Thanks to xtempo (very much) I now have a barcode reader. I’d like to get some educational LDs to use it with but since I never really paid much attention to this market I don’t even know what I’m looking for. Does LDDB have a category for this? Did this format ever take off outside of the US? Are there Japanese discs? Maybe the National Film Board of Canada?* What are some of the more interesting ones? We never had these in my school. We just used film strip, slides, 16mm, and eventually VHS so I have no real background.

There is a good deal on eBay for The Human Body Vol 3 but this deals exclusively with the reproductive system and the excretion system and I was hoping for something less disgusting to get started with.

Also, two things I learned. Apparently Pioneer made DVD decks that also use the laser barcode system although by that time you’d really think a PC would be best for the entire operation...I mean, that would have been post-Windows 95 at that point.


* I would love to have Paddle to the Sea on LD. https://youtu.be/uhjb1IG1pnQ

Wow, I wonder how paddle to the sea would be today with a plastic boat?? and possibly a GI Joe soldier in it

I have an apple encyclopedia that uses the barcode but that's in KY though I don't know of anything else. I sort of remember stuff in school but that was years ago. YOu can have it if you like news and events

Encyclopedia of Multimedia, The [APPLE]

Do you mean this? I’ve never seen this before. Is it meant to team up a Performa with an LD player? I know some of that stuff is. I’m mainly looking for stand-alone discs (no computer required).

At my school district we had an Apple II based catalog system in the libraries with bar codes on the books sort of early. Before many stores had checkout scanners. That was it for bar codes. It wasn’t very good at reading back then either. Maybe the administrators got a bad taste of bar codes early and told Pioneer to F off.

Its pretty much the same except the running time is 750 years.

It doesn't use a computer just some fun stuff. It was apple and a LaserDisc so I grabbed it. Also I think mainly the science programs we had use those barcodes but still I can't remember any specific title. Wish there was a way to track that.

I have about 20 different sets, bought from a guy that picked them up at a school salvage. Haven't had a chance to go through them yet.

Let me know if you want to get rid of anything. I’m mainly looking for anything that’s complete and in good shape. Science and history, etc.

Practical reasons, probably. You could just shove a DVD player under the TV in the rack. School computers are almost never state of the art so they probably would've had to pay through the nose just to upgrade even one PC to actually play DVDs back in the day. And really, a PC even today without an SSD takes ages to load up, whereas with a DVD player you can just stick the disc in and go.

I haven't seen any new "professional" DVD players in years either so I think that might've been a very brief thing in history of classroom TV anyway.

You know, since we're talking about educational discs, I've noticed some of the Dream Machine: A Visual Computer discs have a sticker on them mentioning a floppy disk, presumably for use with a player hooked up to a PC. I always wondered what that one was about.

Yeah, for playing programs from beginning to end nothing is faster than LD. When you want random access of high quality stills though (why you want a barcode reader) DVD is really pretty crap. Even a PC from the beginning of DVD can display images at least double the resolution of DVD and that goes a long way when it comes to maps or labeled anatomical illustrations, etc.

The remote xtempo gave me and the DVD system I saw both also work with the CD version of the barcode system which I for sure know nothing about.

For about 10-15 years the Laserbarcode really must have been pretty good. Combine it with a projector and you can directly engage a lot of people.

That's probably why the professional DVD players lasted so briefly. If you're gonna display those images off a PC anyway, you might as well go with DVD data rather than DVD video since there's no fixed limit to the resolution.

I have several discs that use the laserbarcode system, a biology one full of animations that I actually ended up using for revision during my college course last year and several science ones narrated by Don Herbert. I can see how the bar codes would be useful assuming you had the proper scanner and not the rubbish pen type one.

I actually picked up a Pioneer V7300 and V8000 on ebay a while back. The V7300 has laserbarcode functionality and the V8000 does not. I've not found any DVDs that use it yet and I have little doubt there are very few to speak of. Their both very solid machines as you would expect, all BNC connectors, RS232C and the V8000 has DVI which makes it practical for use today.

Those DVD players were intended for educational/industrial LaserDisc DVD ports - Pioneer posted some of the details on a .pdf once, IIRC the digital/analog channels are emulated as well, and the LD serial protocol is as well. So there was probably a decent market for a year or few, but once embedded computers got powerful enough to do everything there was less of a point to it.

Now you can just use a Raspberry Pi or somesuch

I've never heard of the V7300 (LD-V7300 or CLD-V7300). Can you double-check the model number?

There are 3 flavors of the LD-V8000, and 2 flavors of Barcodes. Players with SN KJ3906076 and up have LB1 built in. Players with SN ME3912276 and up have LB2 built in. Any player prior to ME3912276 can be EPROM upgraded to support LB2. I have no idea how to tell if the EPROM upgrade has been applied to the player.

I was looking for educational laserdiscs on ebay for fun and it is messed up. There are titles that aren't educational pop up.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Coronet-Videodisc-The-Human-Body-Vol-3-Laserdisc/292257793456?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2060353.m1438.l2649
This is one that is cheap.

rein-o, he literally cited that as an example and why he doesn't want it

However, I did a quick search for the distributor and this seems interesting enough: https://www.ebay.com/itm/VIDEODISC-MAP- ... :rk:3:pf:1


Got any specific examples?

I mean technically you could consider something like the National Geographic discs educational, but those were intended for consumer use, not establishment, and thus would not use laserbarcode.

more like mainstream movies like sleeping beauty and pink floyd the wall to name a few. I put educational laserdisc in the search box.

So did I, also got a whole bunch of music titles for some reason.