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Interview with creators of the Domesday Duplicator Project
https://forum.lddb.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=8056
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Author:  thefringthing [ 09 Oct 2018, 22:22 ]
Post subject:  Interview with creators of the Domesday Duplicator Project

http://retrorgb.com/interview-with-simon-and-chad-of-the-domesday-duplicator-project.html


Author:  forper [ 11 Oct 2018, 10:27 ]
Post subject:  Re: Interview with creators of the Domesday Duplicator Proje

Smart guys..

Really interesting what one says about redbook CDs having RF information that can't necessarily be captured in normal duplication.

It's what I've always felt, otherwise why do some CD players clearly sound better than others playing the same "digital" information.

There is this magic below PCM audio that computer nerds can't comprehend. That's why MP3 sucks so much, not everything in the world of music is quantifiable, even digital information, a lot of it is unexplainable "magic" that you "feel" and computers will never be able to translate well enough..

Digitisation of entertainment isn't really the enemy, it's computerisation of it.

Author:  happycube [ 11 Oct 2018, 16:55 ]
Post subject:  Re: Interview with creators of the Domesday Duplicator Proje

Thanks :)

There's no magic in the CD RF, just metadata and error correction bits. With those you can make sure you have the exact bits that are intended to be there, which depending on one's setup can be difficult to do. With a RF sample you know when it skipped a sector and/or corrupted some data which a raw digital output stream won't say.

The variation in players is really how the digital data is processed - some cheap/early CD players do a bad job of making it analog, and a good CD player with oversampling produces a better waveform. There's more to it than that but eh, I'm not awake yet.

Also lossless compression (FLAC) is a thing and is even useful for Laserdisc RF signals - just not implemented by lddecode yet :)

Author:  signofzeta [ 11 Oct 2018, 21:47 ]
Post subject:  Re: Interview with creators of the Domesday Duplicator Proje

This was very interesting. We live in exciting times. I didn’t know about the Doomsday thing. It seems far more worthy of backing up than Laseractive or whatever.

Author:  signofzeta [ 11 Oct 2018, 22:34 ]
Post subject:  Re: Interview with creators of the Domesday Duplicator Proje

forper wrote:
Smart guys..

Really interesting what one says about redbook CDs having RF information that can't necessarily be captured in normal duplication.

It's what I've always felt, otherwise why do some CD players clearly sound better than others playing the same "digital" information.

There is this magic below PCM audio that computer nerds can't comprehend. That's why MP3 sucks so much, not everything in the world of music is quantifiable, even digital information, a lot of it is unexplainable "magic" that you "feel" and computers will never be able to translate well enough..

Digitisation of entertainment isn't really the enemy, it's computerisation of it.


The host of the show also didn’t really understand everything that was said. I’m pretty sure he still thinks there’s a file structure/type on the disc even after talking about it for an hour. I’m not sure he grasps that LD uses infinitely variable pits and lands.

CDs are digital but were made to be played on systems with almost no CPU power or storage in comparison to how much data was on the CD. There is no verifiable accuracy of data transfer like you have with almost everything else because you’re just playing one sample at a time with no parity bit or hash. There aren’t even two things in memory at once that you could hash. It just...blasts through the data, pretty much one sample at a time, like a dumb robot who knows exactly where to put every brick perfectly but doesn’t know what a house is so it can’t ever check its work.*

With an EFM wavefrom of the entire disc captured on an memory card you can use whatever means to read it you can build in software. A modern computer can easily see every bit on a disc at once this way. This is the point of digitizing the entire raw FM at as low of a level as possible. In fact it’s actually a stop gap solution until we can litterally map every pit and land in 3D, which requires flatbed scanners to perform as well as only scanning electron microscopes used to which...probably isn’t far off, honestly. You don’t need molecular accuracy to do an LD since everything is so huge on the disc. With sufficient technology though you could create an “image” of the disc that tells you every single thing about it, even the PH of the paper they made the sticker out of and the identity of everyone who ever left a finger print on it.

The reason two CD players sound different is because getting the original EFM is what part of the player does, the other %80 of the crap in there actually makes sound out of it. I’ve never compared two transports with the same DAC before and I don’t think I’ll bother. You have to have pretty huge errors to be audible. For the purposes of an ARCHIVE project though it’s important to preserve even what’s thought to be irrelevant. LD and the Doomsday Project specifically are a great example of this because that EFM waveform has SO MUCH stuff folded into it that if you just “capture it” or even remaster the original video from a film source you’re still missing much of what’s on the disc and once the EFM image is made you can develop the tools to decode the stuff even after the original disc is garbage. As the one guy said, to make a copy of an LD so accurate that you can reproduce the LD itself, not just the program on it...that’s the ultimate goal.

Very exciting times. And yes, these are smart guys for sure.


* There seem to be parallels between the original CD and SACD in that they’re both designed to play huge files on very weak computers, but in different ways, by only every handing very small amounts of it.

Author:  je280 [ 11 Oct 2018, 23:10 ]
Post subject:  Re: Interview with creators of the Domesday Duplicator Proje

The spelling is Domesday or you may get some strange stuff if searching for it under Doomsday!

I have tried hard to pick one of the sets up but any schools etcetera that had them no longer appear to have anything to do with them anymore, even the hardware is long gone.

It was to be a big thing back in the day here in the UK & it featured on news programmes & the like for quite a while when under development & a bit after it was issued then nothing - the project just stopped & got no further.

Thanks to precertvideo we have details on lddb & a picture of what appears to be the set as delivered.

Thanks for adding this precertvideo - very helpful :thumbup: .

Worth checking out, brief details below.

BBC Domesday Discs (1986) [AEKP019X]
Manufactured by PDO UK

Additional Information by precertvideo (3) 17/04/2008
Large cardboard box set-A modern Domesday Book (containing information from the UK census of the early 1980's). All but 1 side are "LV-ROM" (same concept as CD-ROM) and contain data. They must be used with a LV-ROM computer drive (I think with the BBC Acorn Archimedes computers we used to use at school in the 1980's).

Disc 1: "National Disc"
Side A: CAV LV-ROM "Always start with this side"
Side B: CLV video sequence featuring an hour of Britain in the 1980's (shudder)
Disc 2: "Community Disc"
Side A: "Southern Side" CAV LV-ROM
Side B: "Northern Side" CAV LV-ROM
Box contains the 2 discs, key card for computer keyboard, quick start cards and notepad, trackball label, 3 feedback cards, grammar card, and spiral bound user guide.

Data contained on the discs include "50,000 photo's, 250,000 pages of text, 24,000 maps and millions of statistics". Moving from photo to photo you can even navigate around streets and inside houses!


It would be good if I can find one of these but I do understand that I would only be able to playback/display only some of the content on a "standard" LD player.

Cheers.

Author:  forper [ 12 Oct 2018, 12:21 ]
Post subject:  Re: Interview with creators of the Domesday Duplicator Proje

signofzeta wrote:

The host of the show ....


Too long DID read.

Thanks Zeta, a few smart guys around here too, definitely not me but I just know I'll never be duped into "streaming audio to a soundbar"..

and yeah I thought this project might have been the prototype of that scanning technology you talk about when I first saw the link here. I was slightly disapointed at first to learn it was just extracting the RF signal on playback, but still ended up being a fascinating discussion.

Author:  cplusplus [ 14 Oct 2018, 17:09 ]
Post subject:  Re: Interview with creators of the Domesday Duplicator Proje

Thanks for sharing this and thanks to happycube and Simon for the considerable amount of time they have put into this. I had believed that a laserdisc's lifespan was longer than they had stated, so this certainly puts a further emphasis on the importance of this project.

Author:  happycube [ 14 Oct 2018, 23:07 ]
Post subject:  Re: Interview with creators of the Domesday Duplicator Proje

most LD's (that weren't pitched etc) are as good as the day they were made... but the Domesday disks were made at the PDO UK plant, so they're screwed in a decade or so as the edgerot creeps in.

Author:  yaffle2345 [ 05 Aug 2019, 18:31 ]
Post subject:  Re: Interview with creators of the Domesday Duplicator Proje

je280 wrote:
The spelling is Domesday or you may get some strange stuff if searching for it under Doomsday!

I have tried hard to pick one of the sets up but any schools etcetera that had them no longer appear to have anything to do with them anymore, even the hardware is long gone.
I see there's a nice looking set on eBay at the moment - up to £510 still with 4 days to go :o

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ACORN-BBC-Micro-LaserVision-BBC-Domesday-Discs-complete-rare-boxed-AS-NEW/143345354352

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