I recently picked up this player. It works wonderfully except there are several rows of lines on the left side of the screen.

They’re only present when a disc is playing, not on the blue stop screen.

They do not move or alternate; it’s like a graphic overlay. It doesn’t matter what type of LD I play, and it’s present on A and B sides.

I do not have the original remote to play with DNR settings, but I may try my old Harmony remote to see if I can figure it out.

Screenshot below. Not sure why linking isn’t working right.

https://imgur.com/a/HpSJh7A

Any suggestions would be great! Thank you!

Interesting. I've never seen that before. I assume there is a bad cap somewhere.

Looks like dropouts, but usually they move from one side to the other and then go away.
Sometimes it could be glue or dirt on the disc itself or its just something in-between the layers that the laser is reading.

Discs play from the label inside out so check where the time is and see if you see anything.
This player also reads from below.

Is this through the entire side? Or both sides??
Hope this helps.

It’s almost like an overlay. The lines don’t move at all. I’ve tried multiple discs. And when I accidentally slowed down a disc by poking around in the machine, the video distorts, but the lines stay in the exact same spots and can be seen over the distorted video. Not sure if I explained that clearly.

I’d say the TBC memory IC is bad. Only other option is DNR addressing errors the way it repeats. Turn OFF DNR and see if anything changes. This is in one of the processing IC’s so I’d try to get my money back.

Thank you!

The player was dirt cheap, so I’m not too worried about refunds. It was a tinkering machine.

For some reason I can’t get my harmony remote to control any of the DNR functions. I’ll keep trying. Is there any way to manually touch pins to adjust this?

If it is the TBC ic, is there a modern replacement?

I figure if I can get this fixed, it would be a step up from my 604 (and 703 which doesn’t have AC-3)

I've had problems using Harmony to control certain devices. It's not always a guarantee it will work. I don't know why the codes would transfer over or something. Yea its probably a bad cap. I should try mine out since I've not used it in a while but the movies I want to see are in storage which I should get them this March... I hope

The IC’s are multiple pin parts soldered onto the video board . The board is designed to match the pin out of that IC. You cannot just put in any part. Best option is to find another video board, the one on the top, and swap it out to see if the problem goes away. This issue being constantly at the same position every time no matter what disc you play is a problem with the digital storage of the fields in memory.

Thank you for that information. I wasn’t sure which board to look at.

Do these boards ever turn up used? Or can I try another board from a similar machine?

If nothing else I’ll save this one with my other parts players, but I sure like how this one looks.

Board is VWV1421 and I don't think the swap out would be difficult at all once you find one. I think it is unique to the CLD-79.

Another interesting option if you have good electronics experience would be to try to bypass the digital memory.

Hey Kurtis. Is it possible the issue could be aged caps or cold solder on this video board contributing to the problem as well?




The CLD-79 appears to be a "one off" type of player where there are very few clones to attain spare parts for it. It's quite ubiquitous to find parts for a CLD-D704 since so many clones exists for these units.

Maybe it's possible to use a CLD-99 board on a 79 since the chassis holes for the RCA jacks appear to match? The only difference appears to only be the Y/C Separator circuit.

Possibly, but if I found a broken CLD-99 I would probably be using the CLD-79 to resurrect it.

I did see that pin 20 on IC500 (digital video processor) is labeled video and isn't hooked up to anything. Surely it wouldn't be as easy as trying to tap that directly or jumping it to the video buffer?

You'll see people part out players every so often. Someone recently gutted a LD-S2 on eBay. I don't think the seller realizes how little chance those boards have of selling.

IC500 takes in the analog takes in the analog video signal and output the digital signal to IC602 which is where the NR is performed. IC601 uses IC602 for the video memory. IC601 output digital to the video D/A’s to re-create the analog signals. You could try taking the video input at connector CN51 pin 1 and isolating the video D/A IC604 output and and jumper the video signal there to skip the digital processing adding something to allow adjustment of the video level. This is for the composite signal only. The 99 and 79 boards cannot be swapped as the 99 is programmed to have the Mitsubishi Adaptive filter added.

The issue with this 79 is most likely in IC602 as the digital video is sent over as 8-bit video with the sync signals. Most likely IC602 has a memory error as trouble with a video bit would cause issues in every storage pixel. This has issues with specific addresses in the memory. This is not a capacitor issue.

Now I have 2 part 79 units and may be willing to part with a video board. If interested write me at kbahr@comcast.net

Forgot to add pin 20 if IC500 is not pure analog, input pin 47 is digitized and then a D/A creates the pin 20 analog signal. You would want to use CN51 pin 1 or IC500 pin 47 for pure analog.

Very, very insightful information. Thank you Kurtis.

IC500 in the CLD-D703 is also PD0146A so I might give this a try.

This is great information! Maybe I’ll desolder the shield on that board and look over those ICs. Nothing seems amiss on the other side.

But it sounds like the issue is beyond caps or broken traces or other simple things.