Hi, I'm just going to get into the world of laserdisc and i have a few question for you guys.
First of all, I'm from Spain so the easiest way i have to buy a player is PAL one. So here comes the question, not many discs where published at europe so i would like to play some american and japanese discs on my player. Is that possible?? PAL resolution is superior to NTSC so i think that the number of lines wouldent be a problem, in adittion of that i own a pvm which basically can play almost any frecuency you gave, so... knowing that. Do think there will be any issues or not?

PD:Apologize for my poor english.

There's plenty of PAL/NTSC combi models on the European market. Pretty sure you can get one on the Spanish market, too. Easiest way to tell on someplace like ebay is just looking at the photo of the back of the machine; there's a box on the info label that says "PAL", "NTSC", or "PAL/NTSC", and it's the last two you need to look out for.

For maximum disc compatibility for about 99% of LDs you'll ever see you need to ensure your player has two things:

Support for dual standard PAL/NTSC
Support for analogue and digital audio (older players will only have analogue and for a brief time a few players came out that were only digital).

One of the best PAL players to have ever existed is the Pioneer CLD-D925 - it has PAL/NTSC and analogue and digital support, and it also has both sides play, and a framebuffer to allow it to freezeframe CLV discs.

Don't confuse the newbie with a lot of unnecessary information, just stick to the basics.

For one thing, the lack of analog PAL playback isn't that big of a deal unless there's a lot of old PAL titles you absolutely must have (and a lot of those would be pan & scan probably). Secondly, you shouldn't really concern yourself with the whole resolution nonsense; if the disc is NTSC then NTSC is all you're gonna get out of it. I think most combi players can convert NTSC to PAL internally, but you're honestly better off leaving that up to your TV anyway, unless you have an old POS CRT TV too.

I don't know about Spain but in the UK it's very easy to come across interesting titles with only analogue audio. I would have been rather pissed off if I'd have accidentally bought an LD player that couldn't play them. I'm talking only from experience! It depends of course why you're getting into LD but one of the joys for me is finding unusual obscure titles I would never have seen otherwise. And a lot of these have analogue audio.

And I didn't mention anything about the resolution. But yes, dual players will be able to optionally convert PAL to NTSC, but they're usually not very good at it so you should disable this feature if you have a TV that will take NTSC. But since OP mentioned they have a PVM I believe those tend to support both standards.

Very good advice there.

Also if you can get a CLD-D925 you will not go wrong.

A really good all round LD machine that will do everything you would want from a player & can handle almost any disc.

Cheers

Well the common advice is "any player that works is a good one", but under the circumstances, "that isn't PAL only" should be added.

Thank you so much for your advises guys. I bought a REALLY cheap thomson only PAL player, but probably I'm just gonna sell it to get a few extra bucks and buy PAL/NTSC player as you rightly recommend me. I'm searching good offers of the pioneer 925, but most of then are broken or have absurd prices.
On the other hand, what do yo think about SONY players??
I found one with NTSC compatibility on a second hand store and i thinking about buying it.
Looking forward for your answers.

If it works & is not too expensive then the SONY might be a good bet but they don't have the best picture & can sometimes be problematic though others may argue with that - at least one person here might.

Don't pay too much for it though.

It may also save you the shipping hassles, damage in transit & all the other issues that can happen with a player going through the post system.

It might also get you started with a PAL/NTSC player & you can then perhaps pick up another player if you want to at a later date when one turns up at the right price.

Good luck .

Certainly worth giving the Sony a go if it's cheap enough, or even if not, if they say it's definitely working. Do you know which model it is? Having a quick look online I can't find any Sony models that have digital only support (I think that was a Pioneer thing), so I'm almost certain that this player, if in good condition, will be able to play virtually any disc you throw at it.

I do know that there are some known maintenance pain points with the Sony players, and from posts on here I've seen in the past, some will say they're a bit less reliable and harder to repair than the Pioneers. But really unless you're going to be paying a lot for it, I think this should only be a minor concern. If it works, it'll work with virtually any disc, and will in all likelihood be a good player.

If it works and it’s local then buy it.

Sony players are garbage, such garbage in fact that it’s hard to even find someone here with one that works. However ANY player that works is a good player in 2020. It’s been 12 years since any LD player was made and much much longer for most of them.

Then...why'd you buy it?

Anyway, you live in Spain, you could also keep your eyes peeled on the French market since it's closeby and I think the French market in general was a lot bigger than the Spanish one so there should be more options there. Also you can probably forget about ebay since people always sell this crap at inflated prices there. Check local and domestic listing sites instead, you do have them right?

Well this is going to be a bit longer so let´s do it step by step.

First of all, why do I bought the PAL player. It was from a move sealing and cost me only 15 euro, I would bought it even if it was broken. Unexpectedly it works great but it doesn't have digital audio, which suck a bit but in the other hand it reads CDV too. That came really handful actually because i really want to stop using my dreamcast and saturn to play cd video (you know, that lens are really fragile).

In second place let's talk about the sony player I've found, well after a lot of guessing checking out the almost erase label of the front i think that it's a MDP-650D. The price would be 80€ (88$), the store claim that the price is high cause the player have RGB output, but as far as i know the signal recorded on laserdiscs was a composite one, so I don't know if they're lying to me or what, cause it doesn't make a lot of sense.

On third place, about the French market. It's a lot easier and cheaper than the spanish, but i would like to stay local because of high shipping extra costs. The problem it's that find anything on any kind of local retailer it has been hard as hell, no one know anything about laserdisc here, even "profesional" retro stores are really lost.

Maybe the next time i have a little trip to the uk i should buy something there and ship it back by myself.

Btw, you guys are being really helpful, the spanish forums are not as near as active as this one, even when it's about trending topics.

Unfortunately CDV (CD Video) is not the same as VCD (Video CD). CDV is analogue picture and is in effect just a LaserDisc with CD form factor. VCD is just digital video stored on a CD encoded with MPEG-1. It would surprise me if a player without digital audio will read a VCD. Some DVD players can read VCDs though so perhaps you should look at finding a cheap one if you want to stop using your Saturn/Dreamcast for it?

Here is information about the MDP-650D written when it came out: http://www.laserdiscarchive.co.uk/laser ... p-650d.htm

As you correctly said, LaserDiscs only store composite picture. However, having a TV in Europe that supported NTSC in the 1990s was still quite rare, so the player had a feature where it could decode the NTSC using an internal decoder and output it over RGB SCART. However, the comb filter in a modern TV is *likely* better than the one in a LaserDisc player from the early 1990s, so this feature is not likely to be useful today. It's not a lie, but it's also not amazingly useful today.

As for that price - well, it's not the cheapest price I've seen, but if the player works, I would say go for it. Anything you get over the internet when you include shipping or travel costs to collect it is likely to cost that much.

Oh men... what deception, I was really looking forward to watch my VCD copy of star trek VI on the player (i should did it before say anything). Well i didn't know a thing about cd video so i'm gonna take a look, sound really interesting actually.


All this video stuff is rougher than i thought, now the world of videogame consoles with RGB and all that kind thinks sounds like the easiest XD

Yeah, because a CD is obviously much smaller than a Laserdisc a CDV doesn't have much capacity! They were usually used for music, you would have 1 track of music video which could be played on a Laserdisc player, and around 4 tracks of ordinary CD audio which can be played in a CD player or a compatible Laserdisc player. Other things were also sold under the CDV brand too though, mostly music discs but some films, in various sizes (CD size 5 inch, 8 inch for about 30 mins per side in CLV (usually used for a small collection of music videos), or the standard Laserdisc 12 inch for about 60 mins per side CLV).