8:16 From capture to decoding, its all possible in Windows/MacOS Arm today, alongside many video tape formats thanks to vhs-decode which windows binary bundles ld-decode with it, alongside cvbs-decode and hifi-decode, also not limted to just the DdD for FM RF capture today.
@@AureliusR Sadly due to standard post workflows and ease of use, resolve is clunkly on Linux, a good 75% of commerical ingest setups are using Blackmagic/Vrecord are MacOS based, also the apple M1-M3 are the fastest platforms for decoding FM RF with current code due to raw single core speeds, I love Linux and I hope the projects bring it into more peoples lives alongside learning basic hardare tooling, but the end goal is to get the tools into as many hands as possible.
The thing I like the most about this project is it's fork "vhs-decode", it requires cheaper hardware since VHS tapes have lower bandwidth that can be covered with cheap Connexant PCIe cards. It may be the last non-expensive way to have high quality VHS captures, specially if you live in an area where you can't find professional second hand videotape equipment.
I wonder/hope if there is or will be a Video 8 variant of that as well, I've captured old family videos through just analog (...let's be real tho, more than good enough) but that would be awesome to extract the last few bits of quality straight outta 1995.
@@Kalvinjj Its not limted to VHS it covers the Sony 8mm formats, Video8 and Hi8 using standard Jig points off Digital8 camcorders, so you can get your metadata off the firewire run and your archive off the RF capture as Video/HiFi/Timecode are all on seprate carriers like LD so 1 capture point RF wise.
Really the best thing to say is it requires 20msps mimium sampling so half or less the storage requirement of LD, (well 16msps for NTSC, and 18msps for PAL but we stick to 20msps with FLAC compression to be safe and ensure 100% signal convrage even if its off spec)
Yes, as I commented below, there is no reason why this can't be tweaked for any analog video tape format. They all use FM recording. The only caveat is the color under process consumer VTRs used as well as the multiplexed RY/BY second track method the Sony Betacam (not Betamax) used. But there is no reason this can't be handled in a software based decoder.
@@6581punk So we're going even one step further on the archival, tho I can definitely imagine that something like Dragon's Lair would be archived from it's original cell animation to begin with, for further releases on the market.
I saw Laserdisc and Domesday and thought this was about the 1980s Domesday project in the UK where they used a laserdisc to create a modern day Domesday book with a laserdisc machine controled by a BBC Master. It got recovered about 20 years later when they thought it might get lost due to hardware failure of the players.
Yeah, me too. We had a Domesday system at our school, and I thought it was the coolest thing at the time. IIRC, they have a Domesday system in operation at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park.
As this video details, that's actually the origin of the name, as the Domesday Duplicator is part of the Domesday86 project, which was started to explicitly make digital copies of the Domesday Project's LD discs. The use has expanded out past just the Domesday Project LDs though. There's also a fork that uses the Domesday Duplicator on VCRs, with accompanying VHS-decode software. The "Domesday Reloaded" project hosted by the BBC somewhat recreates the experience on the web, although it's incomplete due to copyright concerns over the National disc.
I remember contributing to our local submission back when I was at school. Every school kid did something in 1984-5 or so. I'd watch stuff like tomorrows world to get updates on what was happening with it.
George Lucas' first major film THX-1138 was not released digitally in its original form, only in one of George's 'enhanced' editions with CGI and such inserted. It's been worth holding on to the original laserdisc (and even the VHS) because of that...
I do not personally care about laserdisc, but projects like this remind me just how much effort ppl are putting into tech preservation... and I applaud any such efforts.
This video has one of the best descriptions I've yet come across of what is actually encoded on a Laserdisc. It's fascinating that the inventors of the format realized that they could simply convert a 10MHz video signal to PWM and record the pulses!
wow, this thing is awesome! the results truly do speak for themselves. LD preservation is super important with the risk of disc rot and just all that comes with it being an analogue medium so I'm glad we've basically got it down.
I saw the rip of the Laserdisc release of the playstation Ghost in the Shell cut scenes here on youtube a while back. If I remember correctly. It used captures from several discs with the same content. By doing that, they could stack the video signals and cancel out the difference that the individual discs had introduced. That way they got as close to the original master tape quality possible. I must say, I was astonished with how good it looked. And it makes me want as many as possible to rip their LD collections as soon as possible. Because that way you can get the very best master tape esque versions restored.
I wonder if the software that does the combining also checks for signs of cutouts or other damage-moments where one source's signal significantly differs from the others-and automatically cuts that source out of the mix during those spots.
I've been looking to make use of one of these myself, as I've been digitizing a lot of rarer Hong Kong and Japanese Laserdiscs for the past year. Side by side the quality improvement is so noticeable, and considering how unlikely a lot of these films are to ever get re-released beyond the analog era, I'll have to invest in properly figuring the duplicator process out.
The word "dome" in the name did indeed become "doom" in modern english. And as mentioned, it means "judgement" here. But, this word in its original meaning still exists in modern english, in an inflected form. The word "deem" (as in "I deemed it to be like this" or something) comes from the same word.
That's what I was thinking the moment I saw "Domesday" as "Doomsday", meaning that, while the device is still new, these discs will eventually be discontinued and become retro mediums.
The ham radio nerd in me loved this episode. This is rather like what you can do with older radios: You can physically tap into the raw IF (intermediate frequency) signal inside the radio, pipe it outside, and capture it via a software defined radio for *external* decoding. That way, you can still utilize the ham radio's superior front end and receiving hardware, but you can decode it all in software at a much wider bandwidth. 73 de WU2F
I'm glad you've done this. There was a lot of fuss in Britain a few years ago about how the data on the Domesday Machine discs was being lost because the hardware was no longer functioning and the masters had been lost.
Well, now you are required by Intergalactic law to go down the vhs-decode project too. (seriously, I'd love it had more exposure and possibly reach as it'd also certainly move the project a little faster and further. with the added bonus of having a reference video on youtube)
OMG thank you for this. I found the related VHS project earlier this month and have been trying to wrap my head around all of this. Very much love seeing this explanation. Looking forward to the next one.
11:02 While not easy, it's very much doable. Laserdisc audio preservationists such as blah-ray (or those who supply Blah-ray with captures to compare) have been capturing ac3 and DTS for years without a DDD.
As a historian who’s had to look in the Doomsday Book, the dry description you gave made me laugh. It is really dull (but also really cool because you can look up places you know and see how tiny they were)
@@TechTangents ummm.. this is really interesting Shelby.😯.. was it Fran Blanche @FranLab who have those rare NASA LaserDisc that she can't safekeep online because of copyunrights BS??😤.+... this will be a nite tool for preserve those🤔..+.
It seems to me that a library's archive operation might want to look into something like this in order to preserve for the long term its legacy laser discs. Thanks for the review.
saw some anime enthusiasts mod vcr's into capturing the signals directly from the vhs's as well. apparently they're doing this because they're degrading with time too, and getting the signal before it's processed is far better. many animes released on vhs back in the 80s and were never re-released, japan tends to abandon their old stuff. for example there's like 15k film reels from the 1960s about to be destroyed in 2-3 months if nobody claims all of them.
Due to the decaying nature of probably all LDs, it is also important to contribute to the "stacking" efforts to try to reconstitute the least corrupted version of every disc. Due to copyright restrictions, I don't know if you can get a copy of the results even though you may have contributed a version.
I was going to suggest this as there is no check sum or CRC codes on the video component. Having a large collection of sample streams would allow for the reconstitution of the original, perhaps even with the aid of checking if distortion to the sub carrier signal is increased or decreased depending on the source selection. Very happy that this project exists even though only the copyright holders will gain the most benefit. You can be they will harness the archives one day to generate new copies for rental without giving back to the community. I hate modern video compression and cannot see how we have sunk so low. I have not watched more than a couple of movies on laser disk and am not worried about some loss of sharpness due to analogue transmission or recording but the horrible motion prediction artifacts and blocky compression on modern digital broadcast TV make me hate myself when I sometimes turn on the TV.
Back around 2010 I had a Laser Disk transfer process that I think was as good as it gets - until this! I tapped the 8bit digital video signal directly out of the internal TBC in a Pioneer CLD-95. I made an FPGA based interface board that converted the raw 8bit video to a SMPTE standard parallel composite digital signal*. Then I used a surplus broadcast NTSC digital decoder to get to standard component SDI. Then through a surplus DVNR noise reducer and onto and SDI capture card making DPX files to a 30TB raid. Now this could be compressed further but I kept the raw DPX files. Digital audio when present was just upsampled from 44.1K to 48K. There was a group in Germany that was working in a similar RF capture system for Sony Betacam tapes. Betacam, not Betamax, was a highly successful broadcast component analog format in the 1980s through 2000. It was very high quality. Originally it used standard Betamax tapes but ran the tape much faster. An L750 tape would only last 20min on a Betacam. Mid 1980 we had Betacam SP which used a larger cassette and metal tape and could record up to 90min IIRC. There are huge archives on Betacam tape that need digitizing. * There was a composite digital system in the 1990s that complemented the CCIR601 component digital standard. It was basically digitized NTSC or PAL. The digital tape format was called D2 and Panasonic made a half inch version called D3. Because of the way the signal was quantized (it digitized the sync as well), some of us, including me, thought that a first generation analog 1 inch tape was actually better than first generation composite digital recording. But of course the digital tape could go about 20 generations down with virtually no loss. By the early 2000s it was obsolete as the HDTV/DTV transition used component video.
I found an old Laser Disc player and a copy of "A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the way to the Forum" and grabbed them since the LD was still shrinkwrapped new. I should have known that LDs would degrade, especially since I have CDs and DVDs that are already dying on me. I'm glad someone out there is preserving them. Now I just need to find a hosting database of saved movies since there are some ancient ones I've only seen on LD.
I have laserdisc from the mid 80s completely functional, with no signs of decay….. other from the late 90 were rotted from day one. I think it was plainly a lack of care durin manufacturing duplicating, specially in the USA, rot was almost not present in discs made in Austria or Japan
This is amazing! I remember, for example, those videos of the amusement park ride. I searched on the net for some footage and found almost nothing. Now I understand why. Thank you very much for your incredible work!
I remember a school trip to London back in 1986 when I was 10; I was lucky enough to spend a couple of minutes using the BBC Domesday Project at the Science Museum, sparking in me a fascination with computers that has pretty much shaped my life. I sometimes imagine I might have turned out to be a normal person if it weren't for those two mindblowing minutes 🤣
You're doing great work archiving rare LaserDiscs! Respect for knowing about the Domesday project (and getting the pronunciation right haha) and BBC micro too, I'm guessing they are pretty obscure to Americans! I used the BBC micro quite a lot at primary school here in the UK because they lingered around in classrooms well into the 90s and were a very capable computer with lots of useful educational software, BASIC interpreter built into ROM etc. I have a vivid memory of seeing a maze game on the BBC when I was about 5 and being fascinated by it and that really kickstarted a lifelong love of computers and technology. Never got to try the Domesday project though.
My Criterion Collection AKIRA and Star Wars: The Definitive Collection will never be released on DVD, so this is absolutely something I want to do. Thank you for sharing this!
Now that's important, was aware of a few unique things that were doomed to rot on Laserdisc until now. Wow those old simulator videos! I'm sure everyone remembers some of those from the 80s and 90s, feels like those moving simulators were everywhere and I'm sure I recognise the roller coaster video at the least. Would love to see more of them.
Happened on your video through RUclips's "For You" suggestion algorithm - very interesting, it's given me a number of ideas .. Thanks very much for posting this and preserving the past for people who might be interested in the future - Awesome 😎
3:32 _"And 4:3 home releases were sometimes filmed 'open matte,' making more of the original footage visible on those than in widescreen releases."_ That's not always a positive. Some movies that were matted widescreen were composed that way, so removing those mattes could disrupt the picture's composition. That can affect how the audience is supposed to see the picture according to the intentions of the director and the cinematographer. And sometimes those widescreen mattes can hide what you really don't want to see, such as distracting or detracting details above or below the matted frame. Some directors, such as James Cameron, didn't mind open matte and even took effort to reframe the image for acceptable composition on 4:3, but others did care about such alterations. For a movie, it's usually best to watch it in its original aspect ratio.
I've got some recordable laser discs that came from gameworks in Tempe AZ. They were used back before sega bought them. I found them in the av room cleaning up after we went out of business. I think it was something that used to play on the video walls that hung from the rafters
Thanks, RUclips algo! Very interesting video, I didn't hear about this capture device before. It's a throwback to my LaserDisc time more than 25 years ago. I've sold almost all discs and the Pioneer player long ago, but it is a beautiful format, especially with the huge Special Edition boxes. Great to see the releases archived.
I love this. I bought a Laserdisc of Repo Man because the open matte was only ever released on LD & VHS. There are not even any composite rips of this version out there. Thanks Shelby, looking forward to seeing the second part.
This is very cool, especially for the niche things described. I met someone who has a stack of LD's from an old exhibition at our local science centre, with this tech those could be dumped, or captured I should say, in a meaningful way! Looking forward to the next video! :)
I have about a dozen LaserDiscs (mostly Japanese Anime) that I got from a friend some years ago, but the players are so darn expensive 😞 I would love to dump them properly but unless I find a cheap and good player and the Doomsday device gets cheaper, I'm stuck with looking at the beautiful cover art and booklets ...
@@TheRedOGRE I'm in a similar predicament as the OP with the Laserdiscs. The thing is, I also know basically nobody who has this setup that could rip it. I would love to "properly" rip my LDs, but for stupid prices for something I don't really have much of a personal "investment" into, honestly drives me away from wanting to do anything with the LD at all, aside from stare at it on my shelf. It's not very easy either way. I can spend tons of money doing it for the single LD I have (which would be ridiculously overkill and expensive), or I can wait until someone with this specific setup just so happens to come within my friend circle, which is full of fellow nerds, but not very likely to occur anytime soon. I have my reservations about sending an LD to someone I don't really know, as well. I don't know how well they'll take care of it, how well they're ripping it, or if they're a bad actor that won't do as asked and simply use it as a way to get a free LD.
@@TheRedOGRE I contancted some people from the Doomsday Duplicator community in th past, but they all were very ... let's say "unenthusiastic" to help out, so at some point I just gave up 🤷♂
@@Darkstar2342 that's lame. What can you do then? I'm sure someone would help out but finding the right person is probably hard. Sucks when communities are stuck up. It's obvs a bit to expensive to do yourself just on a whim with the dd dumper tool thing and all the storage you'd need to hold those massive files. Hope you meet the right person someday
I've been following the DdD for years now, and I already had a 4300D from previous forays into capping LDs, but it might be this video that tips me over into buying the DdD hardware and getting started.
3:20 while preserving home releases is important, I assume you know that the actual theatrical releases of Star Wars have been preserved by people who scanned the 35mm film and released it in 1080p.
Great work! I am a fan of obscure formats (particularly Blu-ray 3D) and hope that one day we can ensure full backups of most titles from formats like these are archived! A comparison to the ride film would be Happy Family 4D, which was released on 3DBD but few copies ever were produced. In contrast, some creators like Florian Werzinski have published copies of their ride films online in stereo to view.
Some years ago, a group grabbed one of those players with a serial interface and a player that could go frame by frame and had a component output. They captured every singe picture. They created DVDs of a quality which surpassed the official DVDs.
I learned about this awhile back because of the Laser Disk version of "The Legend of the Galactic Heroes". The laser disk version has a whole other animation then the later dvd and blu-ray versions. As the laser disk is the original TV broadcasted version, and the later DVD version added and changed allot (allot for the better tbh). But yea there are not allot of people preserving LD with the Domesday out there. Decent LD is almost impossible to find online for most disks. I was actually trying to find the best version of sailor moon, and found out that the LD version is pretty much the definitive version of the first few seasons. The later releases all have their own individual problems. Like the newest blu-ray being way to red for some reason, and having weird up-scaling. The only recordings of the LD version, are really low quality rips that are basically unwatchable on the Archive org.
2:55 I am sure I remember seeing that video in a simulator ride when I was a kid. 30+ years ago, it was a box with seats inside and hydraulics that moved it around like you were actually on the rollercoaster
@3:19 There is also the Star Wars despecialized editions to consider, which do carry over the best of all worlds in terms of the film's releases over the years. It isn't official, of course, but it's still the definitive way to watch the OT. Great vid btw, LD preservation of this caliber is really a sight to behold
oh wow, I hope someone is doing this with Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film, it's seemingly never gonna get released in another format due to licensing reasons and we've only got terrible VHS copies easily available. Real shame when it's got so many great first hand accounts of the silent film era. One episode ripped from laserdisc was briefly on youtube years ago and the quality leap was gigantic.
I bought one a while back. I’ve used it to capture 3 discs so far, all things that aren’t available on DVD. It’s tricky as hell but it’s super cool that this tech was developed.
90s Interactive TV vendors like Wink Communication used custom LD that had the data stream in the VBI to demo the product with a modified set top box. Simple setup that needed no encoders, rf modulators, etc.
I was an admin of LaserDisc Forever!, the largest group of LD enthusiasts in the world, for over a decade. We saw its growth from 300 members to, now, over 15,000. LaserDisc is dead: Long Live LaserDisc. I shared this there and *adore* that you made this video.
I’m so jealous of you techy types, I’m a network administrator and hardware technician for many years, but never to the likes of you. You inspire me brother.
OMG thanks to this video i found out that theres a similar thing for VHS and Video 8 etc. called VHS-Decode, and using a 25€ card from aliexpress with custom drivers and my Digital8 camera i should be able to do this with a Video8 tape I've recorded a decade ago that I've been trying to preserve in the highest quality possible, this is awesome, wish i could do LaserDisc bc it sounds way cooler but the way i had hardware lying around that can do exactly this?? This is so amazing !!
I didn't even know Family Dog was released on LD. I had tapes of the episodes when it originally aired. And that was the only way I archived mine. I'm jealous you got all the episodes on the disc. I think I only have half the series. The best episode I still think is the homeless woman episode. And you're right about the unmatted movies. The only movie that's ever released the wide and unmatted 4:3 frame, is The Transformers The Movie.
The Domesday Book captures a ton of information about the population, place names, land ownership. It might not be interesting to read in and of itself, but it's a really important resource for historians, archaeologists, genealogists etc. In other words, it's a unique record of a past time recorded in a physical format whose future utility might not have been apparent to the people who made it, but has lots of value a thousand years later. Much like a Laserdisc of Family Dog or the video from a motion simulator ride, it might not be inherently valuable to everyone, but is still information capturing something about a unique time in history and should be preserved.
I can't believe how in this age and with all the technology we have, some copyright, license and cost-benefit shenanigans make that some movie studios let their archives rot, instead of preserving their catalog. It's sad that some media is really lost forever.
I'd love to watch that The Fifth Element LD, it's one of my favorite Bruce Willis movies EVER!! Fifth Element and Armageddon are my two all time favourites of his
I have a Pioneer DVL-91 in my closet. It's slightly modded to allow DVD region changes. I can't even remember the last time I used it. I'd say some 2 decades ago. Hopefully, it still works....
Well, when I was looking at old animated movies, I found out some laserdisc movies were used to make the DVD of the movie from laserdisc. But that's just a few there used the laserdisc because it was better quality then on Betamax or VHS. Plus, it had all the extras the DVD needed in audio, subtitles and so on. So, in the end movies that's on VHS, Betamax, and other formants of the time the laserdisc can be edited different and show extra scenes that other formants never have.
Typically, when a commercial DVD is released using a "laserdisc" source, it's far more likely to have used the Laserdisc video MASTER, i.e. the video the Laserdisc was made from. So they didn't rip the LD, but used a high quality video tape, sometimes a digital video tape source, especially later in LD's lifetime, that is the same source the Laserdisc was created from. And while LD could offer some of the features DVD could, and was often the inspiration of the DVD feature, it was far more limited. For example, LD originally only had two analog audio channels, which it could play as either a single stereo track or two audio tracks. Dolby Digital AC3 used one of the analog audio channels, if it was on it, which left only a single analog mono track on the disc. Later, separate digital audio tracks were added, but you were limited to 4 audio tracks total, and some were likely mono if you tried to split it up. In contrast DVD can hold up to 8 audio tracks, potentially all surround. LD also doesn't really have any subtitle support. It has CC support, but nothing else, which often resulted in subtitles being "burned in" to the video image, which limits certain imports. DVD supports up to 32 subtitle tracks.
Years ago I got a very old pioneer LD player that had a helium neon laser it it. The laser was starting to go and I replaced it with a 635nm laser diode with a colimator lens. The image and sound was crystal clear afterwards. The beam out of a laserdiode is oval and the polarization plane is along the oval axis. To do the fix remove the laser tube it's HVPS, jumper the power OK wire. Remove the laser colimator lens and reuse the mounting to hold the laser diode. Connect the laser diode to any 5V rail in the player. Align the laser diode so the beam is emitted with maximum brightness out the laser lens using the colimator adjustment screws. That's it.❤
As you mentioned, it's great for preserving videos made for specific LaserDisc-based machines and internal videos not sold to the general public! Seeing this video somehow reminded me of someone's video on the rare CD Video format (the analogue format), which was based on LaserDisc (in comparison to the later Video CD format which was based on CD-ROM and was digital, if I recall correctly).
This is awesome. Years ago I read that the Japanese Studio Ghibli box set had an English dub that was made to play on flights from the US to Japan. This pops into my head every now and then and I look it up to see if I can find a copy, but haven’t worked super hard looking for rips.Im really excited at the prospect of getting to hear a good audio rip from these discs, or finally justifying the purchase to rip it myself. We could also get a better quality Wizard of Speed and Time!
I'd get one but I wanna get one of the older LD players that use the He-Ne tube laser because the lower wavelength might improve tracking over later units and if I'm already spending $500 on the DD itself, I might as well go all out and get an old tube laser ld player too. The only other issue is limited hard drive space.
Calibrated HeNe players are not as good as a calibrated more modern player. There are many myths in the land of LD to do with quality of different players and wavelength, etc. When the project was starting out there were tests of the same calibration disc in multiple players from the early HeNe which have slow tracking response as its a fixed laser tube with a lot of inertia on moving the mirrors and optics as opposed to a laser diode that moves with the optics. all the way upto MUSE players. The MUSE players were the best but almost impossible to calibrate and a well calibrated industrial player could outperform a non calibrated MUSE. At the end of the day the best player is the one you have, and if you get a sample of a disc in a sub par player there is nothing stopping you getting another sample at later date in a better player. But the time between there can be degradation of the media.
That's so neat, I too have an LD player (Pioneer CLD-V2600) I picked up locally that was originally from the University of Michigan's Flint Campus Learning Resource Center.
I controlled a laserdisc player by outputting DTMF over the wired remote input. I used my TI 99/4a. That’s all the remote was doing so it was easy. Pioneer but no idea model.
nice project the price for someone who wants to build their own is about 210 bucks. 130 for the fpga board 30 for the custom board 50 for the fx3 usb board
Motorcycle Mania or Motorcycle Madness was the name of the ride I was in, at the Joplin Mall in Missouri. It looked like a Star Trek shuttle on hydraulics and the video looked like they strapped a camera to the handlebars of a motorcycle and the ride was unforgettable. Test driving a dirt bike in the city and you end up driving across iron beams, stories high, between skyscrapers. The most subversive amusement ride I've ever been on.
This is an absolutely wonderful project coupled to an interesting and informative video. I'm a big fan of video game preservation, and this reminds me of the ethos and intent of that although different execution. As a tech nerd in general, it allowed me to learn something AV related I didn't know, and does something clever and hacky with consumer electronics to introduce a new feature, modding basically. Great stuff. Look forward to Back To The Laser Part II 😉😁
Excellent video! Glad to see there is a way to preserve this format. I didn't know that the data on a laserdisc was analog. I think most people would assume because its a disc that it is a digital format, but I guess that didn't occur until CD's came to be.
Had Spawn the Director's Cut in DTS. I captured the DTS track by using a Sound Blaster Live! and the custom KV drivers. I planned on muxing it with the DVD version... I ran out of hard drive space, and deleted the file, and sold the LaserDisc before I could capture it again. I don't miss it. I still have that same Fifth Element Disc, a LaserDisc player with an RF out and a Demodulator for the AC-3 sound... I can't wait till your next video to see what it takes for the decode!
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8:16 From capture to decoding, its all possible in Windows/MacOS Arm today, alongside many video tape formats thanks to vhs-decode which windows binary bundles ld-decode with it, alongside cvbs-decode and hifi-decode, also not limted to just the DdD for FM RF capture today.
yeah but why on earth would you willingly use windows or macos?
@@AureliusR Sadly due to standard post workflows and ease of use, resolve is clunkly on Linux, a good 75% of commerical ingest setups are using Blackmagic/Vrecord are MacOS based, also the apple M1-M3 are the fastest platforms for decoding FM RF with current code due to raw single core speeds, I love Linux and I hope the projects bring it into more peoples lives alongside learning basic hardare tooling, but the end goal is to get the tools into as many hands as possible.
Omg so many things in one sentence
The thing I like the most about this project is it's fork "vhs-decode", it requires cheaper hardware since VHS tapes have lower bandwidth that can be covered with cheap Connexant PCIe cards. It may be the last non-expensive way to have high quality VHS captures, specially if you live in an area where you can't find professional second hand videotape equipment.
I wonder/hope if there is or will be a Video 8 variant of that as well, I've captured old family videos through just analog (...let's be real tho, more than good enough) but that would be awesome to extract the last few bits of quality straight outta 1995.
@@Kalvinjj Its not limted to VHS it covers the Sony 8mm formats, Video8 and Hi8 using standard Jig points off Digital8 camcorders, so you can get your metadata off the firewire run and your archive off the RF capture as Video/HiFi/Timecode are all on seprate carriers like LD so 1 capture point RF wise.
Really the best thing to say is it requires 20msps mimium sampling so half or less the storage requirement of LD, (well 16msps for NTSC, and 18msps for PAL but we stick to 20msps with FLAC compression to be safe and ensure 100% signal convrage even if its off spec)
Yes, as I commented below, there is no reason why this can't be tweaked for any analog video tape format. They all use FM recording. The only caveat is the color under process consumer VTRs used as well as the multiplexed RY/BY second track method the Sony Betacam (not Betamax) used. But there is no reason this can't be handled in a software based decoder.
Interesting! Thanks!
I hope someone (with alot of money) archives all the pioneer laseractive games.
Yes, especially the Sega MegaLD games. Those are an important part of the Sega MegaCD/Mega Drive's history and it feels wrong to omit those.
and the laserdisc arcade games, such as Dragon's Lair, and Space Ace.
This is so important actually, we need to see that terrible crime game in Britain extracted
@@robmoye7373 Seems like those have been done? or certainly scanned from film anyway.
@@6581punk So we're going even one step further on the archival, tho I can definitely imagine that something like Dragon's Lair would be archived from it's original cell animation to begin with, for further releases on the market.
I saw Laserdisc and Domesday and thought this was about the 1980s Domesday project in the UK where they used a laserdisc to create a modern day Domesday book with a laserdisc machine controled by a BBC Master. It got recovered about 20 years later when they thought it might get lost due to hardware failure of the players.
Yeah, me too. We had a Domesday system at our school, and I thought it was the coolest thing at the time. IIRC, they have a Domesday system in operation at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park.
Huh, TIL, neat!
As this video details, that's actually the origin of the name, as the Domesday Duplicator is part of the Domesday86 project, which was started to explicitly make digital copies of the Domesday Project's LD discs. The use has expanded out past just the Domesday Project LDs though. There's also a fork that uses the Domesday Duplicator on VCRs, with accompanying VHS-decode software.
The "Domesday Reloaded" project hosted by the BBC somewhat recreates the experience on the web, although it's incomplete due to copyright concerns over the National disc.
@@marsiliesWhere is the fork for VHS?
I remember contributing to our local submission back when I was at school. Every school kid did something in 1984-5 or so. I'd watch stuff like tomorrows world to get updates on what was happening with it.
George Lucas' first major film THX-1138 was not released digitally in its original form, only in one of George's 'enhanced' editions with CGI and such inserted. It's been worth holding on to the original laserdisc (and even the VHS) because of that...
Perfect!
theres a scan of a 35mm print on myspleen afaik (but goodluck getting a myspleen invite if you dont have one already)
What about the special feature in thx 1138 DVD with the original version?
Yet Lucas decided to use lame and mediocre LaserDisc transfers for the 2006 Star Wars original trilogy two-disc DVD set.
I do not personally care about laserdisc, but projects like this remind me just how much effort ppl are putting into tech preservation... and I applaud any such efforts.
This video has one of the best descriptions I've yet come across of what is actually encoded on a Laserdisc. It's fascinating that the inventors of the format realized that they could simply convert a 10MHz video signal to PWM and record the pulses!
wow, this thing is awesome! the results truly do speak for themselves. LD preservation is super important with the risk of disc rot and just all that comes with it being an analogue medium so I'm glad we've basically got it down.
I saw the rip of the Laserdisc release of the playstation Ghost in the Shell cut scenes here on youtube a while back. If I remember correctly. It used captures from several discs with the same content. By doing that, they could stack the video signals and cancel out the difference that the individual discs had introduced. That way they got as close to the original master tape quality possible. I must say, I was astonished with how good it looked. And it makes me want as many as possible to rip their LD collections as soon as possible. Because that way you can get the very best master tape esque versions restored.
I wonder how they kept all the stacked copies in sync.
@@zoomosis
That, I can only speculate on.
@@zoomosis Probably, timecodes embedded into video.
I wonder if the software that does the combining also checks for signs of cutouts or other damage-moments where one source's signal significantly differs from the others-and automatically cuts that source out of the mix during those spots.
@@stevethepocket The software puts cleaner signal from another source only in places where the dropout happens
I've been looking to make use of one of these myself, as I've been digitizing a lot of rarer Hong Kong and Japanese Laserdiscs for the past year. Side by side the quality improvement is so noticeable, and considering how unlikely a lot of these films are to ever get re-released beyond the analog era, I'll have to invest in properly figuring the duplicator process out.
Good luck!!
Family Dog! You've just filled a gap in my memories of that dog drawn with the nose floating in front of its face. Thanks!
I don't have an LD, and I never actually used LD, but I love seeing these backup solution being made
The word "dome" in the name did indeed become "doom" in modern english. And as mentioned, it means "judgement" here.
But, this word in its original meaning still exists in modern english, in an inflected form. The word "deem" (as in "I deemed it to be like this" or something) comes from the same word.
That's what I was thinking the moment I saw "Domesday" as "Doomsday", meaning that, while the device is still new, these discs will eventually be discontinued and become retro mediums.
The ham radio nerd in me loved this episode. This is rather like what you can do with older radios: You can physically tap into the raw IF (intermediate frequency) signal inside the radio, pipe it outside, and capture it via a software defined radio for *external* decoding.
That way, you can still utilize the ham radio's superior front end and receiving hardware, but you can decode it all in software at a much wider bandwidth.
73 de WU2F
I thought the same thing. 73 W2ZOU
This is one of the best tech focused channels on RUclips.
For once the algorithm works out!
I'm glad you've done this. There was a lot of fuss in Britain a few years ago about how the data on the Domesday Machine discs was being lost because the hardware was no longer functioning and the masters had been lost.
Well, now you are required by Intergalactic law to go down the vhs-decode project too.
(seriously, I'd love it had more exposure and possibly reach as it'd also certainly move the project a little faster and further. with the added bonus of having a reference video on youtube)
Oh we at the decode cult managed to catch the twich stream and set him on the right path off the bat!
Wow, I have to pull out my old Pioneer LD and about 15 discs and start this as another project!
Thank you for the video!
OMG thank you for this. I found the related VHS project earlier this month and have been trying to wrap my head around all of this. Very much love seeing this explanation. Looking forward to the next one.
11:02 While not easy, it's very much doable. Laserdisc audio preservationists such as blah-ray (or those who supply Blah-ray with captures to compare) have been capturing ac3 and DTS for years without a DDD.
As a historian who’s had to look in the Doomsday Book, the dry description you gave made me laugh. It is really dull (but also really cool because you can look up places you know and see how tiny they were)
In the right context I could absolutely seeing it be an amazing resource. The name kind of sets a different level of expectations nowadays though lol!
Dull? Maybe. Hugely interesting if you have any connection to England though
You'd think a historian would know it's called Domesday Book.
@@Okurka. I'm willing to bet autoincorrect struck again.
@@TechTangents ummm.. this is really interesting Shelby.😯.. was it Fran Blanche @FranLab who have those rare NASA LaserDisc that she can't safekeep online because of copyunrights BS??😤.+... this will be a nite tool for preserve those🤔..+.
It seems to me that a library's archive operation might want to look into something like this in order to preserve for the long term its legacy laser discs. Thanks for the review.
Oh, beautiful! It's always great to see humanity coming together to archive art and knowledge and prevent it from falling out of existence!
saw some anime enthusiasts mod vcr's into capturing the signals directly from the vhs's as well. apparently they're doing this because they're degrading with time too, and getting the signal before it's processed is far better. many animes released on vhs back in the 80s and were never re-released, japan tends to abandon their old stuff. for example there's like 15k film reels from the 1960s about to be destroyed in 2-3 months if nobody claims all of them.
Due to the decaying nature of probably all LDs, it is also important to contribute to the "stacking" efforts to try to reconstitute the least corrupted version of every disc. Due to copyright restrictions, I don't know if you can get a copy of the results even though you may have contributed a version.
Hum... That was my first though. Being an analog format, it would degrade w/o the benefit of RS error corrections
@@kayakMike1000 it is more that the glue use destroying the discs and maybe tiny imperfections.
I was going to suggest this as there is no check sum or CRC codes on the video component. Having a large collection of sample streams would allow for the reconstitution of the original, perhaps even with the aid of checking if distortion to the sub carrier signal is increased or decreased depending on the source selection.
Very happy that this project exists even though only the copyright holders will gain the most benefit. You can be they will harness the archives one day to generate new copies for rental without giving back to the community.
I hate modern video compression and cannot see how we have sunk so low. I have not watched more than a couple of movies on laser disk and am not worried about some loss of sharpness due to analogue transmission or recording but the horrible motion prediction artifacts and blocky compression on modern digital broadcast TV make me hate myself when I sometimes turn on the TV.
Back around 2010 I had a Laser Disk transfer process that I think was as good as it gets - until this! I tapped the 8bit digital video signal directly out of the internal TBC in a Pioneer CLD-95. I made an FPGA based interface board that converted the raw 8bit video to a SMPTE standard parallel composite digital signal*. Then I used a surplus broadcast NTSC digital decoder to get to standard component SDI. Then through a surplus DVNR noise reducer and onto and SDI capture card making DPX files to a 30TB raid. Now this could be compressed further but I kept the raw DPX files. Digital audio when present was just upsampled from 44.1K to 48K.
There was a group in Germany that was working in a similar RF capture system for Sony Betacam tapes. Betacam, not Betamax, was a highly successful broadcast component analog format in the 1980s through 2000. It was very high quality. Originally it used standard Betamax tapes but ran the tape much faster. An L750 tape would only last 20min on a Betacam. Mid 1980 we had Betacam SP which used a larger cassette and metal tape and could record up to 90min IIRC. There are huge archives on Betacam tape that need digitizing.
* There was a composite digital system in the 1990s that complemented the CCIR601 component digital standard. It was basically digitized NTSC or PAL. The digital tape format was called D2 and Panasonic made a half inch version called D3. Because of the way the signal was quantized (it digitized the sync as well), some of us, including me, thought that a first generation analog 1 inch tape was actually better than first generation composite digital recording. But of course the digital tape could go about 20 generations down with virtually no loss. By the early 2000s it was obsolete as the HDTV/DTV transition used component video.
I found an old Laser Disc player and a copy of "A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the way to the Forum" and grabbed them since the LD was still shrinkwrapped new. I should have known that LDs would degrade, especially since I have CDs and DVDs that are already dying on me. I'm glad someone out there is preserving them. Now I just need to find a hosting database of saved movies since there are some ancient ones I've only seen on LD.
I have laserdisc from the mid 80s completely functional, with no signs of decay….. other from the late 90 were rotted from day one. I think it was plainly a lack of care durin manufacturing duplicating, specially in the USA, rot was almost not present in discs made in Austria or Japan
This is amazing! I remember, for example, those videos of the amusement park ride. I searched on the net for some footage and found almost nothing. Now I understand why. Thank you very much for your incredible work!
Can't wait for the next video: I just inherited a library of Laserdiscs, and backing them up is definitely in my wheelhouse
I remember a school trip to London back in 1986 when I was 10; I was lucky enough to spend a couple of minutes using the BBC Domesday Project at the Science Museum, sparking in me a fascination with computers that has pretty much shaped my life. I sometimes imagine I might have turned out to be a normal person if it weren't for those two mindblowing minutes 🤣
The BBC was my gateway into computing too around 1990/1. They were very well designed computers with great expandability
Amazing! Using a modern hardware stack to digitally capture the entire analog waveform is brilliant!
You're doing great work archiving rare LaserDiscs! Respect for knowing about the Domesday project (and getting the pronunciation right haha) and BBC micro too, I'm guessing they are pretty obscure to Americans! I used the BBC micro quite a lot at primary school here in the UK because they lingered around in classrooms well into the 90s and were a very capable computer with lots of useful educational software, BASIC interpreter built into ROM etc. I have a vivid memory of seeing a maze game on the BBC when I was about 5 and being fascinated by it and that really kickstarted a lifelong love of computers and technology. Never got to try the Domesday project though.
My Criterion Collection AKIRA and Star Wars: The Definitive Collection will never be released on DVD, so this is absolutely something I want to do. Thank you for sharing this!
Now that's important, was aware of a few unique things that were doomed to rot on Laserdisc until now.
Wow those old simulator videos! I'm sure everyone remembers some of those from the 80s and 90s, feels like those moving simulators were everywhere and I'm sure I recognise the roller coaster video at the least. Would love to see more of them.
Happened on your video through RUclips's "For You" suggestion algorithm - very interesting, it's given me a number of ideas .. Thanks very much for posting this and preserving the past for people who might be interested in the future - Awesome 😎
I've been following the Legend of the Galactic Heroes Domesday Duplicator project for some time now. I finally get to learn about it! Great video.
3:32
_"And 4:3 home releases were sometimes filmed 'open matte,' making more of the original footage visible on those than in widescreen releases."_
That's not always a positive.
Some movies that were matted widescreen were composed that way, so removing those mattes could disrupt the picture's composition. That can affect how the audience is supposed to see the picture according to the intentions of the director and the cinematographer.
And sometimes those widescreen mattes can hide what you really don't want to see, such as distracting or detracting details above or below the matted frame.
Some directors, such as James Cameron, didn't mind open matte and even took effort to reframe the image for acceptable composition on 4:3, but others did care about such alterations.
For a movie, it's usually best to watch it in its original aspect ratio.
I've got some recordable laser discs that came from gameworks in Tempe AZ. They were used back before sega bought them. I found them in the av room cleaning up after we went out of business. I think it was something that used to play on the video walls that hung from the rafters
Thanks, RUclips algo! Very interesting video, I didn't hear about this capture device before. It's a throwback to my LaserDisc time more than 25 years ago. I've sold almost all discs and the Pioneer player long ago, but it is a beautiful format, especially with the huge Special Edition boxes. Great to see the releases archived.
Well this is amazeballs technology! It's like CryoFlux for laserdisc
I love this. I bought a Laserdisc of Repo Man because the open matte was only ever released on LD & VHS. There are not even any composite rips of this version out there. Thanks Shelby, looking forward to seeing the second part.
This is very cool, especially for the niche things described. I met someone who has a stack of LD's from an old exhibition at our local science centre, with this tech those could be dumped, or captured I should say, in a meaningful way! Looking forward to the next video! :)
I have about a dozen LaserDiscs (mostly Japanese Anime) that I got from a friend some years ago, but the players are so darn expensive 😞 I would love to dump them properly but unless I find a cheap and good player and the Doomsday device gets cheaper, I'm stuck with looking at the beautiful cover art and booklets ...
You could always send them to someone to dump and get them and the files sent back.
@@TheRedOGRE I'm in a similar predicament as the OP with the Laserdiscs. The thing is, I also know basically nobody who has this setup that could rip it. I would love to "properly" rip my LDs, but for stupid prices for something I don't really have much of a personal "investment" into, honestly drives me away from wanting to do anything with the LD at all, aside from stare at it on my shelf. It's not very easy either way. I can spend tons of money doing it for the single LD I have (which would be ridiculously overkill and expensive), or I can wait until someone with this specific setup just so happens to come within my friend circle, which is full of fellow nerds, but not very likely to occur anytime soon. I have my reservations about sending an LD to someone I don't really know, as well. I don't know how well they'll take care of it, how well they're ripping it, or if they're a bad actor that won't do as asked and simply use it as a way to get a free LD.
@@TheRedOGRE I contancted some people from the Doomsday Duplicator community in th past, but they all were very ... let's say "unenthusiastic" to help out, so at some point I just gave up 🤷♂
@@Darkstar2342 that's lame. What can you do then? I'm sure someone would help out but finding the right person is probably hard. Sucks when communities are stuck up. It's obvs a bit to expensive to do yourself just on a whim with the dd dumper tool thing and all the storage you'd need to hold those massive files. Hope you meet the right person someday
happy to see archival of less-popular media getting much-needed love!
I've been following the DdD for years now, and I already had a 4300D from previous forays into capping LDs, but it might be this video that tips me over into buying the DdD hardware and getting started.
Really amazing this exists! Thanks for sharing and explaining.
3:20 while preserving home releases is important, I assume you know that the actual theatrical releases of Star Wars have been preserved by people who scanned the 35mm film and released it in 1080p.
And 4K too, now, right?
Great work! I am a fan of obscure formats (particularly Blu-ray 3D) and hope that one day we can ensure full backups of most titles from formats like these are archived! A comparison to the ride film would be Happy Family 4D, which was released on 3DBD but few copies ever were produced. In contrast, some creators like Florian Werzinski have published copies of their ride films online in stereo to view.
Some years ago, a group grabbed one of those players with a serial interface and a player that could go frame by frame and had a component output. They captured every singe picture. They created DVDs of a quality which surpassed the official DVDs.
I learned about this awhile back because of the Laser Disk version of "The Legend of the Galactic Heroes". The laser disk version has a whole other animation then the later dvd and blu-ray versions. As the laser disk is the original TV broadcasted version, and the later DVD version added and changed allot (allot for the better tbh).
But yea there are not allot of people preserving LD with the Domesday out there.
Decent LD is almost impossible to find online for most disks.
I was actually trying to find the best version of sailor moon, and found out that the LD version is pretty much the definitive version of the first few seasons. The later releases all have their own individual problems. Like the newest blu-ray being way to red for some reason, and having weird up-scaling.
The only recordings of the LD version, are really low quality rips that are basically unwatchable on the Archive org.
It would be cool to see this done for Hi-Vision HD Laserdiscs, although I'm sure we'd need higher bandwidth capture and a lot more complex decoding
I am also interested in this. Would love to archive my HD laserdiscs in this manner...
2:55 I am sure I remember seeing that video in a simulator ride when I was a kid. 30+ years ago, it was a box with seats inside and hydraulics that moved it around like you were actually on the rollercoaster
@3:19 There is also the Star Wars despecialized editions to consider, which do carry over the best of all worlds in terms of the film's releases over the years. It isn't official, of course, but it's still the definitive way to watch the OT. Great vid btw, LD preservation of this caliber is really a sight to behold
oh wow, I hope someone is doing this with Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film, it's seemingly never gonna get released in another format due to licensing reasons and we've only got terrible VHS copies easily available. Real shame when it's got so many great first hand accounts of the silent film era.
One episode ripped from laserdisc was briefly on youtube years ago and the quality leap was gigantic.
I bought one a while back. I’ve used it to capture 3 discs so far, all things that aren’t available on DVD. It’s tricky as hell but it’s super cool that this tech was developed.
20 seconds in and I see the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. This can never be a bad video.
90s Interactive TV vendors like Wink Communication used custom LD that had the data stream in the VBI to demo the product with a modified set top box. Simple setup that needed no encoders, rf modulators, etc.
I have my grandparents laser disc player still, hoping to be able to do this at some point.
I enjoyed this dive into capturing laser disc content. Thanks for making it. It was just the perfect length.
I was an admin of LaserDisc Forever!, the largest group of LD enthusiasts in the world, for over a decade.
We saw its growth from 300 members to, now, over 15,000.
LaserDisc is dead: Long Live LaserDisc.
I shared this there and *adore* that you made this video.
This is _so_ cool.
I am lookig forward to your next video about this topic.
I’m so jealous of you techy types, I’m a network administrator and hardware technician for many years, but never to the likes of you. You inspire me brother.
Great timing just today I got the thought to create a data repository. You never know... One solar flare and bye bye internet.
OMG thanks to this video i found out that theres a similar thing for VHS and Video 8 etc. called VHS-Decode, and using a 25€ card from aliexpress with custom drivers and my Digital8 camera i should be able to do this with a Video8 tape I've recorded a decade ago that I've been trying to preserve in the highest quality possible, this is awesome, wish i could do LaserDisc bc it sounds way cooler but the way i had hardware lying around that can do exactly this?? This is so amazing !!
I didn't even know Family Dog was released on LD. I had tapes of the episodes when it originally aired. And that was the only way I archived mine. I'm jealous you got all the episodes on the disc. I think I only have half the series. The best episode I still think is the homeless woman episode. And you're right about the unmatted movies. The only movie that's ever released the wide and unmatted 4:3 frame, is The Transformers The Movie.
If the motion data from the arcade video disc can be preserved, theoretically, a ride can be made using it.
Absolutely fantastic - can't wait for part 2 !! Thank you...
You know, I never actually heard the format itself talked about, thank you!
The Domesday Book captures a ton of information about the population, place names, land ownership. It might not be interesting to read in and of itself, but it's a really important resource for historians, archaeologists, genealogists etc. In other words, it's a unique record of a past time recorded in a physical format whose future utility might not have been apparent to the people who made it, but has lots of value a thousand years later. Much like a Laserdisc of Family Dog or the video from a motion simulator ride, it might not be inherently valuable to everyone, but is still information capturing something about a unique time in history and should be preserved.
Dude I don't know how you find the time & energy to produce as much as you do. This is an amazing project, thank you!
I have no interest in LaserDisk, but I appreciate archival and preservation work so much. Thank you for your work.
I can't believe how in this age and with all the technology we have, some copyright, license and cost-benefit shenanigans make that some movie studios let their archives rot, instead of preserving their catalog. It's sad that some media is really lost forever.
I'm so happy this is being done i wish so much i could see the Archive as there are ld stuff I've always wanted to see
Hoping you'll cover the VHS fork of the project after part 2!
I'd love to watch that The Fifth Element LD, it's one of my favorite Bruce Willis movies EVER!! Fifth Element and Armageddon are my two all time favourites of his
THX 1138 is another one of the Lucas movies where Laserdisc was the last version you could get that wasn't ruined with horrific CGI changes.
I have a Pioneer DVL-91 in my closet. It's slightly modded to allow DVD region changes.
I can't even remember the last time I used it. I'd say some 2 decades ago. Hopefully, it still works....
Well, when I was looking at old animated movies, I found out some laserdisc movies were used to make the DVD of the movie from laserdisc. But that's just a few there used the laserdisc because it was better quality then on Betamax or VHS. Plus, it had all the extras the DVD needed in audio, subtitles and so on. So, in the end movies that's on VHS, Betamax, and other formants of the time the laserdisc can be edited different and show extra scenes that other formants never have.
Typically, when a commercial DVD is released using a "laserdisc" source, it's far more likely to have used the Laserdisc video MASTER, i.e. the video the Laserdisc was made from. So they didn't rip the LD, but used a high quality video tape, sometimes a digital video tape source, especially later in LD's lifetime, that is the same source the Laserdisc was created from.
And while LD could offer some of the features DVD could, and was often the inspiration of the DVD feature, it was far more limited. For example, LD originally only had two analog audio channels, which it could play as either a single stereo track or two audio tracks. Dolby Digital AC3 used one of the analog audio channels, if it was on it, which left only a single analog mono track on the disc. Later, separate digital audio tracks were added, but you were limited to 4 audio tracks total, and some were likely mono if you tried to split it up. In contrast DVD can hold up to 8 audio tracks, potentially all surround.
LD also doesn't really have any subtitle support. It has CC support, but nothing else, which often resulted in subtitles being "burned in" to the video image, which limits certain imports. DVD supports up to 32 subtitle tracks.
These kind of videos are great! This channel is turning into an ultimate archivist's reference guide for converting old media.
Years ago I got a very old pioneer LD player that had a helium neon laser it it. The laser was starting to go and I replaced it with a 635nm laser diode with a colimator lens. The image and sound was crystal clear afterwards. The beam out of a laserdiode is oval and the polarization plane is along the oval axis. To do the fix remove the laser tube it's HVPS, jumper the power OK wire. Remove the laser colimator lens and reuse the mounting to hold the laser diode. Connect the laser diode to any 5V rail in the player. Align the laser diode so the beam is emitted with maximum brightness out the laser lens using the colimator adjustment screws. That's it.❤
As you mentioned, it's great for preserving videos made for specific LaserDisc-based machines and internal videos not sold to the general public!
Seeing this video somehow reminded me of someone's video on the rare CD Video format (the analogue format), which was based on LaserDisc (in comparison to the later Video CD format which was based on CD-ROM and was digital, if I recall correctly).
Those motiin capture ones may be able to be used on motion chairs for holmes same as games on laser disc bring uo very good possability
so cool to see some of Inversephase's music in other folks collections!
also gosh the DD is now twice as much as I last checked a few years ago ugh. one day I'll have enough saved up to preserve parts of my collection
This is awesome. Years ago I read that the Japanese Studio Ghibli box set had an English dub that was made to play on flights from the US to Japan. This pops into my head every now and then and I look it up to see if I can find a copy, but haven’t worked super hard looking for rips.Im really excited at the prospect of getting to hear a good audio rip from these discs, or finally justifying the purchase to rip it myself. We could also get a better quality Wizard of Speed and Time!
I’ve been waiting for this video. Thank you.
Welp, about to decimate my wallet, time and NAS with this project. Great vid, thanks for this!
I'd get one but I wanna get one of the older LD players that use the He-Ne tube laser because the lower wavelength might improve tracking over later units and if I'm already spending $500 on the DD itself, I might as well go all out and get an old tube laser ld player too. The only other issue is limited hard drive space.
Calibrated HeNe players are not as good as a calibrated more modern player.
There are many myths in the land of LD to do with quality of different players and wavelength, etc.
When the project was starting out there were tests of the same calibration disc in multiple players from the early HeNe which have slow tracking response as its a fixed laser tube with a lot of inertia on moving the mirrors and optics as opposed to a laser diode that moves with the optics. all the way upto MUSE players.
The MUSE players were the best but almost impossible to calibrate and a well calibrated industrial player could outperform a non calibrated MUSE.
At the end of the day the best player is the one you have, and if you get a sample of a disc in a sub par player there is nothing stopping you getting another sample at later date in a better player. But the time between there can be degradation of the media.
That's so neat, I too have an LD player (Pioneer CLD-V2600) I picked up locally that was originally from the University of Michigan's Flint Campus Learning Resource Center.
I controlled a laserdisc player by outputting DTMF over the wired remote input. I used my TI 99/4a. That’s all the remote was doing so it was easy. Pioneer but no idea model.
nice project
the price for someone who wants to build their own is about 210 bucks.
130 for the fpga board
30 for the custom board
50 for the fx3 usb board
I'll never use this but I'm happy this exists!
Motorcycle Mania or Motorcycle Madness was the name of the ride I was in, at the Joplin Mall in Missouri. It looked like a Star Trek shuttle on hydraulics and the video looked like they strapped a camera to the handlebars of a motorcycle and the ride was unforgettable. Test driving a dirt bike in the city and you end up driving across iron beams, stories high, between skyscrapers. The most subversive amusement ride I've ever been on.
such a cool little sandwich-device, gotta love the open source community!
It being called the Domesday Duplicator shows its British roots!
This is an absolutely wonderful project coupled to an interesting and informative video. I'm a big fan of video game preservation, and this reminds me of the ethos and intent of that although different execution. As a tech nerd in general, it allowed me to learn something AV related I didn't know, and does something clever and hacky with consumer electronics to introduce a new feature, modding basically.
Great stuff. Look forward to Back To The Laser Part II 😉😁
Excellent video! Glad to see there is a way to preserve this format. I didn't know that the data on a laserdisc was analog. I think most people would assume because its a disc that it is a digital format, but I guess that didn't occur until CD's came to be.
not saying this is clickbait, but that was a clever thumbnail. I thought the device was spinning the disc.! XD
great video. can't wait to see more.
Nice to finally see your video on this. Always funny to hear about just how much time it takes to do this properly.
Had Spawn the Director's Cut in DTS. I captured the DTS track by using a Sound Blaster Live! and the custom KV drivers. I planned on muxing it with the DVD version... I ran out of hard drive space, and deleted the file, and sold the LaserDisc before I could capture it again. I don't miss it.
I still have that same Fifth Element Disc, a LaserDisc player with an RF out and a Demodulator for the AC-3 sound... I can't wait till your next video to see what it takes for the decode!
Family Dog looks just like Rocko's Modern Life. I know a lot of 90's toons had similar design language, but dang!