I know early dvds sucked and had bitrate issues. I'm just wondering if at the time you were disappointed in the video quality or not. I believe in some cases laserdisc even beat a lot of these early dvd releases Faculty, The (1998) [15972 AS]. I guess it all depends on when you adopted DVD. If you didn't get the early DVD's you lucked out because some of them were bad and suffered from bitrate issues and just companies not caring enough to give a half decent release. Seems like more care was put into a good amount of laserdiscs since by comparison laserdisc pretty much looks better than vhs in every category when it comes to clearer picture and better colors than VHS.

For sure I remember being disappointed with DVD but it has to be said that the players available at the time weren’t very good. A DVD from 1999 looks way better now than it did in 1999. Now the players all upscale very well, output HDMI, etc.

Dark City is one where the LD is better than the first DVD of it and it’s made 10x more obviously when it’s being played back on a Best Buy price buster special from the same year as the DVD.

In another thread I complained about What About Bob’s early DVD. I’m pretty sure the LD would look better than than DVD.

Now dvds are great because they just downscale 4k or 1080p sources to dvd.

Yeah, DVD looks great…now. Now that we have DTS and anamorphic widescreen and more density on the disc and way better playback software and HDMI not to mention multiple remasters. In 1999 the format was a lot crappier.

I recall some of the earlier ones we received in this neck of the woods were the type that you had to flip over to watch the rest of the movie.
'The Rock' was one of those. At the point where Sean Connery's character gets back on to Alcatraz and opens a door for the others to enter, he then says: "Welcome to The Rock!". Then you had to manually flip the disc to side B. Like a mini Laserdisc.

That was pretty rare in my experience. Far more common were the versions where Wide was on one side and Full Frame on the other.

The transition to dual layer was not so smooth. All but the best players would have a slight hiccup there at the layer change and the combination of a so-so disc and a so-so player could result in player lockup. I don’t mean this happened on old worn out stuff. At this point was was no old worn out DVD stuff. This was brand new stuff. DVD was just kinda buggy in some ways and the definition of “quality” was in flux. DVD was designed to be really good but also really cheap and those two opposing goals tend to undercut each other.

When people complained about the expense and hassle of big old LDs I think…I never had these issues with it.

One memory of DVD…I was renting a house with a friend of mine. We were watching DVDs on a PS2 at the time. We got a new anime DVD and it didn’t play. We updated the DVD player and then it did play. Never had this happen with LD…

Last night I needed two factor authentication to watch a movie. Never had this happen with LD…

I’ve watched Toast of London six times through on Netflix. It’s my favorite modern show. I paid $20 a month for years just to be able to watch this show…essentially…since little else on this service interests me anyway…and then one day it was gone and I can’t watch it anymore. That never happened with LD…once owned it is owned forever.

LD was such a good format it’s more enjoyable decades after it died than DVD is. DVD, aside from the title selection, is the stinker of home video. The resolution is better than DVD…but barely. The macro blocking is hideous, the software occasionally buggy, sound is too often mediocre. DVD introduced copyright protection and unskipable menus. It even allowed hotlinking external advertising, so cutting edge at being bad! The only way to make it worse would be password protection.

Yep, I recall the slight pause at the layer change.

I also remember a few discs not being fully compatible with my early model Philips DVD player. A Bruce Willis movie - Last Man Standing was one of those. You could play, pause and stop the disc, and skip to a particular chapter. It would not allow you though to fast forward or rewind.

Fast-forwarding and rewinding is one of digital video's (and especially DVD's) Achilles heels. Video codecs simply aren't optimized for that purpose. You can't just run the tape/move the laser faster, so it can quickly become a CPU- or bitrate-bottleneck on older hardware. Even jumping around isn't that simple, since compression means part of the picture may be frames or seconds behind in the data stream.

There's an alternate timeline where DVD was much better in practice than it actually turned out to be. Between weak and unreliable early hardware, poor mastering practices, and all the corporate-imposed annoyances, DVD got set up not for "failure" obviously but for the most unfortunate kind of success.

A few notes about my move into DVDs, in 1997-98:

-I was in no hurry to buy a DVD player even though many DVDs were about US$20 in the early days versus $30-35 for Laser Discs often. Some DVDs were also around $30, I think the Universal Studios ones.

-Knowing the history of the Laser Disc format, and learning that some DVDs would be two-sided, I thought immediately "Well, they will take the lesson from the Laser Disc format, and make -every- player (almost all $500 and up in the beginning) dual-sided from the start, right? Right???" And I was disappointed that they did not, none in fact.

-I was also disappointed to see many movies in pan-and-scan only in the early days. This is another thing I thought they would "do correctly, right from the start".

-A few movies (Jingle All The Way I am pretty sure, and maybe George Of The Jungle and probably others?) were in widescreen on Laser Disc but -not- on their DVD versions at first. That sure did not do much to sell the new format to me.

-I did not understand at all what "enhanced for widescreen" meant at first. I only learned later about "in-player letterboxing" for the still-univeral-in-the-USA 4:3 displays used at that time.

-What moved me toward getting into DVDs sooner was the announcement of that horrible "DIVX" concept (essentially DVDs that you have to "pay rent to watch" rather than just buy and own, if you do not already know), and its potential threat to the already-started normal DVD format.

-What made me decide "OK, I am going to start buying DVDs today" was the news that seven existing DVD titles directed or produced by Steven Spielberg were going to be pulled off the market because he wanted to support -only- the DIVX format. Gremlins was the one I knew I wanted; The Color Purple was another but I do not remember the others. I was on vacation in the Chicago, Illinois area, which at that time was still an excellent place for shopping. I probably went to five DVD/video stores, and I did find Gremlins, and I bought Capricorn One (widescreen) and maybe a couple of others too. At one point after that, I remember that Gremlins was pretty expensive on Ebay (another "new thing" in 1997-98).

-Soon, when the Laser Disc format started its decline, I started chasing down and buying a bunch of titles I did not expect to see on DVD for a long time if ever, such as Big Jake and Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines. There was a Web site where you could search for Laser Discs by title and it would find online sellers, maybe run by a man named Steve Martin (not the actor). I probably still have my ~1999 bookmark for it on my desktop computer.

-I also saw my first High-definition TV broadcast and TV sets in 1998, and by the end of 2000 I was one of the first fifty customers for a computer-based HDTV recording system. The coming of HDTV, and of course HD video discs, meant that any "thrill" I got from the DVD format did not last long.

Well... technically I've never been from LD to DVD.

Didn't like DVD by then, still don't like it today.

I mostly skipped Blu-Ray as well after the huge disappointment that HD DVD was, but I fully embraced 4K UHD.

Julien

No

Definitely do. My first DVD player was the DVL-919. A very "meh" DVD player by all measures and a squarely average LD player (honestly though, it was an upgrade from my Sony MDP-A3.)

I still bought LDs in DVD's infancy. The biggest things I remember in the transition from LD to DVD were the magazines of the era. The Laserdisc Newsletter became The Laserdisc-DVD Newsletter then finally The DVD-Laserdisc Newsletter. LD reviews went from the front of the magazine to the back, and the "Coming Attractions" list of Laserdiscs got smaller and smaller with each month. Widescreen Review used to give detailed and favorable reviews of Laserdiscs, sometimes saying the LD was better than the DVD of the same movie in terms of picture (when many early DVDs were highly compressed with tons of MPEG artifacts) or sound (many times they said the matrix Dolby Surround tracks on the LD bettered the Dolby Digital tracks on the DVD and LD.) That all changed though when they joined the DVD Forum and then basically had a distain for LD--dialing in 90% of the reviews. The last detailed LD review they ever made was for the import LD of The Phantom Menace--their first and only non-North American LD review.

The anime industry in the US which I was quite into at the time was quick to adopt DVD. So if you were an anime fan, you probably were an early adopter of DVD. When you could get the original language with optional subtitles and the dub in one package for the same price that you would the subtitled VHS, it was a no-brainer.

I'm still changing from LD to DVD.
When people are buying common LD titles for 100 bucks and the DVD is 5, I can't keep it anymore.
Thx gen-pop-culture collectors

I engage LD player, it hums but its pure weight suppresses all resonance. "LD PLAYER ENGAGED."

I engage my scaler. It channels the pure analogue sourced video signal and it's processors provide the perfect over/underscan to present the OAR. "SCALER ENGAGED"

I engage my Cathode Ray Tube. It displays an unlimited perfectly blended colour palette that LD demands. "CRT ENGAGED".

I engage my Digital Audio Signal Processor/DAC. The uncompressed full PCM audio of my LD booms. "DSP ENGAGED".

My components bristling with capability and appropriate settings, it all comes together when I press "play" "OPENING SEQUENCE ENGAGE"

I sit back and take it all in "SENSES ENGAGED."

I put a DVD in the DVD player. It "LOADS" then I have to f around with menus before I can watch the movie I apparently own (?). Then its macroblocked. Then it has compressed sound. "FRUSTRATION ENGAGED".

I take the DVD player and throw it through my window "PAYBACK ENGAGED."