Hey guys. I figured while I was waiting to find a replacement m holder for my D604, I'd look for other players locally. So I found a working CLD-1070 locally and started ripping some discs. I'm noticing a bit of chroma noise and kind of a pattern of noise in general. I don't know what this player can do, what condition the internal parts are in, or really the limitations of the laserdisc format. So I'm hoping some of you may be able to give your opinion on what I'm seeing. Here's my signal path: CLD-1070 > composite > Later model Panasonic DVD Recorder (as a passthrough) > component > Hauppauge HD PVR (H.264 14mbps).

Below are two sample videos I created from two different discs:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/9f1nx89bt ... ew.ts/file

http://www.mediafire.com/file/dvdz8ber3 ... ew.ts/file

For what it's worth, I notice it more on my TV, which may be more saturated than my laptop monitor that I'm on right now. But if you turn your brightness up, you should see the noise in the black areas, and hopefully you see the chroma noise that I'm talking about specifically.

Thanks in advance.

I can't make those links work. I'm not even sure what they are.

In general though LD is loaded with chroma noise. It will increase if there are issues with the player but only the later high end machines could be called noise-free. You're probably just experiencing that normal running.

Calibration of your display is key. If you are asking for too much brightness and contrast it will look absolutely terrible.

You click on the link, then click the big green "Download" button. The files are .ts files, and they're interlaced, so make sure and play it in something that deinterlaces by default (and deinterlaces well) like Windows Media Player. VLC is pretty terrible for interlaced content.

Anyway, I know it's a composite format, so there's going to be some inherent chroma noise. Having said that, I don't see as much noise is VHS rips of the same content (Panasonic AG-1980P > s-video > the rest of the chain is the same). I suppose it's possible that the Panasonic VCR is doing some advanced filtering or it's just lower resolution and therefore the noise is blurred. Just looking for another set of eyes who is experienced with laserdiscs for confirmation.

For context, I do a lot of music video collecting, and there's a lot that isn't available on DVD, but *is* available on VHS and laserdisc. Laserdisc is the more expensive route but has greater resolution. I want to make sure it's worth my time before I sink a ton of money into this project.

Thanks for explaining the link, I'm not downloading anything from some rando.

As for your copying, while you can do it its illegal to copy copywritten stuff.

It would be nice for you to post on youtube or something so that others can see but Zeta is correct, this is LD and while the best LD may
be on par with DVD its still LD and not magical.

Almost like Vinyl and CD.
When someone isn't bias towards a format they can really hear that CD is the better choice.

Its all about the mastering and what you know my heart.

Guys, I really appreciate the help, but I'm not trying to debate the theoretical advantages of DVD vs Laserdisc. I'm trying to verify is what I'm seeing is expected or if I need to be looking into recapping or getting a better player. It seems like there's a real strong fear about downloading MPEG-TS files (not executables or scripts or anything dangerous). What free upload sites would make you guys feel better? I can remux to any other format as well, as long as the container supports H.264.


I'm well aware of the legal implications here, but this is for my own private collection and is under the same umbrella as ripping a CD to MP3.


Please understand that I provided high quality samples for the express purpose of not destroying the visual artifacts that I'm trying to get opinions on. Uploading to YouTube is like throwing 3/4 of the information out the window (or if you want to talk about actual bitrate it's closer to 90% thrown away). I assumed we all agree on this here - it's a videophile forum after all.

All things being equal if they used the same masters and there isn’t anything wrong with anything then LD will DESTROY VHS and it will be obvious to even noobs. It has double the picture info. In your situation I think maybe your VCR is doing a better job than your LD player is.

I have a JVC VHS/DVD recorder and it massively cleans up not only tapes but also anything else you run through it so I’d normally assume that the LD would still end up looking way better. Perhaps your LD player is in rough shape. When they develop mechanical issues they can produce chroma noise and also crosstalk on CLV discs. If CAV discs look significantly better that’s usually a hint there is an issue.

These are videos I made from LDs using a CLD-99 and a JVC somethingortheother:







These look pretty good to me and weren’t even done using the best quality possible, which on my setup would be to capture the HDMI out on the VCR-DVDR. These were done by making actual DVDs and dropping the VOBs into YouTube for automatic conversion.

I’m no archivist but when it comes to straightforward video I don’t see any point in keeping it interlaced and then telling people they need Windows to watch it. Just convert it to progressive on your end then you can be assured they see what you want them to see.

And yeah those sleezy pirate sites are just...nah. I don’t like going there. Web space is super cheap nowadays, no need to slum with Kim Dot Com or worse.

That's exactly what I'm trying to figure out now. I wish someone would just *look at the samples provided* and guide me to where the problem is (if any). I do appreciate the info about the CLV vs CAV discs though; that's new information to me.

Your Youtube videos do look quite good, but the bitrate Youtube uses really kind takes out all the detail in the areas I'm talking about, so it's hard to tell. Keep in mind, the only reason I have this music video collection is that YouTube starves the bitrate to a comical level and doesn't have a 480p60 option. Otherwise, it would be a nice resource.


The simple answer is that I didn't want to re-encode the source material and introduce more generation loss. But let's put it this way: the majority of video in history is interlaced. Analog NTSC/PAL. VHS, Laserdisc, DVD. Even most of what you watch on TV today is interlaced by the TV networks (the vast majority are 1080i, some are 720p). The only reason I mentioned it is because the VLC player got really popular about 10 years ago, and yet it *still* doesn't deinterlace by default. So I don't want to tell you what player to use, but I never recommend VLC for playing back interlaced content, otherwise you're busy looking at combing artifacts rather than the actual content.

As for keeping something interlaced vs converting it to progressive, there's an argument for both sides, as well as a time and place for each. I worked in the video encoding realm professionally for many years and can talk at length about it if you want, but all I can say is that there is never a *perfect* deinterlacing algorithm, and so the best method today may not be the best method in 5 years. To convert to progressive now implies that you believe you're working with the best algorithm possible. I assure you that you are not.

And on a more practical level, keeping something interlaced maintains compatibility with DVD, Blu-ray, etc. Once you deinterlace properly (e.g. 480i > 480p60; 1080i > 1080p60), you normally go out of spec from not only delivery standards but also decoding hardware.

Ah I see. I was thinking you were maybe trying to copy and paste the link with the ellipsis or something. I didn't realize you had a moral qualm with mediafire. To call it a pirate site is a stretch, but I understand your point about the common uses of ad-supported free web storage. I've uploaded them to another server:

http://www.theselectedworks.com/video/sample_new.ts
http://www.theselectedworks.com/video/sample2_new.ts

I don’t have a moral problem with piracy. I just linked you to three videos I pirated myself.

I did try watching your videos. They wouldn’t play for me. I had never seen .ts as a video extension before so I gave up. I believe I heard the first few frames from a very popular Phil Collins songs but that’s it (which would be pirate, but again, I don’t a problem with that).

I don’t have Windows so I don’t have use of Windows Media Player.

We don’t have a lot of members here but we do share videos and screen grabs and usually it’s via YT or a direct link to a private server. Maybe we’re just out of date here.

EDIT: I was able to get the videos to play in, of all things, Quicktime. Its a 70MB stream...wouldn't have expected that.

They are both almost totally devoid of color so analyzing chroma noise is...very hard, because there is so little chroma to be noisy. Only the section with the donkey or whatever it is actually has more than a second or two of sustained color. The interlacing drives me crazy though and may be exacerbating it. Do you actually watch them interlaced at any point?

The samples were kept short for the purposes of fair use either way. MPEG-TS (.ts) is what all broadcast TV is contained in, as well as Blu-ray (with the .m2ts extension) and also what most (all?) modern camcorders record in (usually as .MTS). It's also the default container for many capture devices because it can contain multiple video and audio stream types (e.g. MPEG-2, MPEG-4, AC-3, MP2, PCM, etc). It's effectively the working man's version of MKV/matroska. Windows plays it by default, but Apple really just kinda gave up on file type support with Quicktime a while back. It's odd considering a lot of professional video is authored on MacOS

Anyway, I re-encoded the two videos as progressive H.264 at 60fps. I had to put the rate factor pretty high to not introduce generation loss, hence they're much bigger. Confirmed that they play back in Quicktime on my Mac.

http://www.theselectedworks.com/video/sample_new.mov
http://www.theselectedworks.com/video/sample2_new.mov

And I don't think you guys are out of date - YouTube wins out in convenience for sure. I realize that the majority of people are focused on the content and are not as concerned with the overall fidelity of the delivery method. Hence why my Spectrum TV signal has macroblocks everywhere and yet they charge money for it like nothing's wrong The majority speaks with their money and quantity wins over quality every single time. But as I mentioned earlier, I worked with encoding video for a living, so it's hard for me to turn the part of my brain off that sees imperfections.

I haven’t watched any appreciable amount of broadcast TV since before it went digital so I don’t know about that I guess. I do copy/pirate/collect a ton of stuff from all sorts of places though and I’ve never seen a .ts.

Can you use a clip that has color in it? These are almost monochrome so the color noise is low. Luma noise is almost zero on LD, btw. To make this problem really stand out use I Want to Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) or Big Time.

The chroma noise in the blacks is specifically what I was talking about. I definitely see a lot of red and blue. Take a look at the letterbox bars on the second clip. There's a fair amount of luma noise too. I can find another clip, but please let me know if you're seeing what i'm talking about. Might be worth boosting your saturation a tad just to exacerbate it.

If you see random color speckles everywhere (ie: color burst, I think Pioneer called them) then that may be light rot. I’m at work and can’t see the new versions of the videos at the moment. If it’s rot it will be all over the screen but more visable in solid areas. The speckles will be of every color. Fully black or white speckles are another type of defect.

Music videos are often terrible quality, sadly, some even shot on VHS so I do have to reiterate that you can’t have your standards too high.

It's pretty easy to see when a music video is shot on video vs film. The vast majority of music videos throughout history (yes, even the early ones) are shot on film, though they occasionally may be telecined to video for special effects or chroma key. Sure, they may not be shot on the same calibre of film as a feature length, but certainly most are leagues above Super 8 or 16mm handheld quality. Ones shot on video will have much more fluid motion, even if they are decimated down to 30p. Most of the masters from this time are probably on either film reels or Betacam tapes, which should be very high quality if stored correctly.

As for light rot / laser rot, I do have a disc that exhibits this (and a replacement on the way), but that looks quite a bit different than what I'm seeing. I suppose my standards may be too high has well. Hopefully that was implied in the subject or my first post. I'm kinda just waiting for someone to help me find the benchmark by which I judge everything else. Keep in mind this is going to be a very time and money intensive process. I only want to do it once. If the quality can be improved greatly at this stage in the process, I'd like to know that.

Wait, is this from the 8" bonus disc? I always thought it'd be the original 70's version.

Yes that's the 8 inch disc.
I thought it would have been the earlier one also.
But its on youtube so someone can still enjoy it.

I’m pretty there is just one short, and it’s the same as what’s in the movie except for a frame or two. I think the short predated the feature but not by much. The bonus disc mainly gives you the whole short in CAV and chapter names for sections of the short which to my knowledge aren’t listed anywhere else.

EDIT: oh yeah, there was a previous version. Now that I’m watching it on YouTube I realize that I’ve already seen it and sort of forgot about it. Most/all of the photography is different but they used the same locations and props. I agree that it would have made more sense to put this on a preorder item but it had room for both. Bummer.

Well it certainly makes the bonus disc a lot less interesting to me, since I prefer the original short. Isn't this version the same that appears in the actual movie?

The beginning is slightly different.