In 1996, after a modestly successful 18 year run as the high-end video format for movie
buffs dedicated to quality, Laserdisc was clearly doomed.
The Digital Versatile Disc, or DVD, was slowly making its way onto the market.
Boasting the same physical form factor as the ubiquitous and wildly successful compact disc,
along with the promise of high-quality digital video, DVD was clearly poised to be
the next high-quality home video format.
But unlike Laserdisc which never made its way out of the very high-end market niche,
DVD would quickly become the standard mass market home video format.
By 2003, it would surpass VHS in popularity, and it still sells relatively well in 2018.
What allowed DVD to succeed where Laserdisc failed?
DVD shared the biggest downside of Laserdisc when comparing it to VHS--
you couldn’t record on them (at least initially).
And for a good while, DVDs and players came at a significant price premium.
From a quality standpoint, DVD wasn’t that much better than Laserdisc, in fact some early
DVD titles were mastered very poorly and looked worse than a Laserdisc release.
And while DVD was more convenient than Laserdisc, by the 1990’s convenience wasn’t THE major
downside to Laserdisc.
Both side play machines existed to save you the trouble of flipping the disc, and there
was even one relatively rare model, the LD-W1, that could play 2 discs uninterrupted.
As usual, there’s not one simple answer.
A number of things came together to make DVD spread like wildfire.
Sell like hotcakes.
Disseminate like the Borg.
Resistance is futile.
So first, a little history.
Many people erroneously believe that DVD stands for Digital Video Disc, but that’s not entirely true.
As already stated, the V originally stood for Versatile.
The video format is officially referred to as DVD-Video.
If you thought the V stood for Video, you might be under the impression that DVD was
the first digital video format for consumers.
But DVD wasn’t the first digital video format for consumers.
That was the Video CD.
Video CD is only a few years older than DVD, being released in 1993.
From the perspective of efficiency, the VCD is a remarkable achievement.
A 74 minute audio CD holds only 650 megabytes, the original capacity of the format.
In that same 650 megabytes, a video CD holds 74 minutes of video.
That’s pretty impressive.
But of course, that video was highly compressed.
In fact, the video was ridiculously compressed.
With a resolution of only 352 by 240 in NTSC countries, there was only the same level of
detail as VHS.
And the compression left tons of everyone’s favorite blocky MPEG artifacts.
Imagine taking a VHS tape, then uploading it to YouTube in 2005.
It’s that bad.
Some years ago I ran across this set of the Back to the Future trilogy on VCD, originally
from either Singapore or Malaysia.
Let’s compare a scene from the VCD release to a VHS release.
[Kids, we’re gonna have to eat this cake by ourselves.]
[Your Uncle Joey didn’t make parole again.]
[I think it would be nice if you all dropped him a line]
Honestly, I’d rather watch it on VHS.
The sound quality is noticeably better on tape, with VHS Hi-Fi really beating the pants
off the 224 kbits/second MP2 audio on the VCD.
♫ The power of love ♫
♫ is a curious thing ♫
♫ Make one man weep ♫
♫ make another man sing ♫
♫The same song again ♫
♫ but with much better sound ♫
♫ It’s a bit slower ♫
♫ with a lower pitch, too♫
As you may imagine, VCD wasn’t very popular here in the states.
However, in Asia it was very popular.
VHS didn’t have a strong foothold yet when VCD was released, and the machines could tolerate
the high humidity of some Asian regions much better than tape-based formats.
However, I will be fair and show the VCD playing through a CRT television.
CRTs hide many of the flaws in a VCD and make it much more tolerable.
And although the limited recording time meant most movies were spread across two discs (with
a few perhaps needing three) the common carousel CD changer mechanisms were easy to adapt into
a VCD player, which would just require you to load up the discs ahead of time.
DVD was also beat to the punch (in the US anyway) by digital satellite television services,
with DirecTV launching digital service in 1994.
But we’re talking about home video here, so back to DVD.
What made DVD possible was the use of a red laser rather than the infrared laser in use
with the compact disc.
The shorter wavelength of light produced by a red laser could focus on a much smaller
spot, enabling a significantly finer data stream on the disc, and thus allowing 4.7
gigabytes of data to be stored on a single layer, almost 7 times as much as the CD.
And for those wondering, yes, history would repeat itself when Blu-Ray adopted the blue-violet laser.
Ah, but it wasn’t just 4.7 gigabytes.
One of the most interesting innovations in DVD was the use of dual layers.
In many DVDs, the metalization of the first data later is actually translucent.
This allows the laser to be focused on it and reflected back just like any other disc,
but it also allows for the laser to partially shine through it.
By changing the focal point of the laser, it can read a second set of pits located behind the first.
This didn’t quite double the capacity of the discs, but it brought a significant boost
from 4.7 gigabytes up to 8.5.
Blu-Ray discs also use this technique, with some discs having 4 layers and holding over
100 gigabytes.
You may have noticed when the DVD player switches from one layer to the other.
When watching a DVD, there’s typically a point where the video briefly freezes and
then resumes.
This happens because the laser has reached the end of the first layer, and needs to switch
to the second.
Usually the folks behind mastering a DVD would take care as to ensure this happens across
a quiet jump cut to a change in scenery, thus reducing the noticeability of the pause.
Also of note as that on the second layer, the data spiral is encoded from the outside in,
so the laser carriage doesn’t have to travel back to the center and further cause delays.
With so much more data to play with, DVD supported much higher resolutions and bitrates than
a video CD, supporting the full standard definition resolution of their respective region.
NTSC discs had a resolution of 720 X 480,
and PAL/SECAM discs had a resolution of 720 X 576.
And because it was a digital format, variable bit rates could be used to pack more content
onto a single disc, so long as reduced quality was acceptable.
DVD also added some very useful features.
The navigation of the disc via menus created a much more interactive experience, and even
allowed for games of a sort.
Though DVD also allows for blocking out navigation features, sometimes forcing you to sit through
annoying previews.
That was never a thing on Laserdisc.
And let’s not even mention regional encoding.
Managing special features is much easier on a DVD.
Subtitles were stored alongside video and generated by the player on demand, enabling
the addition of many different languages at once.
Laserdisc did technically offer closed captioning as well, but it was limited to the closed
captioning decoding abilities of the TV it was plugged into.
And in case you didn’t know, most VHS titles were also closed captioned.
Are you seeing how the captions don’t match the dialogue?
That’s some lazy captioning right there.
The nerve.
DVDs also enjoyed far more audio options, with support for multiple languages, different
surround sound formats, and commentaries all on one disc.
In fact, up to 8 separate audio streams are supported at once.
Laserdisc did offer some of these features, for instance the Laserdisc release here of
the Wizard of Oz features a Spanish and French dub on each of the analog tracks.
[She’s worse than the other one]
[Who killed my sister?]
[Who killed the Witch of the East?]
[Was it you?]
[¿Quién mató a mi hermana?]
[¿Quién mató a la Bruja del Este?]
[¿Eras tú?]
[Qui a assassiné ma soeur?]
[Qui a tué la fée de l'Est?]
[Toi, sans doute!]
But it wasn’t possible to pack anything else in.
If you wanted to offer a surround sound track, you’d lose one analog track at a minimum.
This leaves room for either a commentary or a second language alongside the standard digital audio
--but not both.
If DTS audio was present on a Laserdisc, then you’d lose the digital track and be left only with analog
stereo or two mono selections.
However, the digital audio on a Laserdisc isn’t compressed at all, whereas on a DVD
it often is to save space.
OK, you’ve probably interacted with a DVD player before, so there’s not too much use
droning on about the format’s capabilities.
Instead, let’s look at the machine I showed earlier.
This was one of my more fortuitous Goodwill finds, particularly due to its history.
The DVL-700 by Pioneer was released in 1997, with this machine being manufactured in September
of that year.
This was the bleeding edge of technology.
The Laserdisc Archive claims this to be the world’s first combination DVD/LD player,
but the Laserdisc Archive also claims that the DVL-9 was released in Japan in 1996, so…
maybe?
Anyway, DVD was released in Japan in November of 1996, and the US in March of 1997.
So this machine was made only 6 months into the US existence of DVD.
Now just in case you’ve somehow forgotten, computing power in 1997 was pretty paltry
compared to today.
Let me just remind you that the website for this film remains online as a time capsule
of the 1996 computing experience.
Yeah.
Decoding standard definition video at the bitrate of a DVD was quite the task for a
desktop computer of the time.
Though DVD players were purpose-built for that task, they were still packing some sophisticated
hardware for the time.
This machine actually has a cooling fan onboard, which you can hear running whenever it’s
turned on.
Of course these days playing a DVD is child’s play to a $200 laptop, but to bring us back
on track let’s look a little closer at this machine.
It made a great deal of sense for Pioneer to introduce a player that could play both
Laserdiscs and these newfangled DVDs, as their customer base probably had a sizeable collection
of laserdiscs already.
One device capable of both would probably be preferred to managing two devices.
Now, this machine took an odd approach to reading both DVDs and Laserdiscs.
Rather than use a single red laser which could be adapted to read laserdiscs and CDs, Pioneer
further altered the Both-Side Play mechanism by using two separate lasers for Laserdisc
and DVD playback.
OK, here’s where things get a little weird.
In many Pioneer players, for some reason the engineers thought it was worth the extra complexity
to build two disc trays in one.
You’ll see there are two eject buttons--one labeled LD, and the other CD/DVD.
Press LD and the entire tray opens for you to deposit your laserdisc.
But press CD/DVD, and a small tray will exit through the middle portion here.
This wasn’t new for the DVD capable machines, they had been doing this since at least 1992
with a feature they called “Direct CD”.
Now here’s where I go---
WHY????
I admit it looks silly, but you could easily just plop a CD or DVD into the center of the
large tray.
All the little tray did was make them create another mechanism to drive just the center
portion out of the machine.
I never understood this, and to me it just seems a wasted effort on extra complexity.
If anything I’d say this was out of vanity, so that people could show off the small size
of the DVD when playing it.
But as I said, they were doing this years earlier, so who knows.
In a strange twist, Pioneer botched an opportunity to actually make the dual tray thingy useful.
Because this unit uses a separate laser for the DVD and Laserdisc functions, it could
have used these buttons to prepare the correct laser.
See, if you put a DVD in the middle of the large tray, it will first try to read it as
a Laserdisc or CD.
When it realizes it can’t focus on the pits--they’re too small for the infrared laser--it sends
the laser back, and brings the red laser to the rescue.
Then it will play the DVD.
Pioneer did make it smart enough to always prepare the infrared laser when you select
Laserdisc eject, but it didn’t go the other way around.
Why?
Well, because for some incredibly silly reason, Pioneer didn’t use the red laser for CDs.
They totally could have, but when you eject a DVD and then play a CD, it will try to read
the disc with the red laser, and upon realising it’s not a DVD, it sends it back and brings
out the infrared laser.
Why on Earth does it do that?
Does anyone know?
I’m genuinely curious as to why Pioneer used the red laser for DVD’s only.
I don’t know of a DVD player that can’t also play CDs, and they don’t have two lasers
at their disposal.
When you take a closer look inside the machine, you’ll see that the two ribbon cables coming
from lasers’ waiting room are going to different places.
There are two large circuit boards stacked on top of each other.
It’s my pretty strong guess that one of these boards handles DVD playback, and the
other Laserdisc and CD playback.
This sort of gives a clue to the odd, irrational behavior of this machine.
It seems like this isn’t so much a combination DVD/LD player, it’s more of a Laserdisc
player that’s had a DVD player shoved inside it like some sort of digital parasite.
With that said, it’s still not a good explanation for only using the Laserdisc section for CDs.
I don’t see a reason why the DVD section couldn’t have handled that.
I suppose they might have just wanted the infrared section to read CDs on the off chance
a 5 inch CD-video disc was played.
In that case, the Laserdisc circuitry would be needed to get the analog video off of the
CDV disc.
But, you ask, why not just use the red laser for everything?
What’s to stop the player from using the red laser on Laserdiscs, too?
Well, hold that thought.
There were machines that used a red laser, and in Japan this was used for a very impressive
laserdisc offering we didn’t get in the States.
Like I said, hold that thought.
Now when this machine was released, the art of mastering a DVD had not yet been perfected.
It was very common for a 1997 DVD release of a film to look noticeably worse than a
1997 Laserdisc release.
And these early players had some really clunky navigation.
Want to fast forward and get a picture search?
This is the best you’ll get.
[So, it is down to you, and it is down to me]
That pales in comparison to a CAV Laserdisc.
In fact, this machine featured a frame buffer to allow for smooth fast forwarding on CLV discs.
Take a look.
♫ Delightfully jolly music of 1952 ♫
That’s not fast by today’s standards,
but it blows its own DVD performance out of the water.
But even on a conventional machine, searching through a CLV disc was far better than the
slow DVD search of 1997:
[Too late!]
[disap..p…]
[Disa-what?]
[...pear] [Shh!]
But DVD did have a number of huge advantages over Laserdisc that were oh so apparent even
in 1997.
Biggest among them, an entire movie was contained on a single side of a tiny disc.
The brief pause for the layer change was nothing compared to the time it takes this machine
to automatically switch sides on a Laserdisc.
The discs were much easier to handle, and since they had the same physical size of the
ubiquitous compact disc, everyone was familiar with how to interact with them.
DVD also wasn’t so strictly limited on recording time like the Laserdisc was.
If a movie pushed into three hours, you could just apply more compression and fit it all
on a single disc.
It was very very rare that movie needed a second disc.
And even if it did, the Dual-layer, double sided disc meant you could just flip it over
just like a Laserdisc.
There was never a need for a second disc like was so common on Laserdisc.
The digital nature of the format allowed for error correction and cheaper laser assemblies
to be used, though admittedly it’s much easier to scratch a DVD to the point of no
return than it is a Laserdisc.
And as perhaps the greatest advantage DVD had, its small size meant it could actually
work for the rental market.
Netflix famously started as a mail rental service for DVDs in 1998.
Try doing that with Laserdiscs.
DVD may have been far and away more convenient than Laserdisc, but it still was a playback-only
format in 1997.
If the ability to record was what drove consumers to VHS over Laserdisc, what caused DVD to
succeed where Laserdisc failed?
I think its success came from four major places.
First, the home video market was now well established, so people had warmed up to the
idea of buying and renting movies on tape.
Second, DVD equipment and media plummeted in cost relatively quickly.
Third, by 2000 people were buying much larger TVs than they were in the 80s and 90s, so
the quality flaws of VHS were starting to become more of an issue.
And the fourth factor--which I think is the biggest--was that it shared its physical attributes
with the CD.
So let’s start with the first thing--the home video market.
Because people were now accustomed to renting or buying video content, a new format that
was more convenient than both VHS and Laserdisc was intriguing.
No need to flip a disc OR rewind a tape.
And since everyone already had a VCR for recording TV, the inability of DVD to record wasn’t
that big of a deal.
Even when VCRs were common, to make the leap to Laserdisc meant dealing with very high
costs for purchasing discs, limited availability, and also the added inconvenience of multiple
sides and/or discs.
Not many people saw all those downsides to be worth the investment.
But once DVD players started to come down in price, the leap to DVD brought the quality
boost of Laserdisc with none of its inconvenience--and a lot of added convenience when compared to VHS.
Now let’s look at how quickly the prices dropped.
In 1997, the cheapest DVD player was about $500.
But that’s actually not too bad.
As a refresher, in 1993 the Pioneer CLD-S201, a single side player, was $319, and this CLD-D502
was $459.
In August of 1997, this DVL-700 went for an even thousand.
But by 1999, you could get a DVD player for as little as $250.
VCRs were still over a hundred dollars at this point, so the price disparity was beginning
to shrink.
By 2002, DVD players could be had for less than a hundred dollars.
By now, VCRs and DVD players cost about the same, and it was around this time that the
ubiquitous combo units started to appear.
The picture quality advantage of DVD was starting to become quite critical by the late nineties.
Even on your average CRT TV, the DVD looks noticeably better than VHS.
Make that a 27 inch CRT or bigger, and the difference is even clearer.
DVDs could also encode widescreen content without significant image quality loss.
By stretching a standard aspect ratio frame to fit a 16:9 frame, there wasn’t any detail
lost.
This was called anamorphic widescreen, and worked much the same as film projectors did.
Widescreen content was produced natively on the disc like this.
On a 4:3 display, the DVD player would generate the black bars for letterboxing, and squish
the video downward to fit the frame.
But if set to a 16:9 display output, the DVD player would not add the black bars, and it
would produce a picture that appeared to be squeezed in from left to right.
It would send a signal to the TV to tell it stretch this back out out to either side,
thus restoring the correct aspect ratio.
If a movie was released on VHS in widescreen, the black bars are there as part of the video
signal, which means there’s less actual image on screen.
To fill a widescreen display requires zooming in, which drastically harms image quality.
Many early DVDs were not encoded with anamorphic widescreen, so on these releases the letterboxing
is unfortunately part of the actual video.
These discs also require zooming to fill the frame.
Now let’s look at what allowed the cost of DVD to fall so quickly.
The biggest factor is probably that at its core, it’s nothing more than a modified CD.
Take a look at the disc mechanism from a first generation PlayStation.
Open up any modern optical drive and you see the same basic stuff.
A spindle to hold a disc, and a laser to read it.
The only things that separate this drive from what’s in the PlayStation are a stronger
and faster spindle motor, and a red laser rather than infrared.
The simple fact was that a DVD drive was just a slightly altered CD drive, and we were pumping
those things out like crazy.
Computers, car stereos, the CD Walkman, PlayStations, boomboxes and home stereos all had a CD drive
in them.
As a personal example, in 1999 I can think of five CD players in my home--my dad’s
car, my personal walkman, our main stereo, my brother’s bookshelf system, and our home
computer all had a CD drive of some sort.
Manufacturing facilities existed all over the world to produce these CD drives.
All they needed to do to start making DVD drives was to upgrade the motor and laser.
Pretty much everything else could stay the same.
The only really expensive components in the early DVD players were the electronics needed
to process the data on the disc into a video output.
But as we know, electronics tend to get cheap fast.
It only took a few years for the DVD player’s hardware to plummet in price, at which point
a DVD player could be had very cheaply.
DVDs were also significantly helped out by the fact that the computer industry adopted
them as a data storage format.
In the nineties and early 2000’s, optical storage was still the best bang for your buck
in terms of storage space.
In 1998, the iMac was released with a 4 gigabyte hard drive.
A single layer DVD could store more than the entire hard drive of your typical computer.
In fact, the development of DVD was done in tandem with computer OEMs.
There were initially two competing standards--Philips and Sony were working on the MultiMedia Compact
Disc, and Toshiba, Time Warner, Matsushita Electric, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Pioneer,
Thomson, and JVC were all backing a different format called SD, or Super Density Disc.
The computer manufacturers stepped in and said,
look, either you guys agree on one standard,
or don’t expect us to play along.
Got it?
It’s a good thing this happened, as it avoided yet another format war.
With the computer industry on board, DVD drives started to appear in devices like desktops
and laptops.
This massive scale continued to drive the cost of DVD downward, and it also meant that
people could now play their movies on the go with a laptop, or at the very least use
their desktop as a second place to watch a movie
(assuming their computer was capable of handling the video).
The discs themselves were also far easier to make than a Laserdisc.
Though the dual layers added extra complexity, they were made much the same as a CD.
The production of Laserdiscs, while technically still mass production, was a tiny tiny business
compared to pressing CDs.
When DVDs became available, the same businesses that made CDs could adapt some of their existing
equipment to produce DVDs, and by needing less raw materials the discs were cheaper
to make over the long run.
And then, there’s the PlayStation 2.
[The blissful sound of the PS2 startup]
Sony, having realized the benefit of the much larger
storage capacity of DVD, decided to make DVD the format of choice for their new console.
And they also made sure it could play a DVD-Video disc.
Released in 2000, the PS2 was a pretty early DVD player.
Sony really made a genius move there, as parents could be persuaded by their kids to buy one
"because it can also play DVDs!"
And it would push the format along massively.
The PS2 may have been the single greatest catalyst for pushing the DVD into the mainstream.
Nintendo missed a huge opportunity by using the mini-DVD discs in the GameCube.
Without the ability to play DVD Video, that’s a harder sell for your parents.
Of course, Sony would repeat the same strategy with the introduction of Blu-Ray
in the PlayStation 3.
Lastly, DVD recording ended up being a somewhat common thing.
The DVD-RAM disc was introduced in 1996, with the more common DVD-R coming the following year.
It took a while for consumer devices to get to reasonable prices, but set top boxes capable
of recording directly onto DVDs were available and DVD-Camcorders were available by the early 2000’s.
However, using a DVD recorder wasn’t really that common.
For those who wanted to record TV, their VCR was often seen as good enough.
And once hard-drive based DVRs for recording TV came along, few people were still using
physical media for that anyway.
All of these developments just passed Laserdisc by.
Being a primarily analog medium, it was rarely used in the computing industry.
While an all-digital Laserdisc could have been made, it’s large size would still have
been inconvenient.
When DVD was released, it had obvious applications outside of home video.
The support of the computing industry (and gaming industry) made it explode, and economies
of scale would ensure DVD media and machines to play them were cheap cheap cheap.
Now before I end the video, remember how I asked why Pioneer couldn’t have used the
red laser for all functions in this machine?
Well, there are some Laserdisc players that did use a red laser.
In my next video on Laserdisc, which will likely be the last in the series, I’ll talk
about the laserdisc format we didn’t get in the States--The MUSE High Definition Laserdisc.
That's right. HD Laserdisc.
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The only thing that separates this drive from what’s in the Playstation are…
Things.
Sh*t