The front facing button panel is cracked and about to come off, from shipping damage. All the tabs on the bottom and top (looks like 6 or 8 total) that keep the face held on are cracked off, the face is only held on by the fact that the laserdisc tray trim/facing is keeping it on. It did power on prior to shipping so I was wondering if it is the front panel circuit, is it easily repairable? I do have a programmable remote for it, Logitech Harmony 520.

Any specific places to look or tips on how to disassemble the thing? Or at least the front control panel so I can determine if that's the problem or not.

Today I took it to a local charity store (St. Vincent DePaul) but they apparently no longer accept things that don't work. I would of thrown it away right there but the store clerk said, before learning it was broken, that they wanted to use it in the store for some karaoke thing. I don't want it because I just received a nice replacement but, charity could use it if I could get it to power on/off and open/close. I guess as long as the machine plays karaoke nothing else matter.

The service manual might help!

https://manuals.lddb.com/LD_Players/Pioneer/DVL/DVL-V888/

Julien

Thank you!! I had no idea that subdomain existed.

Always available

[IMPORTANT] Hardware PDF Manuals

Julien

The circuit board is cracked It looks like ~30 traces that would need jumped. Although it's just a single sided board, which helps my motivation, I still don't think I'm up for this right now.

Assuming all the jumps are good, is there any hope? Any help is appreciated. Again, it was damaged by the box being dropped/roughed up during shipping.

The player now powers on but never ejects. The carriage that holds the eye goes up and down and other times the bottom eye moves about 5mm then halts. When I push POWER to turn it off, it blinks "-- OFF --" for a very long time then ~90 seconds later it finally shuts down. If I power it on with the POWER button, ~30 seconds passes until it boots/POST and then it prints "STOP".

Here's what happens after it powers on via the POWER button...

0. I press POWER and wait ~30 seconds for it to POST and print "STOP".
1. I press LD eject and the carriage raises (or lowers, I don't remember which).
2. ~30 seconds after the carriage moves, the bottom eye moves about 5mm then halts (lowest one under tray).
3. The machine prints "OPEN", but it never opens.
4. I again press POWER and the machine prints "-- OFF --"
5. ~30 seconds later the carriage lowers (or raises).
6. ~60 seconds after that it shutdown.

Why are the jumper wires so long????

If that's the only issue then yes you fixed it, looks like you have another issue that you need to find.
If you bought this working and its not I would try to get some or all of your money back.
Good luck.

I received a full refund and *if* I fix this I'm going to rip 1 disc and donate it to a local charity named "St. Vincent DePaul". Apparently they can use the karaoke feature and DVD feature.

If the jumps are good then I'll try the 2 most related things I've found, loose/bad ribbons and a jammed sled. Since the player appears to of been dropped on its side, hard, I'll have to also determine if the frame is square.

I know nothing about these players so I made the jumpers longer than normal in case of variables during reassembly. Technically, the facing is only attached by 3 screws atop underneath the sheath as all 3 of the bottom plastic rigger tabs are broken off.

The service manual doesn't list any problem scenarios, just explode and pinout diagrams so, I guess the repair of these is hands-on, trial by fire lessons.

The manuals for the other DVL models might have adjustment points that could be used for this model. You'd probably need an oscilloscope and a test remote (a Pioneer GGF model should be in the Harmony database), though.

Did you check the traces with a multimeter to make sure they're all correct and there's no bridges?

IT'S ALIVE!!!!!!!! I could use some advice on healing/fixing the plastic, which is supposedly ABS.

Apparently the eye for the underside of the disc was maligned or wasn't going back far enough on it's rail or something else wrong with it, I didn't know that though.

1. I forced the tray open (in retrospective I don't think I needed to).
2. I forced the underside eye from the back to the center of the machine.
3. I turned on the machine and the bottom eye sought to the back again.
4. This time the eye made a grinding sound and was vibrating back there.
5. I pushed down on the white spinner-picker-upper thing and the eye was picked up.
6. After the eye was picked up/changed, it performed a spin and it is seemingly works again!!

Currently all functionality seems intact although I don't know about auto-side change because all I have is a karaoke LaserDisc and when it reaches the end of side A, it prints "PAUSE". So I don't know about that but side change via the button works.

Thank you to all 3 of you. Honestly the most helpful was the link to the service guide as that let me know I would only be performing brute force tactics. There was no way I was going to take my scope to it :-/ It's always a good idea but, not knowing anything, well... too much time down that route.

Ah, nice.
The disc pausing at the end might be due to a code on the disc, not sure.
Some PlasticWeld or other epoxy would probably work for the plastic, maybe use a piece of plastic from something else and screw it to the two parts from the inside if you want to make it really strong.

Above is a good post but a little more work I think but its up to you.

I would get tape, little bit of paint, epoxy, small piece of wood or metal.
Put tape on outside of panel, mix a little bit of paint into epoxy and apply to break with a small piece of metal or wood to connect.
Coat all in epoxy.

It has a heroic ending, this story, but it didn’t have to.

Please don’t mail LD players.

Yes but something tells me he can't get an LD player locally in Afghanistan.
So one would have to take the risk.

I took your guy's epoxy + brace suggestion. I quickly printed this elaborate brace but decided to only use a portion of it, it has holes in case I need screws later on. The brace is a failure because I *_thought_* I read somewhere that epoxy would cause PLA to melt a little, soft like when using vapor for surface smoothing. I was completely wrong, the PLA didn't cause any reaction at all.

I couldn't find a single player locally. I tried over 30 different pawn shops and a few of which were chain stores. One shop claimed to have about 500 or so LD's but none of them had players. Tried craigslist too. I was looking for a player and 1 specific LD... no love.

P.S. The LD I'm looking for is a copy (or two) of 10,000 Maniacs: MTV Unplugged (1994) [40183-6] Just that disc, no others.

The next thing I have to figure out is how to rip a disc "bit perfect". There's a lot of cloudy information revolving around this, but I do know that on Linux and Windows "Reaper" does work. ALSA (ie. arecord) works straight out of the box. I'm not sure about MacOS (doesn't run well in VMPlayer... pretty badly in fact). I also know that some mixer software won't allow bit perfect ever. ie. Focusrite Sapphire Pro 24 (old Firewire) using their official mixer. Also, some editing software won't or hides the option to record bit perfect ie. Pro Tools 12.5 and Ableton and Audacity apparently wont capture bit perfect (but can edit after turning off dithering).

Anyhow, thanks for all the help . Some day soon the Thrift Store will have a new player.

I use an ESI 2496 along with Sound Forge to capture bit-perfect audio, not sure if there's freeware that can do it. There should be guides for doing this on media preservation sites like fanrestore.com