The player is a karaoke player but since I don't have any Karaoke discs I can't tell how well it plays those. However I can tell how it plays movies. The player was made in 1989 or 1991 I can't really find when it was made but I have found images of instruction manuals of the player and amp that I don't have and those are the two years I have found.

The player is probably one of the earliest PAL and NTSC players. The player can only play 12 inch and 8 inch Laserdiscs. It doesn't have anything fancy like s video or scart it just has AV cables so don't expect image quality to be good.

Now I'll talk about how I got this player. I bought it broken (the tray wouldn't open) for 80€ plus shipping which made the price to somewhere around 95€. It came with 5 discs 4 of them PAL and 1 NTSC. All I really needed to do was glue one cogs and it worked. I haven't found this player sold much elsewhere though I did see a working one on ebay once for something like 150€. That should give the pricing.

Anyway how well it plays movies. It has two settings movie and karaoke. In movie mode you can rewind the movie. The movie mode as far as I can tell only works on PAL discs though. When I want to play an NTSC disc I have to use the Karaoke mode. The first side of the disc 1 you can select a scene using the Karaoke controls also if the first side has more than 15 scenes you can skip to you probably can't watch all of the disc. (I'm not sure since I don't own a disc that has more than 15 scenes you can skip to.)

In the later sides and disc it just plays all of the side meaning you cannot skip anything. (This could bad if you own a TV series disc and want to see a specific episode.)

Also I'm not sure is this because of the condition of the disc or something like that but it doesn't play my copies of Star Wars Empire strikes back and Star Wars Return of the jedi. It does play my copy of new hope but my copy of new hope is newer than my copy of empire strikes back and return of the jedi.

Anyway unless you find this specific player for cheap or use it only on Karaoke I wouldn't recomend it.

(Update)

I forgot to mention this but it has a voltage selector which is very useful because you don't have to get a power adapter to use it.

I hope someone else can help you out with this.
Sounds like something to do with PAL NTSC switching either with the player or your TV or combination of both.

I have sometimes unpluged the player from my TV it won't play those two movies. It also has 3 settings in the back. Pal, 4.43 NTSC and 3.58 NTSC. As far as I can tell nothing changes if you use these settings other than when you are playing something and change a setting it ruins the color scheme.

I have a theory and it is that my player might not be able to play analogue sound (at least on NTSC) and that is why it doesn't work with those two movies. My copy of new hope is a 1991 release while the Empire Strikes back is a 1981 copy and the Return of the Jedi is a 1984 copy.

Though it would be stupid to make it only play digital sound at the time because the player was either released on 1989 or 1991 when I think most Laserdisc releases still had analogue sound.

But if someone somehow find a way for me to play those two movies I don't mind.

So these discs are playing but not the audio??
LD doesn't work that way, only a PAL NTSC thing will make it not play, or a really bad damaged disc.
Enjoy the hobby.

No. The disc spins for sometimes and then spits it out. I said that could possibly be a reason that it does not recognize the analogue audio. There are some PAL/NTSC players that cannot play discs that do not have digital sound.

Yeah, but you said Return of the Jedi does not play either. The one in your collection has digital sound so it should play.

LD doesn't work that way.

If you have an analog audio disc it will play in any player.
If you have a digital audio disc it will play in any player.

Your player not playing a disc has nothing to do with the analog or digital audio.
LD players are not really computer operated like DVD with encoding.

If you put a disc in it will either play or it won't.

Putting a PAL disc into an NTSC only player will prevent the disc from playing.
But your situation is something different.

Alright I have to make this update this after all these years.

This player can only play NTSC discs with chapters. The reason it could not play my copy of Empire and Return of the Jedi was because they did not have chapters. While my copy of New hope did have chapters. So it means this player cannot play some of the old NTSC discs.

That makes even less sense!

It might be true, because karaoke is weird and this is a PAL/NTSC machine with still prototype ‘oke fucntions...but that makes no sense. Chapters are a totally optional mostly irrelevant feature. If the player needs chapters to play (possible...I guess) it’s a very very weird player. It sounds like what it needs is a full fleshed out TOC for some reason.

If we had the manual it would be explained there.

Was part of this larger setup (scroll to bottom): Want to buy 621 Pioneer Karaoke discs?

Looks like a LD-V171 which is a unit that had a billbox connector.

Hmmmm that's interesting.

If the player was purely dedicated to the Karaoke market, then it would make sense that a TOC with chapters is a pre-requirement to play a disc to guarantee the automation system selecting the songs loads the correct disc + chooses the correct song.

Unheard of, but not devoid of logic!

Julien

It was part of this karaoke setup with an amp plus other things.

But I think the reason it needs chapters is again since it's the karaoke mode. In karaoke mode you press the numbers to select a track, which the player sees as chapters off course. When you try to select a track and the disc does not have one. Well it tries to search for one until it stops and spits it out. The player sees this as a karaoke disc without tracks.

And again the movie mode is a PAL only mode. While I haven't tested (and can't test since the player broke on me some time ago) that if a PAL disc without chapters would work on this mode. I think it would.

If your disc doesn't have chapters encoded on the actual disc you need a higher end player with that stuff built in.
Otherwise it will just play CLV discs and you won't get any special trick play features.

If your disc is CAV then its programmed onto the disc so you can get trick play features on any disc.

BUT if no chapters then no chapters, you can make it skip with time and a remote on which should be any player
but the sad part is that this player of yours no longer works.

Hope you can get a working player if you don't have one already.

I think it makes sense to say that the player is a PAL deck. It has an NTSC function but only for karaoke discs (%99.9 of which are probably NTSC) and for all the karaoke functions to work you need the TOC. Therefore it rejects all TOC-less NTSC discs. In the industrial application it would only be fed those Pioneer discs with the bird on them and they’d all work.

Not a problem, frankly. There are very few discs with no chapters/TOC.

If I understand it correctly: LD really didn't have a TOC, at least in the CD sense. It was instead sort of read on the fly throughout the disc in portions of the video signal not visible to the viewer. So when you search for chapter three, the player skims the disc until it hits an area marked with the chapter three code.

I would really love to read this service manual to see if there is any additional insight there.

You could get normal NTSC playback via test mode, but that is a hassle- especially since you own a CLD-D925.

Edit: found a video here that helped explain this player to me: https://youtu.be/LINmV6ZZ-qI?t=192

He says "In normal mode, you can't easily go to the next track. You can only press forwards and backwards- not directly select the next track."

What happens if you select BGV while in normal mode with a chapterless disc?

I made a thread about the BGV thing a long time ago.

When I put a disc in normal mode and turned on the bgv. It would light up and do.... absolutely nothing. And this player doesn't have a remote (there is no infrared port or even a spot for a wired remote).

So yeah the bgv thing does nothing and it doesn't even work in the karaoke mode. Maybe it would do something if I had the other things attached? But with a regular mid 90s PAL releases it did absolutely nothing.

I am really curious if Pioneer might have done something like BGV flags for BGV discs? Manufacturers could insert their own codes into the lead-in and lead-out of the disc.


Very possible. This model is quite peculiar.

It absolutely needs the other stuff attached to do everything.

Regarding TOC: technically, I’m misspeaking this. I don’t know the correct term for “all the aggregate data on the disc regarding time, chapters, etc”. I’m not sure how it’s handled, but I think the point is that karaoke machines have to be able to live queue tracks, take cash, run remotes from other rooms, etc. This is an industrial deck, non-educational, which means it was built to make money for the place it was installed in a bar or a hotel or something. Customers request a track via a book or some doodad and when their turn comes up the robot or attendant puts the correct disc in the player and they sing to it. For all of this to work the system has to be able to actually identify the disc using the time code or whatever. Nobody “puts in a movie and plays it” so such a basic function may be more difficult to do.

It only plays NTSC so it can use the same karaoke discs as the US/JP. That’s a *very* special use case when you think about it and they don’t care if anyone watches Star Wars in the thing. It costs $20,000 and generates $400 a day. The guy can buy another LD player to watch Star Wars in.