Last spring me and a friend bought three broken Philips laserdisc
players from the early eighties: two VLP-600 and one VLP-700. These
players are very similar to the Magnavox VH8000, the first commercial
player in North America. It took a while but after combining parts we
finally got two players back in fully working order!



This has been a really fun project, and we have been working on it on
and off since we got the players. Initially we did troubleshooting
just as for any other broken electronics, but realized after a while
that we had to understand a bit more in order to fix the broken
mirrors and also to adjust the laser.

The these players are PAL only, and have no digital audio support.
Initially we could only test with the French dubbed version of
Titanic, which has no analog sound track. It was also CLV so we could
not test the trick features. It took some searching to find a disc
with PAL, CAV, and analog sound, but fortunately the excellent
marketplace at lddb made it easy to find!

We have written detailed summary of the repair at
http://madeye.org/vlp600/.

For a full demo the working player see

Very nice seeing these players restored. Even though they don't have basically any use unlike the magnavox (at least it can play most discs even from 90s even though post ac3 it's mono)

Sad that such a stylish player is so unreliable.

Well I'm certainly impressed. I wonder if you could restore a VH8000 using what you've learned repairing this?

I've no idea if the VLP-600 was as unreliable as it's North American counterpart, but I've seen at least a few people remark they've never even seen one of these in any level of working condition. Even the Technology Connections guy's video had some comments remarking how impressed they were that it was working at all, and that one had the worst case of crosstalk I've ever seen!

This is excellent. Thank you for taking the time to document and share all of this.

Heroic!

Nice repair tutorial .

These are probably the hardest machines to fix and also quite dangerous w/ the type of voltages in them. Picture quality appears to be really nice based on the YouTube video and probably because of the Helium Neon laser used on these players.

Yeah I was pleasantly surprised with the video quality of the LD-660, and that was a budget model.

Wow, just -wow-. This, with the linked site, is an awesome and inspirational post! I am planning to do my best to make one or more Magnavox VH8000 players work again. I have one each from 1978 (Netherlands) and 1979 (USA), and I will look for others at reasonable prices as well.

Staffan and Carl, you are my heroes! You have exactly achieved all of the work I had imagined might be required to clearly understand and then repair these magic, original players. Thanks to you, along with the Dragon's Lair project, my goal is no longer a silly, unlikely or impossible idea, but rather, something I can probably achieve.