I think even in early 2000 this was the case with this player, parts were not easy to find on S2s.
Find someone who has a parts player or get another one working and save this for parts.
This is how I remember as well. S2/X1/X0 parts were never really available for the two decades. Look for a donor player. It may not turn up immediately but I am sure it will eventually.
It probably is a lie. That grading company probably bought that tape for marketing propaganda. They probably paid that website to feature this sale or that website indirectly belongs to them. It is so easy to create a hype with the internet.
It is a stupid idea. First of, grading should cost much more than $300. It would only get you about 2 labor hours to perform all grading work. That’s barely watching the tape from finish to end. The cost should be more like $1,500 for it to be feasible. Who is going to pay that for a VHS?
Buying a Laserdisc player in 2023 is a luxury to the buyer and burden to the seller. If you understand this relationship right, you can calculate your odds with limited funds and patience.
As some of you may know I work in the renewable "green" energy sector. I have spent a good portion of my career offsetting carbon pollution and generating environmentally clean affordable green energy all over the world.
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Acknowledgments:
My gratitude and thanks to our forum admin, Julien for his donation and allowing me to post this link here.
When CBHD was launched, they announced that they had technology transfer from Toshiba and this happened literally months after Toshiba pulled the plug on HD-DVD. Try and find pictures of Shinco CBHD-9100, it surely is a rebadged Toshiba HD-A35 which is the last generation HD-DVD player. I clearly remember seeing pictures of TCL units with both CBHD and HD-DVD logos on it. If I recall correctly, this was a Toshiba HD-A30 rebadge. It might have been an early production model or demo model. This was 2009 or circa and the information is scarce from that era.
HD-DVD was never advertised as one of CBHD players functions but people speculated it could be an unadvertised feature. Since the players are based on former HD-DVD players, the functionality might be already inheritedly embedded in there. So the claim has merits and makes sense. This was a speculation and I didn’t follow CBHD development to find out if it turned out to be true.
Here a quick search returns this https://www.engadget.com/2010-01-11-hd-dvd-rides-again-tcl-brings-china-blue-hd-and-blu-ray-together.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAEA3G-YPmfXGQ5tTBH4X3cgMILxtHYzGXNH_Loy4f-yQtE9CdslyrK_CQ1W3dg0tr-NtGvqLXpZRtTZaUtsQ3a5dWFNqxBDsdqBQ_g4OmkA1aFwppdnK1u3pz4DnavSyDWJJ4X9cXRnwoMb86cpmXsQvoyjLnrfUb9Ta4nwcRGzT
It doesn’t matter now whether it can play HD-DVDs or not. There won’t be any rot free HD-DVDs soon. I was keeping an eye on HD video discs formats development at the time. Like I mentioned I came across a lot of information on CBHD. HD-VMD totally skipped my radar during its production but as the admin mentioned here I made post here back in 2015 (which also mentions CBHD). Nevertheless if you click on the link I posted from 2010, you can see a picture from an early machine with both HD-DVD and CBHD logos on it.
It was a smart move from Toshiba to recuperate some of its losses with selling the tech to the Chinese. There was a lot of interesting things happening between 2008-2012 in the disc media world. Denon DVD-A1UD was supposed to be a universal player with both Blu-ray and HD-DVD support (and SACD and DVD-A). We found out Denon dropped this functionality at release. BD-I was supposed to become a big thing. Netflix actually used this functionality to add streaming functionality to Playstation 3. You would pop in the Netflix BD-I disc and it would start the Netflix streaming app as a Blu-ray interactive function. I still have that disc somewhere. This was the era before any streamers or any player had streaming apps. Vudu had its own box which actually downloaded the films to its 250GB HDD, rather than stream it. Apple TV had a HDD to download content playback too but it only offered iTunes as the store. I miss this era. I was employed by Best Buy at the time. I was fortunate to have test units to see them before or just when they made it to the market. Sony’s HTPCs were the most optimistic at the era. They were surely well ahead of their time. I remember their HTPC with 200 disc changer as its optical media drive.
If you can still access files, copy them to your computer or another HDD while you can. Once you have a back up, there are bunch of free hdd diagnostics tools you can use to verify the drive. If it mechanically checks out then you can simply format it and copy your back up back on it. I used to like Seatools from Seagate for hdd diag. Don’t run any diag before you back up your files.
I didn’t read all responses but are you using the composite video output? LD playback is allowed only on the composite video output. DVD playback is allowed on both composite and component outputs. If you connected your players to your TV via component, it explains that you can view DVDs but not LDs.
You should also try playing a regular music CD and see if you get audio at all. These players use the same laser for CDs and LDs but a different one for DVDs. If you can’t play CDs either than the wider bandwidth laser is malfunctioning.
Come and See (1985) - It’s a movie everyone should see but you will never want to watch it again. It is by far the best war movie and one of the most disturbing films of all times. The production quality, costumes, cinematography and sound design are so good that it’s like you are there. Spielberg watched this movie before making Schindler’s and Private Ryan. This film’s influence on those movies is extremely obvious. 11/10.
I was still using Netflix's DVD by mail up until a year ago. It took longer and longer to receive discs in mail although I am only 15 miles from one of their processing facilities. More than half my queue had titles with "very long wait", some I waited months. I figured they stopped stocking discs and getting ready to drop the service. They made the end of service announcement a few months after I canceled my subscription.
Now I am very close to canceling their streaming subscription. I don't care for it but my parents love it. I have had their 5 users plan for a long time. There were a few decent Netflix exclusives that I watched but mainly my family uses the account. They made a recent policy change which allows users only within the same household. Well, I don't live with my parents. When I first signed up, Netflix encouraged sharing the account with family and friends to justify higher tier subscriptions. Not only they increased the pricing significantly, now they say each person should get a dedicated subscription.
The point of this thread is not BD Live but how Netflix used it as a work around to get its streaming service on the PS3 for the first time. I didn’t care about BD Live either but I couldn’t explain how this disc worked without explaining BD-Live in its historical context.
If you didn’t buy your Blu-ray somewhere between late 2006 and early 2008, you aren’t an early adopter and you wouldn’t know of the struggles on the early players. There were many firmware updates. If you didn’t update your player, it would lock up and not play the newer discs. They were also painfully slow. It would take a good minute before the player powered on and the tray opened then you could go make pop corn and come back before the player reached to the film menu. I am not exaggerating. After around 2008, they sorted out most of the bugs and started putting faster hardware in the players.
This is a good subject. Thanks for bringing it up. Dune (1984) comes to my mind immediately. I think I prefer the theatrical (shorter) version of T2. I will have to think a bit but I am sure there are many more.
a power supply could have multiple rails with different DC Voltage outputs each with different current ratings. If any one of these are off, it will damage the electronic. Manufacturers won't waste pennies putting an oversized power supply unless it is some mega expensive audiophile device. If the nameplate rating is 37W, it most likely very well needed 37W to operate.
In that case what is the purpose of this device? I have ripped large amounts of my movies to reduce storage and clutter. It's very easy to just watch them via a pc tower. I'm guessing there are some benefits but I don't know what they are.
It is an all-in-one solution. You don't need to build a custom media PC. You don't need to educate yourself on which software you need to install on your custom media PC to rip discs, edit metadata/cover art, organize/manage your media library, and setup media share to distribute them. You don't need a media player such as Plex or Kodi to view your content on your TV. It comes with its own proprietary operating system to do all this. It is a purpose specific hardware design so it uses less power than a PC, it is much less quiet than a PC, it can output video in its native resolution and refresh rates, it has built in very high end audio DACs for music, it comes with a proper remote control, it has a mobile app to control and manage it, it integrates with all of the major control systems such as Control4, Crestron, Savant and URC, it is rack mountable, its storage is infinitely expandable with 3rd party servers such as QNAP and Synology, it is expandable to multiple rooms, it automatically keeps itself up to date with all of its software and so on.
If you have the knowledge and the time, you can surely build an equivalent DIY media PC. You may have to use multiple different software for multiple different tasks. You will have to continue to spend time keeping all software up to date and making sure they are compatible with each other. You are probably going to need to use a mouse and a keyboard time to time. PC hardware is rarely videophile/audiophile grade. It may not have the correct color output, low noise floor and high signal to noise ratio as a high end dedicated disc player or Zappiti like machine. After all said and done, such a capable custom media PC would likely cost more than a high end Zappiti system.
I should probably go back and complete my original post. This thread is becoming more important as physical media resellers becoming a rarity.
Note: I updated the first post.
Quick summary:
Amazon is the only big retailer for physical media now. There are many small boutique labels with small libraries they sell their physical media content independently on their own web stores (some have physical stores too).
Physical media alternatives are streaming services and digital stores (for purchase or rent). Kaleidescape store is the only one with high bitrate downloads which either matches or surpasses the physical media quality at an extremely high cost of entry to the eco system.
There are integrated server/player and DIY options but they need physical discs for their content.
Obviously this entire thread is a concern to you only if you care about new releases that are new movies or films previously never been released on physical media. Millions of copies of previously sold physical media will be floating in the 2nd hand for generations.
Pioneer CLD-3080, Pioneer CLD-95, Panasonic LX-900U, CLD-97, Runco LJR-I, Runco LJR-II, McIntosh MLD-7020 in the order from less expensive to more expense while all having comparable performance to each other. Most of these won't have a factory installed AC-3 output but it can be added later.
AC-3 came out too late towards the end of relatively decent LD sales which happened to be too early before home theater equipment sales decently increased. So the LD sales were in stagnation if not decreasing while very few people (early adaptors) were buying AC-3 or DTS capable AV amps (typically the very expensive flagship models only). Hence very few RF demodulators were manufactured.
I think keeping your discs and electronics in reasonable room temperatures and relatively low humidity is the most important. Ideally, with a narrow range such as a delta of 10-15F in the room temperatures so the materials don’t (micro) bend & flex much due to temperature differences. Avoid excessive physical stress like stacking discs horizontally. All this apply to modern electronics and discs too.
Thanks list
