not freeze frame. I felt this was not going anywhere with DVDs in the wings. Oddly, after I retired, I spent 5 years teaching teachers about computer software and hardware to use with computers. Keep presenting your knowledge
The Laserdisc sounds like a freaking jet engine when it's starting up. Terrifying!
Reminded me of _Ghostbusters_ (1984) when they switched on Ray's proton pack.
I wouldn’t call it terrifying, but it’s certainly loud!
Just like my xbox
Well, you get half a pound of plastic up to *1800 RPM,* it's gonna make some noise. Older players take a while (and make a cool sound) spinning down when they stop playing, too.
Actually it's cool that you noticed this because modern jet engines were birthed from LaserDisc technology. People often neglect to mention this because it's actually pretty obscure how Boeing stumbled upon the potential propulsion power a LaserDisc player could project. Now it should go without saying that they didn't just put a LaserDisc player in a jet and call it good. It utilizes the same tech that reads the LaserDisc to act as a sort of computer to accurately judge the speed of the propeller..So if you did some serious modifications to your LaserDisc player, you could theoretically play an airplane! Before this jet engines used to be tape based
The "Dragon's Lair" arcade game was my first introduction to Laserdisc based games. Dropped many a quarter learning the different scenes in the game until I was able to complete the game on one quarter with no deaths involved.
This video is class but it's striking how much your content has grown in such a short time - class stuff
In middle school science class my teacher pulled out a laserdisc and used the remote to input which frame he wanted to go to. It immediately jumped to that part and we were all amazed that he didn't have to fast forward to it, it just automatically jumped to where he wanted.
General Motors used laserdiscs for dealership training in the late 80s. I have several discs from 1979 / 1980 on my channel. Sadly many of them suffer from LaserRot.
Looking forward to the next segment! I can tell there's a lot of research that went into this!
You and techmoan sooooo need to do a video together. The two best tech TH-cam channels out there. Keep up all the great work.
Paul Eckert you want to see them kiss? TM is a bit of a goof. Sorry but it's the truth.
_"a bit of a goof."_ is that supposed to be not a compliment?
"We're almost done with the saga of Laserdisc." NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!! This must go on for an infinite number of episodes.
Don''t worry, I'm sure he's going to move on to CED soon.
If only all the episodes were put onto laserdisc.
The Disney animated movie box sets are the best thing about LaserDisc. I'm very proud of my Fantasia box set. That also applies to Criterion Collection.
Of course he's a TMBG fan. How could this guy get any more awesome?
You must be talking about some other band. 😉
Wonderfully informative, literate, and even funny! Something I didn't hear mentioned is that laserdiscs were not copy-protected which made it possible to dub them onto videocassette with results that were as good as pro tapes.
This is simply hilarious... a time travel to explore the technology ... great work
Good lord. I have no idea how I stumbled onto this channel, but somehow I ended up watching an hour on laserdisc history. Something about your presentation style is just mesmerizing!
The special edition of Alice in Wonderland contains 2 early completely storyboarded versions with completely different styles that you can step through (takes a good 90 min to go through each). You will probably never see this content otherwise.
Back in the 90s, teachers at my school had a laserdisc player that had an external barcode reader. You could use the reader to scan codes from a textbook and the player would immediately play that part of the disc. Pretty amazing in a time before mainstream computers and apps.
Dude, my middle school art teacher showed us a bunch of those computer animation compilation laserdiscs!
PBS also seemed to have those in the early 1990s. Some sort of history of computer animation compilations I believe. I really need to get my hands on some ..
you can get the Mind's Eye series on VHS and DVD as well.
Just a correction re: your discovision disc with supposed laser rot - that’s not rot! What happened was when a video would only take up an odd amount of sides, Discovision took care of the need for an extra side by using a reject/defective side that was already pressed up. They then coated the disc surface with something to make it totally unreadable. These are referred to as “dead sides” and this practice predates the use of a dedicated video they would often use for these odd sides, like the flippy-turtle that came a few years later.
If you can clean off the coating, you can often uncover some realllly weird stuff. Sometimes early promotional/instructional videos. Sides from a canceled title. Etc. but usually just a bum side from another boring discovision title. Could be interesting, could be a waste of time. But there is a database where people have listed what they did find on “dead sides” of particular discovision titles.
Of course that Star Trek disc is post-discovision, but perhaps it’s early enough that this procedure hadn’t fallen out of favor yet
It's hard to tell from the video, but that mottled pattern _is not_ on the outside surface. It's is definitely on the aluminum layer itself. Perhaps it is a dead side, but there is no way to remove that coating (if that is what it is).
Technology Connections hmmm definitely a bit of a mystery here. I haven’t been collecting for very long but I will say I’ve never seen an instance of rot take on an appearance like that, whereas in this case it looks *exactly* like the coating put on the extra side of discovision discs. I also wouldn’t think 2 sides would rot to such different degrees considering they’re bonded at the same time! Maybe at some point they switched to coating the inside of the disc rather than the outside? Just a thought :)
That is definitely a dead side and not Laser Rot. It was a common practice in the earlier days of LD. Mine looks exactly the same.
For a while Discovision didn't use any dead side (people figured out about cleaning the disks and their industrial clients didn't like that), so the result is the glue spray on the top. It doesn't help that IBM loosened quality control about the same time to get more product out...
Chad Page heh, weird. So on very early examples of early titles there should actually be no coating?
Great episode. Say, have you ever heard of LaserDisc recorders? Yes, they existed in the pro video realm back in the early 90s, mainly used to capture a sequence of computer rendered 3D images for animation frame by frame. Todd Rundgren used one to capture images from NewTek Lightwave running on Commodore Amigas with Video Toasters for one of his music videos. I believe it was a Sony LVR6000. The discs held 24 minutes per side, which was pretty good for the time. It would be fantastic if you were to touch on this subject briefly in a future video.
Two episodes in one day! I am so happy ~
[more mechanical noises, with a pronounced whirring added]
Story of my life.
A fellow caption user i see...
Other people *LIKE* captions the way I do?
(screams loudly out of fear of the unknown)
4:45 I remember seeing some of these in heavy rotation at several different electronics stores since it was a fantastic way of demonstrating their systems.
5:42 I remember that one of the uses for the frame indexing was that you could do a "Choose Your Own Adventure" kind of game. So you'd have something like a mystery and at the end of each clip it would let go to one frame index or another. What you'd end up doing was that you could pick to "Run a Spectrograph Test on The Sample" by going to one frame and it would start the video for or you could just go on to other options. So students would end up writing down what a test results and use what they learned in the morning's lesson to interpret what the result meant then vote on if they wanted to run another test or come to a particular conclusion. I think that in some cases the disc had some way of keeping track of resources by ending the short video clips by stopping you on a unique card with the amount of money/time that you spent with the last action and subsequent actions would stop you on a different (but similar looking) card with more money/time spent. It actually kind of made the premise of tracking down an industrial polluter of the ocean by interpreting lab tests kind of fun.
One of the interesting niches that the format was good at was karaoke. The fact that you could go straight to a particular frame made it fairly quick to get to the song that you wanted. I think that most professional places that had "laser karaoke" in private rooms likely had them in changers.
My drivers education class at my school used a laserdisc program, and that was in 2003. Never knew how technologically advanced they were until this series.
This channel keeps getting better and better.
I was a electronic technician back in 1982 - 2000. I remember Laser rot. Customers complaining that their laser disk player was not working right. I would have them bring the disk that wasn't playing and sure enough, It was laser rot. Customers were happy to know their player was okay. Working for the Government and School district, I had a lot of laser rot issues. To be honest, I had a laser disk player and VHS - S-VHS. I'll leave it at that. Like your videos.
I don't know why but it tickles me so much that you are a fellow TMBG fan.
In 2012, my middle school physics teacher used a laserdisc in class, so it was cool to hear about how it was preferred for education. It made the appearance of LD in class even that recently make some sense!
This LD series, like all the others on the channel, has been great! Thanks for making them.
Man, I am digging your channel. It’s like taking trip in the Way Back Machine! Can you please do a video (or series) on MiniDisc? I was a huge fan of the format and was super sad when it died.
I plan to do a minidisc video. I have a recorder I brought from Japan and a minidisc camcorder.
I love watching these videos and learning cool stuff.
Just discovered this channel, and specifically this series on Laser Disc. Really great work. I'm enjoying it a lot. And learning a lot. I still recall my blood boiling with envy seeing all the rich people in line ahead of me at Suncoast Video, with their arms full of Laser Discs (always inept films like "Beethoven"- the dog movie- or "Sister Act 2" or something...), while I had to suffer with my sad stack of pan-and-scan (ie, butchered) versions of "The Deer Hunter" and "Pulp Fiction" on VHS, lol...Bastards. It would be a few years before the deliverance that was dvd. So Laser Disc has always remained this mysterious, esoteric thing to me...Well done, sir.
This series really brings back memories, and reminds me that my dad was a low-key audiophile back in the 80s. We had a laserdisc player and a 32-inch CRT TV since the earliest memories I have (I may actually have a memory of when the TV arrived, I remember my dad and uncle shuffling it across the floor), and we got a dual-side laserdisc player when I was about 8. I always enjoyed going to the laserdisc store, partly because it was just such a cool place, partly because it almost always meant a new movie to watch when we got home.
My parents actually had 2 or 3 copies of the original Star Wars trilogy on Laserdisc. 4:3 and letterboxed. They have a copy of Mary Poppins on Laserdisc which includes a gallery mode of production images similar to the Pocohontas one shown in this video, and it BLEW MY MIND trying to figure out how it worked.
The image quality is quite something for a good laserdisc though I'm genuinely impressed. Especially when compared with the image quality of the VHS stuff in your other videos. I'm a child of the late eighties/nineties and I can't believe I used to record and watch stuff at that quality and think it was good!
Honestly those rotted LaserDiscs still look better than most of my VHSs.
I'm amazed at the claptrap you offer to explain the demise of the Laserdisc while ignoring the simplest, most compelling reason . . . . . DVD!
Great Job! Very informative, well-researched, and well-structured. There's a somewhat distracting resonance/ring on the narration, probably coming from the acoustics of your green screen studio, around 435ish Hz. In the short term you might consider a very narrow EQ cut there, and if it's realistic cost-wise in the long term, some acoustic treatment in your studio would help even more. Thank you very much for making these videos - I'm really enjoying them.
idk if that animation anthology is the best example of an educational laserdisc. in my very limited experience with such laserdiscs, the biggest advantage was the ability to choose specific frames; you could put all sorts of computer generated charts and diagrams onto a single disc. aside from that was the ability to play short video clips on demand, both of which are amazing features in the days before the internet (I mean I guess you could have that on a cd-rom, but that's hard to show to an entire class). I guess entire presentation videos were also a thing, but I can't imagine that was too popular if a VHS tape could do the same.
I remember in school our laser disc player had a barcode scanner. I thought that was the neatest thing in 1998.
What was the barcode scanner for?
What did the scanner do? I NEED TO KNOW
@@hellelujahh some industrial laserdiscs came with a little sheet with barcodes, scanning a barcode automatically jumps you to a point on the disk, like the chapter search feature but the teacher or whomever doesn't need to fiddle with the chunky remote, just scan a barcode off a little list
It's fascinating watching this method of double-sided laser pickup. I have a CLD-D606, which has this insane roller coaster assembly, where the laser pickup travels to the back of the unit, and the motor on the back of the pickup winds it through a C-shaped track on the back, at which point it hangs from a track on the top of the unit. That's a bad description but the overengineering in these players are insanity! I also had that LaserDisc on computer animation as a kid, it's in my basement now. I have that thing virtually memorized by now.
I'm totally geeking out on this channel! Awesome content, and super articulate and clear detailed delivery! 😃😃😃👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽
Thank you so much for your effort, for looking into formats of the past and teaching cool stuff. Please keep these coming!
Imagine how big a Both Side Play machine would be with a helium-neon laser.
I just recently subscribed to your channel and I love how in-depth you go with whatever you're talking about
Excellent Excellent video . Thanks for producing - I appreciate the editing and pre production effort you put in. I am unfortunately old enough to have gone through these formats AT THE TIME lol and I was pretty geeky so there's not a lot i don't know - but every video from Edison through Trinitron Laervision and LD you pull out new nuggets of info. BRILL . I need you to stop working and make more of these TH-cam videos - so thats why im going to support you on Patreon because this stuff is important. ( and to anyone who thinks that's a geeky throw away - let me just say - like VHS , Airships, Flying Boats Phonographs... These were tiny tiny blips on the timeline of the history of the world and yet the vision and the engineering that went into these projects was immense and epoch changing. Its important that these cul de sacs of technology are documented for humanity .Massive thumbs up to you.
This is the BEST series on Laserdisc. Your channel is amazing and I for one appreciate the time you put into it. Your production values are superb. Off to Patreon I go good sir! Thank you :)
These videos are fascinating.. first remember seeing a laserdisc used for kareoke at a hotel in Majorca in early 90s! Was blown away and could never understand why they weren't huge.
Discovision... a format of Laserdisc I never knew existed until Anders Enger Jensen created a tune about it.
Kind of funny story behind my LaserDisc love... began with anime. I loved how crisp the video was, loved the sweet sounding audio. I entered into the world of LD at it's deathbed. Eventually finding a player on sale though a single sided one... Bought some anime, and marveled at the quality.
Funny thing is my father bringing home a LD movie from Blockbuster thinking he could play it on his LP player. In comes in my Panasonic LD player. After a quick intervention I had my LaserDisc player connected to his TV and audio system.The overall video and audio quality blew his mind. It wasn't until DVD did I get my LaserDisc player back and Blockbuster going bust. But still, bringing in such a technology into the home... priceless.
Also bringing Sirius XM into the home... (XM Radio at the time...) Fun times. I now share my father's love for Frank Sinatra. My old man saw Old Blue Eyes over in Vegas live. Something I would have loved to see.
Five years later and DVDs are still kicking.
You are genuinely one of the best channels i follow, keep making good stuff!
I love your videos. I had a laserdisc way back and I never really (although suspected) what went on inside it. Also your sassy, funny, witty, clear and logical delivery style is amazing. Keep it up, please.
Fantastic presentation, if you I would say you must be a professor, if not you deserve an honorary professorship! thank you
You truly have a talent for explaining subjects :) .
Really interesting stuff. I was around to witness the beginnings of VHS, LaserDisc, CD etc. Quite the journey for sure.
I've been watching each video on the channel one by one, and I'm hooked. I never thought I'd ever care about anything covered on the channel, but I can't stop watching. Your content is incredible.
Absolutely superb video, easily training quality, affable host and just all around great info!
I can't get over how amazing his explanations are. When I saw the string wrapped around the disk I instantly understood what he was talking about and the rest of the concept was easily grasped. I have an informations systems degree but have always struggled a little with the hardware side, I love watching him explain how things work.
I love your videos. You speak clearly and are very in-depth and thorough. Great information!
excellent video! I appreciated the attention to small details and insight into a format that I've never experienced firsthand.
I love my Pioneer LaserDisc player. It plays LaserDisc, LaserActive games, Sega Genesis and Sega CD games all in one :D
It might be a good idea to change all the capacitors some time soon.
Good luck with that (smiles)
Fascinating stuff. We had a laserdisc player when I was a young kid in the 80's, and it was so rarely used that I only have memories of Jaws. You offered great insight in both of these videos, and the information was free of emotional attachment (which is extremely important for educational videos of this nature.) Subscribed. Keep it up!
You and Techmoan are my most watched over the last few weeks. Damn.
5:33 The Criterion Collection still exists, although they make 4K UHD blu-ray discs now.
I remember selling off the laserdisc player with collection of about 30 discs around 1989-ish and buying the first new Commodore CDTV system released at Earls Court computer show in London in 1991. The CDTV was a great bit of kit that was relatively easy to create your own interactive media content for. I ended up generating a lot of video, graphical and data content for the CDTV system and a few titles for its successor the Commodore CD32 which was technically better in some respects but did not have the flexibility of the CDTV machines. The CDTV systems were still used for many years after the newer CD32 machines had been scrapped and were only replaced when hard disc storage became cheap enough to build dedicated machines for POS displays and interactive user operated information systems with internal hard disc content storage instead of a stack of CD discs loaded into the machine by the user. The remaining CDTV systems we had in stock at the time (late 1990's) were mostly sold off for educational use with the last few dozen being fitted inside cabinets and sold off as Karaoke systems to entertainment establishments. - Still have distant memories of the good ol' laser disc players and getting fed up with the limited number of titles available, they were somewhat temperamental but pretty cool tech back in the day.
i love laserdisc since 1994 ! still have 5 players and 300 titles :)
One of my favorite tech channels thank you for what you do.
Great video, I always enjoy watching these, Thanks!!
Love your stuff dude.
You seem so approachable, and remind me of a childhood friend and the things that used to interest me as a kid.
I honestly just wish you could upload more.
quality > quantity
nodrinks why not both?
I wish there would have been more than a passing reference to LD-i, or any mention at all of Pioneer's LaserActive line of players that could play these discs. Other than letting the home gaming side of Laserdisc fall by the wayside, this was an interesting and informative video.
Fantastically researched and presented! Keep up the good work! Happy to be a patron
Very good video, your quality is really improving.
0:40 ---> best use of a Twizzler Pull & Peel ever. (Yes, I know it's actually yarn.)
Heh, I have that CGI laserdisc on my shelf right now. Imagine how long it took to render each frame on something with the computing horsepower of a Dorito, especially those ray traced scenes. Everyone who does 3D rendering should watch those old documentaries -- there were several on TV, but this is the only LD version I remember -- to appreciate how easy they have it these days.
Fun fact: to actually get that imagery *out* of the computer in those early days, you had to lay it out frame by frame to tape. A frame would finish rendering, and a machine-controlled Beta SP deck would wake up, cue up to the right frame on the tape, come out of pause to record the frame, and then go back to waiting. When the next frame was done rendering, the process would repeat. You basically "stamped" it out a frame at a time. The process was murder on tape decks, so there was much rejoicing when things like the Personal Animation Recorder came along on the Amiga that finally made it possible to store frames locally and output a stable video signal.
This has been so fascinating thank you so much.
i am truly amazed how the patterns on the pockets of your shirts align perfectly with the pattern on the shirt
It's interesting, I really already know most of this stuff, but there's something about the way you present it that captivates me and gets me to watch anyway.
Late to the party but great doc/retrospective! I can't even begin to imagine how much work you put in to this series.
wow, so glad I stumbled on to this channel. great quality and content.
I'm so happy I discovered this channel!
Love your Laserdisc series. I myself have been collecting since 1993, and in 2017 started to collect old pressings too.
The “rotted” side of Star Trek that your showed on the disc, is not rot though. The movie is only on side 1, 2 and 3. Side four (the side where the label says side 3 on, since you put the label upwards and the discside being played are on the bottom) the side that is side 4 , is usually an excess pressing of another movie that was used as a “null” side, sometimes they even used a white plastic “side” as the “null” side. Laserrot is (as you could see on side 1) not really visible to the naked eye, but will appear when a disc is played, like you showed it. Later the pressing plants used the “this side is empty, turn disc for programme” text on the screen and usually the flipped over turtle. But keep up what you are doing, love the videos and can’t wait for more. :D
I grew up in the 70s and 80s and we had all the VCRs. Betamax and all that jazz. Lazerdisc was always my fav. There was something about them that seemed magical. I loved watching films on them esp stuff like Star Wars and other sci-fi, fantasy stuff.
My father worked at a video/Hi-fi shop back in the 70's and 80's. They had set up one of those large Advent projector televisions pointing out the storefront window, and had a Laserdisc player hooked up to it.
At night they'd leave it on, with the still-step freeze frame of Jaws eating Quint.
DVD and LaserDisc combo player. Give it up Pioneer!!
Amazing in-depth LD analysis! You're the best, mate! 👏😎💿
Wow. The content is really interesting, and then there are the comments!! There are some really knowledgeable people out there.
In regards to the CG disc, I kind of wonder if you’re feignin ignorance. Pretty obviously that was the height of CG at the time, and that video was simply a showcase.
I was insanely excited when it came out and bought my LD copy right away. It was mind blowing, and IT LOOKED SO GOOD on my 27” TV.
That’s right, I wasn’t a 19” chump, I was a videophile with my 27”. Suck it retroers, I LIVED IT. :D
Hey, it's great to hear that you are able to spend more time on the TH-cam videos now! Hopefully soon you can go TH-cam exclusive and we can get more fantastic video essays from you. Keep up the good work, you have a wonderful channel.
You are very gifted. Thank you for making these videos. Very impressive. God bless.
I believe this is the reason PAL LDs only had one set of soundtracks: As the rotation speed is tied to the framerate, PAL LDs start at 1500 RPM vs 1800-ish for NTSC discs, meanwhile they have to fit an additional 100 scanlines in that space as well as a higher frequency chroma subcarrier.
Oh my goodness! Absolutely brilliant video in the format, can't wait for the next chapter on the Laserdisc Legend. Thumbs up and a Sub from me 😃
Dream Machine was one of the third party tapes my dad used to sell. I always loved my VHS cassette of it!
I think that karaoke is one reason as well why Laser Disks survived for so long. Every karaoke entrepreneur (Yes, there was a whole industry of people who had the players, disks and other stuff needed and got paid to go to bars and play karaoke for people there) had a Laser Disk player (or two or more) and dozens of music records.
12:30 FM modulated huh? ;) love these videos! I’ve watched most of your videos multiple times, they are so entertaining and informative at the same time!
Your videos are excellent. Really informative, yours is the only channel I get notifications for. It does seem crazy that Pioneer couldn't find a more economic way to use 2 lasers instead of that crazy system, but the engineering in that is astounding. Also if it had two lasers and one went bad your system would still function. Makes me want to start looking for one.
Great video as always. I had no idea Laserdisc was an analogue format until now. Thanks for teaching me something :)
Thank you for making such fascinating videos
Ahh man, hearing that disc spin up brings back memories of my LD viewing days. Love it!
DVD had/has ONE major bugbear: REGIONAL ENCODING. This stops titles from being made available in several markets at once.
Regional encoding of DVDs isn't a must, it's optional for those who produce them. There are DVDs with no regional encoding. Many porn DVDs say this clearly on their label that they have no regional encoding. If you record a TV show with your DVD recorder or produce your own video with your own camera, and transfer it on DVD, it'll play just fine everywhere in the world.
The problem lies not with the technology but with the copyright owners, the artists' industry that publishes stuff on video formats. Although it's got nothing to do with their profit, they want to publish stuff in one country and hold it back in another at the same time. Publishers in the USA feel a strong need to give their customers in the USA a privilege over customers abroad, to make their costumers in Europe customers second class behind the customers in the USA. In the process they make their customers in Australia customers 4th class behind those in East Asia. The singtress Anastacia once produced a film and felt the need to publish this film in America and make it unavailabele anywhere else in the world, forever.
To remove this bug isn't a question of technology, but it would require to reeducate artists and their producers.
Rainer67059: Your second paragraph brings up the point I was trying to make. I'm fully aware of discs with no region-encoding, And should that I were to copy a disc(to make a back-up), the region-encoding would not transfer to the copy. If I'm transferring what I've shot and uploaded to TH-cam, onto DVD, there'd be no region-encoding as the software being used does not provide such a feature. However, the movie studios(other than those making pornography) wanted the feature to restrict the marketing of their product to selected countries. With videotape this restriction was imposed by the colour system being used, PAL through Britain, Irish Republic, most of Europe(except for those countries stupid enough to choose the utterly abominable SECAM system), parts of Asia, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, NTSC in the USA, Canada, Mexico and a modified NTSC in Japan and other parts of Asia. In many VHS or Beta VCRs, where a choice of colour system had been provided, it was only ever PAL or NTSC. SECAM was, thankfully, NEVER included.
Most players can bypass region locking just by putting in a code anyway