i'm sure it's a stupid question, but i've always wondered why are they listed as DiscoVision
and not as NTSC here on LDDB?

Something I've always wondered about too. Perhaps something to make them stand out in search results?

It was a question I asked myself too a the beginning. It's a kind of an historical twist: the first releases were announced in the "DiscoVision format" even though they where NTSC analog LDs all along. They represented a first phase in the LD history, before Pioneer took over as a supplier and then as a brand owner.

They're technically NTSC LDs, and in a way historically DiscoVision.

Note that the detailed display will show both DiscoVision and NTSC. DiscoVision replacing the LaserDisc logo in that case.

Ex: 1941 (1979) [16-014]

Julien

I always really liked that they stood out almost as if Discovision was it's own format. Although it does get a bit sticky once you know that the last year of Discovision titles are actually Pioneer mastered and pressed, and also the handful of mastered by Discovision titles that came out many years later. But that has more to do with my own insanity.

Ron

They are not listed as NTSC because DiscoVision was an American label and no discs were ever issued in any other country under the DiscoVision label. Also, the actual disc labels and jackets were never labeled NTSC (just like most prerecorded VHS & Beta in America) because we've only ever had one TV standard to deal with and until HD and Progressive Scan came along, no consumer set was ever released in America that could handle any other standard. Most Americans were never even aware that there were different television standards.

JVC's VHD Video Disc format, had it been released in the US, would have been the first video format ever available in the US that was capable of playing PAL/SECAM discs on NTSC VHD players without requiring a television set that was multistandard or capable of handling a slightly non-standard color NTSC signal. The many NTSC capable PAL LD players often require PAL sets that can handle non-standard PAL or NTSC signals since they don't have digital memory to transcode the frame rate from color NTSC's slightly odd rate to PAL's 50 Hz. VHD was truly a "universal" videodisc format and only when the awful Video-CD format came out was there a format that equaled VHD's multistandard abilities.

ah, O.K. it all makes sense now.
thanks.

It does?

I can sorta see having a special section for Discovision, but why not just call them Discovision instead of NTSC? They are US releases, obviously they are NTSC.

"That's not a Laserdisc, its NTSC." is a statement that makes no sense. All the discs I own, Discovision, Laservision, and Laserdisc are NTSC. You might as well be saying, "Thats not a Laserdisc, its an action movie" or "That's not a pickup truck, its blue".

Unless I'm missing something...?

I would say it was also uncommon here in the UK maybe until the 80's NTSC started to catch on over here with imports.

Can a DiscoVision disc play on my Pioneer DVL-909 or any brand with the Laserdisc logo?

Why was it called DiscoVision was it to do with the 70's discotheques?

they will play in your player as long as it plays NTSC.
or they played in all players i have ever owned, but i never had a PAL/NTSC combo player.
if that's what you have.

BTW how is sooty doing?

No eye problem looks like its cleared up. Cheers

Its duel standard PAL/NTSC
Oh, right might just buy one I'll have look to see which ones have Laser rot issues. That's such a dirty word use Laser rot.

My DVL 919E PAL/NTSC player has no problems playing Discovision discs so I imagine the 909 can play them beautifully too.

Okay two conformations is good enough for me.

Any NTSC LaserDisc player will play DiscoVision discs.

Disclord did make reference that all DiscoVision discs were NTSC. That is true. However, all of the early Universal titles issued in England (Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, etc) were all the same transfers, including the opening DiscoVision graphics - just sped up to 25fps for PAL playback.

The name Discovision was actually being used by the company many years before Donna Summer began the disco craze in the 70's. It is in fact a Disc of Vision or Discovision.

Ron

And some early test discs from Philips NatLab.

Over here I have The Sting, clearly DiscoVision, but PAL. And it's the only disc on which I can view the complete DV-intro (when played on a standard/modern LV-player).

Now, the only thing I will need to get my hands on are single sided DiscoVision discs, so I can bring back that late '70s feeling when my uncle brought over the Magnavox player, an NTSC TV (both running on 220V) and three Curver boxes with discs. We had the things for three months before Philips wanted it back.

Oh I see. Well not many to pick from I have my eye on title but I'm a little skint after buying the RF demodulator last week and paying extra VAT on Laserdisc. Well maybe next week they'll be more to choice from.

You got to be a "test" family for the format before its launch? Had it already launched here in the US? What were some of the other titles you had? And what are "Curver boxes"? I don't know that term.

Blam1 and myself have many MCA Disco-Vision test pressings, and I have a good friend who accidentally got a test pressing in a standard DiscoVision box along with some internal DiscoVision mastering and quality control paperwork.

My family was chosen by Philips to be a teat family for their CD-I system and later Kodak's Photo CD format and then the CD-I version of the pre-Video CD format (before it was modified and standardized as VCD). The first few full-motion MPEG-1 movies on CD-I were like DVD's with full menus and interactive features. The test pressings I was sent of Star Trek II and The Hunt For Red October look and act like any modern DVD - but with the very poor quality of MPEG-1's 240 vertical lines of resolution (since MPEG-1 was progressive only) and about 160 lines horizontally - and very pastel chroma... The first discs also had awful MPEG Layer II stereo sound that Dolby required Philips to fix before they would let the movies carry the Dolby Surround logo. Once Philips tweaked the Layer II audio encoder, they sounded much better - about like FM stereo radio but without the noise. At that time each frame of video took the dedicated multi-processor Macintosh computers 4 hours to encode into the MPEG-1 format. So when DVD was announced, I wondered how they'd ever have the time to actually encode films with the quality being promised.

It's a shame Pioneer and Philips never combined CD-I with LaserDisc for the ultimate interactive discs - instead they introduced dead-end junk like LaserActive. (I say dead end due to the very high prices and poor value of the system - and Pioneer abandoned it so quickly here that it was obvious they weren't serious about the system.)

Yep, it was named Disco-Vision in 1969. Philips chose VLP as the name for their optical videodisc, and at different times claimed it stood for Video Long Play, Video LP or Video Laser Player. Their initial digital audio disc project was called ALP before they decided to make the disc 4 inches and call it the Compact Disc. Like JVC's VHD/AHD, Philips initial idea was that one player would do double duty as a VLP player and an ALP player. Compatability between the videodisc and a new advanced digital audio disc was thought to be essential during the first years of format developments. It took Pioneer and Philips working together to finally bring that back to the public in 1985 with the CLD-900 CD/LaserDisc player and LaserDisc's wih digital sound.

Amazingly, even RCA was developing an audio only Digital sound version of their CED VideoDisc, and they had a number of patents relating to it and even demonstrated the original SFT-100 mono launch player being used to play a digital audio CED album.

Toshiba-Link TOSLINK introduced in 1983. Still some Laserdisc players I noticed in the 90's didn't have optical output on the really low budget models.

I think the optical disc is good means of not wearing out but its not indestructible a bad scratch in the wrong place and its a pain to get that fixed. But at least with care it would outlast the magnetic video tape that gets annoying snowy picture that looks worse than Laser-rot jittery sound when the tape is creased with it fluttering up and down and losing high frequency on the linear track, hi-fi its just dropping in and out of Hi-Fi to mono and then the head-banging on the player starts.

We weren't ourselves, but my uncle worked at the Philips NatLab. He was one of those people that actually invented/constructed the machines. In his case the mechanical part, like the mirror and prism parts for the VLP600/700. (He wanted some sort of clamping mechanism, but the beancounters wanted glue. We all know what happened with that.) This made it quite fortunate for us to be some of the few families outside of Philips to really have a pre production MagnaVision player at home. The machine was brand new; I even had to remove the transport safety from it...

A Curver box is a plastic box, made by a company called Curver (duh...). Looks like this:



These boxes were stuffed with test pressings in DiscoVision open top boxes. All discs were CAV and single sided. You know, the disc halves, not bonded together, floppy ones. As far as I can remember, all discs had white sample labels with the title and side number on it and the non playable side was covered with a clear but thick layer of sprayed eh... let me call it paint. And all discs were individually packed in cloth-like white sleeves within their boxes.

Disc titles... tricky one, as one year later we had the machine back again, but now there were more joined discs with it (like the ones we know now). But we definitely had Jaws, Abbott & Costello, Jesus Christ Superstar, Smokey and the Bandit, Frenzy, At home with Donald Duck and at least a test disc with a cartoon on it - about a lion that lived on a time line, which eventually was the spiral of dots that make the image for the discs - with our first batch.

A year later we must have had Jaws 2, Midway, Animal House, Buck Rogers, Six Million Dollar Man (and Bionic Woman), Electric Horseman, Slipper and the Rose... well, just more too, can't remember everything. After all, I was about 8 years old back then.

Some time later, my uncle had his own VLP700 - handmade - at home and some test discs with it. And when I was old enough I could borrow it. At that time there was even a LD rental shop in Veldhoven. Guess I have seen all discs they had in those days. Later, the machine went back to my uncle, but unfortunately the one thing happened to it what kills all VLP-machines: The glue under the mirrors and prism began to crumble so it couldn't focus the laser beam on the disc anymore. Game over. The laserdiscs surfaced at his attic about a year ago and since no-one in his family knew what to do with those funny large CDs, they came to me. The Evoluon disc, The Sting (Discovision, but in PAL), The Producers, Philips Expertise Worldwide, Mixture of Sports, A Slice of Reality...



A few months ago I bought At home with Donald Duck over eBay from someone who is also on these forums. I just wanted to have a DiscoVision disc, didn't care if it played or not. It turned out to play very well, so thanks to mikeystoyz again for that great disc. If you (or anyone else) has a test disc (set) and is willing to part from it, I am very interested. I don't care if the disc is rot or the movie bad, I just want a single sided disc.
Oh, and if someone had ever seen this test movie "The Line" or better: you have it... Please make me a copy; you would do not just me, but certainly my 84 year old uncle very happy with it...



I never had a CDi, but I did have (and still have) a CD100. With glass test discs... And a DCC deck. And in a corner of my living room there is still a VLP600. The machine even wants to spin up, but the focus is gone, so actually it is dead. But it's such a lovely machine that I can not part from it...