Hello,

I finally (2 years! ) managed to get my hands on my first laserdisc player last week, a Pioneer CLD S315.
It's a relatively modest model as I gathered. PAL/NTSC and playing only one side (no auto flip).
It seems to play disc well. I'm quite impressed with the analog audio tracks as well

However, one question I have is about CAV discs. When you pause a CAV disc, is the picture supposed to be completely still or will there always be a slight amount of flicker. As in flicker, I mean slight left/right jerkiness. Is this just the quality of S315, or would the laser possibly be out of alignment?

Apologies if my question is a silly one; I've tried google but couldn't really find an answer

P.S - Terminator 2 1993 Special Edition Boxset is brilliant!

- Brian

Never noticed any flickering with these machines altough I'm not Sure

Might be a display related issue. Maybe nothing to worry about.
If it plays without any issues don't worry about it.

It's a basic LD player but a solid performer. No whistles and bells you won't use anyway...
Throw in a videoscaler if you're watching on a digital display and it all gets
Owned a few of these in the past. Unbreakable!
You can even add a digital optical or coaxial output for dts playback.

Be happy with the player. It's a fine later (last) machine

Enjoy it

The s315 does some really terrible things to NTSC material from what I've seen. I can only guess that it goes through a NTSC -> PAL -> NTSC conversion. So far I've watched a few PAL LD's on mine and they seem to look pretty good though.

In short, if you have more NTSC LD's than PAL I'd recommend getting a dedicated NTSC player. If you are only watching PAL LD's then I'd say rock on!

The flickering you are referring to is what I think of as jitter. I've noticed this on some of my high-end players as well. Oddly, it happens only on a few frames here and there. Most frames are rock solid but I'll hit one every so often that jitters constantly while paused. I've heard that you shouldn't use the pause or jog mode so often anyway because it will add more wear and tear to the unit than normal play does.

Playing around with the picture settings make it a fine performer IMHO . I'm not saying it's "high end" but I always liked the Picture quality.
I got me a few of these in the past. For some odd reason I managed to find a few of these even mint sealed in the box. I don't believe PQ had anything to do with that but single side playback is to blame. I Like dual side players but it's kind of an obsolete feature if you're watching a 2disc set or the Star Wars Trilogy for example.

I could chain up all my players so I would not have to get up an switch sides. I might be out of Digital inputs this way anytime soon

Robwhar.... What do you mean with "terrible things to ntsc" btw. ? I'm curious...

@ Kris. I never thought much about it while just popping in and watching a disc. However, when I capture an ntsc disc at 29.97 fps and 720x480 resolution and then start flipping through frames I can tell that there is frame blending going on and even worse there is like a chroma lag where anything moving will be black and white while the chroma is behind it and then it catches up for a frame or two and then it falls behind again for a frame or two. PAL LD's look great on this unit though imo.

ah, that explains it
Capturing is out of my league I must admit

The frame blending on NTSC disks is caused by film pullup (24->29.97fps) conversion - every couple of frames out of six are made out of two different frames. Even an X0 is going to have those effects, and if your capture card combines chroma from two lines it can be a real problem.

Most of the PAL/NTSC comb players use a baroque color frequency conversion circuit involving a primitive comb filter, a 3.2mhz low pass filter (cutting resolution to about 250-260 lines, i.e. VHS quality!), etc. The 925 and DVL's don't have that, but the 925 appears to have it's own issues...

Pullup from 24 to 30fps is reversible with pulldown without side effects as long as you don't do it in yv12 colorspace.

What I mean with the s315 is that it puts the ntsc video through at least 2 frame rate conversions from original ntsc to pal and then back to ntsc before leaving the player. This causes some irreversible damage as far as I can tell.

For me it doesn't matter because I use the s315 as a capture device and coupled with your software it bypasses all of that nastiness .

Remember NTSC is interlaced, meaning there are two fields odd/even making the frame. Some players display a field and some a frame during pause. If yours displays a frame there can be movement differences in the two fields that are meant for normal watching but cause the movement issues on pause.