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 Post subject: Re: Hiya!
Posted: 03 Jan 2021, 09:05 

Welcome to the madness :)

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 Post subject: Re: Hiya!
Posted: 03 Jan 2021, 23:00 

Enjoy the LD format.... have fun.

:thumbup:

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 Post subject: Re: Laserdisc Reboot Debate
Posted: 05 Jan 2021, 16:58 

wouldn't the wavelength of the intended read laser (infrared) still be a limiting factor on the density of the pit placement during writing?
I'm not sure. I feel they would have just used an infrared laser in that case, but I might not be thinking about this the correct way. I do know that the Ar laser was supposedly 200MW which is quite substantial.

Interesting comparison of track pitch:
LD: 1.4 to 2 microns
VCD: 1.6 microns
DVD: 0.74 microns
BR: 0.32 microns

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 Post subject: Re: Laserdisc Reboot Debate
Posted: 05 Jan 2021, 21:12 

The original spec used an HeNe laser that is an even shorter wavelength than a DVD laser: HeNe=632 DVD=650nm. However, the aperture of the lens was also different (larger?). Interestingly to note: The original spot size of the HeNe LD player was smaller (1.5micrometers) than the later IR player spot size (1.6~1.7micrometers). However, the circuitry after the laser pickup in the HeNe players limits frequency response ( and therefore, ultimately, resolution).

This picture, is from the Pioneer Tuning Fork series describing the early HeNe LD spec (1.5micrometer spot size):
https://ready.cs.washington.edu/~tandersn/nobackup/early_tuningfork_LD_track_specs.PNG

You can see from this diagram, that the pits/lands sizes are very small, nearly as small as a DVD, much bigger than a CD, but the track pitch is large, nearly the same as a CD. This works because of the analog nature of LD, the signal is interpreted as an RF signal, so the pits/lands being close together still generates a fluctuating waveform. However, the large spot size of the LD player makes this waveform "less than perfect", and so the reproduced image is not of the same fidelity as the master (lower signal to noise ratio).

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 Post subject: Re: Hiya!
Posted: 07 Jan 2021, 18:22 

Welcome to the group! I share your admiration of the great LD cover art. It's one of the reasons I like the format so much. It's great to know that there are younger people like you taking up the mantle and helping to keep these wonderful LaserDiscs from winding up in the landfills.

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 Post subject: Re: Looking for Pokemon LD
Posted: 08 Jan 2021, 06:16 

rcarlson wrote:
I'm pretty sure the listed aspect ratio for the main feature of 1.85:1 is wrong.


The cover says "Vista Size" which in Japan means anything from 1.66:1 to 1.85:1, so it's very possible.

IMDb says 1.66:1, you are probably correct, I updated it.

Julien

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Posted: 10 Jan 2021, 18:49 

I’m watching my LD collection because I still have an LD collection.

“Mail order only” is more or less the way LD has always been. I was mail ordering most of my movies in 1992 even though stores in my area weren’t bad at all by American standards. To be honest buying LDs is way better now since most of them are cheap as hell, can be play tested, and you can use eBay, YAJ, and this forum to help you buy any disc from anywhere in the world. You don’t know how good you have it! It used to be that usually if your store couldn’t find a disc then that was it. Out of print meant GONE. LD is a format for people who are already mail ordering their books, records, exotic tea, whatever.

The picture quality is truly very very low compared to a BR but with silent movies and anime OVAs BR is frankly overkill. LD is something I’ve been into almost 30 years now and so to me it was never checking out this wild way old people used to watch movies, it’s the way I’ve watched movies since I was old enough to buy movies. I also have to say that most people don’t have anything like my eyes so BR is double wasted on them. At some point the pursuit of “quality” has to stop if you’re ever going to enjoy the movie. Also, many people including regular posters here don’t know how to even use the correct aspect ratio let alone calibrate. LD on the right display with correct settings can be very good. However the easiest way to make an LD look good is to not throw away all your CRTs like an idiot. Btw, thanks for all the free CRTs everyone. I enjoy them very much. I still have yet to find a modern TV with no composite input so that’s not as issue yet or not as issue with most TVs, probably only the very high end and the utter s**t, to I’d suspect.

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Posted: 10 Jan 2021, 20:09 

I like the way the video looks and the big shiny discs.

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Posted: 11 Jan 2021, 01:26 

but who watches DVDs nowadays anyway?
Just like there is a lot of content that has not left the realm of Laserdisc, there is a lot of content that has not left the realm of DVD. Plus all of the reasons listed above; uncut versions, original sound mixes, etc.

But me, I mostly think of that one Techmoan video where he said "a good movie is still a good movie even if it looks a little soft" and that's something I've thought about a lot. And then I go watch trashy 1990s sci-fi action thrillers. :mrgreen:

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Posted: 11 Jan 2021, 23:09 

I still spin up Laserdiscs because I love the process.

The previous posts sum up quite a few insights.
I believe one missing thread is, we are not living in a linear timeline.
Everything in nature, including our stellar bodies revolve in circles, cyclical. Non-linear.

So my main reason for hanging on to my out dated format museum is for hope that one day the factories open again and glorious LaserDisc production commences as before, with the elapsed time in-between being just Hiccup ......

April is a ways off, however that is my mic drop !

Cheers to the membership !

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Posted: 17 Jan 2021, 19:13 

What happens visually with warped discs?
Horizontal bands of visual distortion. Skipping as well if its severe enough.

This person captured it well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoVsOWo0ITU

I just placed the disc down on a clean counter and I still couldn't get any clear indication that it's warped. :?
Sometimes it is really hard to tell.

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Posted: 20 Jan 2021, 16:08 

Be ready.
Now that Obama is re - elected (chosen lmfao) petrol will be back to nearly $5.00 a gallon.
Mark my words, will not be long to wait....

Disclaimer : really hope I am wrong, very much feel it will not be long though !

Hang tough everybody, the $**t is going to get Knappy

Cheers to the membership

We’ll get along better if you keep your election disinformation campaign to zero. I know you have issues but reality IS reality no matter what you’ve personally been diagnosed with. Climate change, COVID-19 and Obama’s birth certificate are all real.

I nearly flagged this post but decided to be more open about how insane/stupid/irresponsible you’re being. Nothing could be more obvious to me in 2021 than when our fiends say insane b******t we need to engage them on it instead of just chickening out in the name of politeness. There was as clean of an election as this shithole country has ever seen. The only major abnormality was the sore loser and the totoletarian tactics he used to try to stay in “power” (while rarely doing anything but holding rallies). I could just block you or flag you anonymously but I genuinely don’t want you in prison for attacking a country you claim to love. I don’t want you to join the Proud Boys or any other hilarious/tragic organizations.

Aside from election nonsense completely, I have no problem with $5 a gallon gas. Trucks are stupid and driving 20 hours a week because you chose to live in BFE is your problem.

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Posted: 26 Jan 2021, 09:38 

Hello,

Just to clarify about the output from the SM03. The output is SDI (serial digital interface) which is commonly used in broadcast environments. It is a component output, uncompressed, but consumer equipment does not accept it. However, it is possible to convert SDI to HDMI using a low cost box from companies such as Blackmagic. (We do not provide HDMI output because the companies that 'control' the HDMI standard require an annual payment from us so we can purchase the HDMI interface ICs).

The output is 525i (NTSC or 480i active picture lines) or 625i (PAL or 576i active picture lines). We do not provide deinterlacing because modern day displays now have quite sophisticated deinterlacers (as opposed to older monitors that just did line doubling or bob and weave for example) and some have motion compensated deinterlacers. What the SM03 does do is try to produce as artifact free image as possible which makes the job of the deinterlacer simpler (and therefore produces better image quality).
What I am unsure about is how the deinterlacers handle cadence and it might be possible for us to 'help' in that respect.

The SM03 was designed to work with VHS tape players. The method to record the video (colour under) means that a comb filter cannot be used to recover better video. Or at least a conventional comb filter cannot - it is possible to design one that will recover better video. I am less familiar with Laserdisc but we could look to do something similar if the recording format does something similar. For the VHS project we are also replacing all the electronics and are processing the head signal directly to produce better image quality. Again we could consider that in the future. One of the incentives to doing this is to produce faster than real time archiving of the tapes. At present a 3 hour tape takes 3 hours to archive - faster playback corrupts the image. We are hoping to enable faster than real time playback without corruption - essential when you have tens of thousands of tapes to archive.

So I have to read up about laserdiscs which I will do over the coming weeks, and take as much feedback as you wish to give me on what your requirements are for a laserdisc 'processor' to produce the best image quality at an affordable price.

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Posted: 27 Jan 2021, 18:36 

It's an evaluation board, designed to show off the capabilities of their chip to people who are looking at building hardware with that chip. As such it probably has small production runs and might well be made at a loss (on the expectation that the orders they receive for the thousands of chips will make up for it). It certainly won't have been intended to be an end-user product.

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Posted: 28 Jan 2021, 03:09 

There's a whole world of Amiga/PC Megademos using visual effects (and showing off coding skills!) with trippy videos out there :-)

Ex (one of my favorites on Amiga 1200) : GOA by The Black Lotus (ASM 1996 Demoparty)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1CfmZCbhQs

More vintage goodness by TBL

STASH at The Party 1997 (the whole thing fits in 64KB of code!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfbjiTrctJs

Jizz (1997):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLkBwm21_1Q

Julien

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Posted: 28 Jan 2021, 06:07 

If we're going down that road then you absolutely have to include the landmark Amiga demo Jesus On E's. :thumbup:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MjNsNW8DvM


And of course State Of The Art!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89wq5EoXy-0


Not in the same sort of area but Dutch Breeze warrants a mention too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu9fuHxUOPk

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Posted: 28 Jan 2021, 23:00 

Yes the commercial aired in the UK in the early 1990's but was quickly banned after complaints came in about people suffering seizures.

Pot Noodle is a cup noodle product. Similar to ramen cups but more like something a cleaner would find in the bowls of dubious public lavatories.

The advert was slowed down, recut and reaired but didn't have the same impact. The wig advert followed a few years later. I've written a little about it on my blog.

This is the edited version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fca72AlJp8I

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Posted: 22 Feb 2021, 03:58 

One of my favorite documentaries, David Macaulay's Cathedral . Tremendous architectural illustration, stirring photography, perfectly narrated and explained. The animated segments are great for holding children's attention without pandering to them or trying the patience of adult viewers (there are no animal sidekicks or superfluous child characters). What I love most about Macaulay's TV specials though is the pacing. It's conversational: neither turgid like your least favorite history lecturer nor frantic like a cable TV show that's desperate to keep you from changing the channel. Quick enough to always be interesting, slow enough to let you think and react. Also recommend the other three, Castle , Pyramid , and Roman City , but especially Cathedral .

I didn't know this was on LD! Or maybe I forgot. Maybe it isn't, you didn't specifically say.

When I was a teenager they published a book about animation, I forget the exact name, that was more or less built around the production of the animated segments of Cathedral. It's a very good book for learning tradition techniques and has great stills of Cathedral. Its sort of a how-to guide for animation based on a movie that is a how-to guide for building a huge church. Both are very good.

Speaking of traditional animation, tonight we watched Fantasia: Special Edition (1940) [1236 CS] . I usually go for the CLV version because its a real flipper of a movie but tonight I decided the extra work was OK. Does this actually look better in CAV? It shouldn't, but it seems like it does, like the color is deeper, but it could just be me. The Dolby Surround is fantastic, the picture is about as good as it gets, leaning to the slightly softer side which some may prefer to later DVD-esque Disney LDs like Lion King, Snow White...

Anyway, the movie itself is just amazing. It recently occurred to me that even though Fantasia was never their most popular movie it may very well outlive the other early films just because its way way less weird since its sort of psychedelic and semi-representational on purpose. There's nothing as weird in here as kids lying and because of that turning into donkeys, for example, and the biggest liar of all time turned into an elephant in the end and was rewarded with the nation's highest honor so what ancient morality is this movie trying to push anyway? Not a valid one in my culture...

The saddest thing about being an animation fan is that it is a position of constant compromise. When you look at something from the 60s, which was hardly the high point of animation's history, you just think, "Man, you couldn't do that past the 70s...". And the stuff from the 80s, even the cheap crap like Thundercats, is considered impossible now, like moon launch impossible. Even though there are more people who want to be animators and the tools that exist make it easier and faster and cheaper every year, we still basically just have worse animation every year. I guess we're not in the b/w Astro Boy or Huckleberry Hound ghettos any more, but just barely, and its only because of sweatshop labor and Adobe Aftereffects. Japan is over and Korea has yet to take flight. Many of the actual *shows* are of course much better than the junk I grew up with, but the animation itself...there is no Call of the Primitives moment these days. No high points, only animation done perfectly to some specification chosen because it could be perfected. Every single episode of Bob's Burgers or Steven Universe has zero mistakes in it and will look identical to every other episode until someone changes the character designs on purpose as some sort of intentional refresh. You could build it in the Unreal Engine...not just the show, but the entire production!

With Fantasia being mega budget and from 1940 it is absolutely packed with those things you can't do any more. In fact, these segments have is so many techniques above and beyond the standard "draw it, trace it, back color it in blocks" style that was standard by the time of 101 Dalmatians, or really even Peter Pan. There is airbrush, there is what I think is use of oil pastels on FX layers, rotating gradients, front lighting, its honestly hard to even tell how some of this was done and I'm a pretty hardcore dork for this. The labor needed is one thing but the organization is even more impressive, especially considering everything is tight as hell. Recreating this movie today would I think require at least one trillion dollars and some actual genuine witchcraft. Nothing that produced this exists any more!

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Posted: 24 Feb 2021, 04:07 

Which Pioneer amp/receiver do you have? Knowing this might help others familiar with it chime in about its video processing capabilities. It may just be a case of adjusting expectations.

I'm currently using my Marantz SR6011 AVR for comb, A/D, and deinterlacing and then sending the 480p 4:3 signal on to my Epson 4000 projector over HDMI for scaling to 1080p and aspect ratio zoom (for Letterbox discs). Without adding a stand-alone Video Processor (which I've considered), this is the only path I have since the projector does not have composite input and will not do aspect ratio zoom for resolutions above 480p. For the number of LDs I watch (1 or 2 a month, unless I happen to get click-happy on eBay), this path works reliably and acceptably... unless I just stumble on a great deal on a VP30/VP50/similar, it's just not worth the cost for my occasional usage.

Also, PLEASE DO NOT SELL YOUR TV just to get one with a composite video input. That's like telling a single guy to sell his Corvette because once a month he takes his nieces/nephews out for ice cream. An LG OLED is a purpose-built machine, and that purpose is excellent image quality for 4K/UHD/HDR and 1080p/SDR digital content (which I'll bet is still 90% or more of your viewing). If you're watching a couple of LDs a month, just stick with your AVR as VP and maybe consider a player upgrade at some point (you mention an interest in AC3 in another thread). If you're watching more LDs than other physical media (but still less than streaming content), maybe consider dropping $150-$300 on a stand-alone VP or put together a retro system (4:3 CRT, vintage AVR with built-in AC3 Demod, budget 5.1 speakers/sub, etc) in another room.

Regardless of where you land, manage your expectations, prioritize how you consume most of your media, and let those be the bounds of how you optimized your LD consumption.

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Posted: 24 Feb 2021, 22:20 

Micomsoft is overrated and yes it would do nothing for LD. Their products are entirely game-centric.

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Posted: 27 Feb 2021, 20:08 

https://order.mandarake.co.jp/order/det ... 07&lang=en

Dokaban: Exciting games at Summer Koshien (1976) [COLC-3176~82] (link updated, please use the pre-formatted URLs)

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Posted: 28 Feb 2021, 21:13 

The only one that comes to mind is the Lensman box, but it wasn't a long series, I think it was 26 or 34 episodes, have to check to make sure.
But only 4 on LD.

Stuff like fist of the north star never got any TV on LD to my knowledge but GE999 did and I think they were both very popular back in the day,
could it have been also licensing in Japan when you have someone like Matsumoto???

Anyway looks cool, would have picked it up had it been in the USA but that overseas shipping is keeping me to films and OVAs.

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 Post subject: Re: AC-3 RF specification?
Posted: 02 Mar 2021, 04:40 

cplusplus wrote:
I think the main hurdle would be the legal aspect.


The patents on AC-3 actually expired in 2017.

rein-o wrote:
Please keep us posted if you can or can't do this, would love to know.


Will do. So far, I haven't been able to dig up anything useful.

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Posted: 04 Mar 2021, 02:39 

Is there a difference in transfer quality between films? Is there a way or label to know the type of transfer? does this have to do with CLV and CAD?

There can be a huge difference. I've seen it in all formats. "The Abyss" on DVD is crap (LD is better, and no bluray exists). The first "the fifth element" on bluray, was crap. Those are 2 i remember for certain, but there are many more.

Also, from earlier in this thread, this statement was made:

420 scan lines of LD is somewhat equivalent to 420x480


Technically, the term: "scan lines" refers to the vertical resolution, and is always 480 in NTSC. Secondly, the "420" is TVL, which _is not_ equivalent to the digital style Cartesian coordinate system. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_lines
TVL is defined as the maximum number of alternating light and dark vertical lines that can be resolved per picture height.[3] A resolution of 400 TVL means that 200 distinct dark vertical lines and 200 distinct white vertical lines can be counted over a horizontal span equal to the height of the picture. For example, on 4 by 3 inches (10.2 cm × 7.6 cm) monitor with 400 TVL, 200 vertical dark lines can be counted over 3 inches

So that's 420*1.3333333 for 560x480

https://www.burglaryalarmsystem.com/technology-news/cctv-tips-tv-lines-analog-vs-pixels-digital-resolution.html
(There's a table a ways down the page that has 420tvl = 560pixels)

I wanted to post this, because it is a common misconception when people come from the digital way of thinking, back to the analog. And i have no reason why they decided to do it this way in the first place.

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Posted: 08 Mar 2021, 02:55 

This is also why some or most early CDs are commanding money, they are transferred directly from the analog tapes thus
have the original sound.

It's not that straight forward... 1st gen CDs (like my Iron Maidens) sound better not because the transfer was from tape (even the recent remasters were from tapes) but because they didn't over-compressed/brick-walled the mastering to sound loud/good on portable devices.

Example: http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list/year?artist=Iron+Maiden&album=Number+of+the+beast

In that case the vinyl/early CDs are the way to go.

But some early CDs were awfully mastered because the sound engineers were oldskool vinyl and didn't know how to properly master for digital.
Most of the early Beatles or Rolling Stones sound quite bad.

Remember how SONY would make a LOT of noise about Glenn Gould's Goldberg variation 1981 sounding the best on CD/Digital?
30 years later they conceded that it was better with the increase in technology to fall back to the Analog backup master and re-issued SACDs/CDs based on the analog tapes!

Yet, I have an example of a TERRIBLE Digital ->vinyl transfer: Imagine Dragons ‎– Night Visions
Unbearable, it's makes your ears bleed. Tried it twice, then promptly sold to a teenager in HK who thought it sounded "so much better than the CD".

Don't under-estimate the power of marketing and group-induced self-perpetuating influence :-)

But we are in a new cycle now that makes things interesting again:

Vinyl -> compressed to within 20~20Khz due to media limitation
CD -> same then over-compressed starting mid-90's
Streaming -> compressed mix will sound flat, uncompressed mix sound better!

It's a nightmare for sound engineers who now have to release 2 or 3 different mixes -- and sometimes multiple different mastering levels depending on the streaming platform!

Very interesting video about this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiRMYoqU3ys

Julien
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