It is time to end the series on Laserdisc.
I know, I know, it’s tragic, but I’ve been putting it off and and its long overdue.
Many new subscribers have perhaps not seen any of my Laserdisc series, and I’ll place
a link to the playlist down below.
As the fastest recap possible,
Laserdiscs were the first optical disc format, predating the CD by four years, and they held
up to an hour of excellent quality video--nearly that of DVD--with CD quality digital sound.
They never achieved great success in the US or really all of Europe due to the high cost of the system
and the inability to record television shows on them, but in Japan they were pretty successful
reaching about a 10% market penetration.
I’d also like to just throw in here because I keep forgetting to do so, I’m on Twitter
now @TechConnectify.
That’s only the second time I’ve mentioned that and I’ve had it for two months now.
I’m really good at this!
Now, this final video on the format goes over three things: One, the discs popularity in
karaoke, two the Japan-only Squeeze LD format and Three, the MUSE high definition Laserdisc.
We’ll start with that because that’s what’s the title and thumbnail said.
Japan, being Japan, was way ahead of the rest of the world when it came to high definition
television.
As an American, I think of HD as being a product of the early 2000’s, especially with the
introduction of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD in 2006 providing the first form of high definition
home video.
That is of course only if you don’t count the first D-Theater D-VHS releases from 2002.
And I am aware that the first HD broadcast in the US took place in 1996, but adoption
didn’t really take off until 2004-2005.
But in Japan, a new analog High Definition standard began test broadcasts in 1989 via
satellite, and it was in development as far back as 1979.
This standard was called MUSE, which was a sloppy acronym for Multiple sub-Nyquist Sampling Encoding.
NHK, the national broadcasting company in Japan, preferred the name Hi-Vision.
The actual specifics of MUSE are very very complicated and involve some strange sampling
techniques to increase the resolution that go way over my head.
Apparently it’s not strictly analog but also includes some digital sampling that is
limited by movement within the frame and it’s just real weird so please visit some of the
links down below if you’d like to learn more.
But in simple terms, MUSE produced a video source nearly equivalent to today’s 1080i resolution.
With 1,125 lines transmitted, of which 1035 were visible, you could call the resolution 1035i.
And similar to NTSC, it used a 60 hz refresh rate.
To get the MUSE signal on a Laserdisc required tweaking the format somewhat.
The most significant twist was the adoption of a red laser.
If you thought DVD was the first format to use the red laser, think again.
Just as the pits in a DVD are smaller and allow for more data on the disc compared to
a CD, the smaller pits of MUSE laserdiscs allowed for a higher bandwidth analog signal
than a conventional Laserdisc.
Hi-Vision Laserdiscs used the same CAV and CLV flavors of your standard discs, but due
to a higher linear speed required--apparently the pits were still the same length, just
squished closer together-- CAV discs used a smaller portion of the disc, with the inner
radius being pushed out 76 millimeters.
And CLV discs used the entire face of the disc, but the inner portion was read at 2,700 RPM.
My word.
That is ridiculous.
OK, just as a reminder, these discs weigh a tad over 200g, or just under half a pound.
And a consumer piece of A/V equipment would get this massive disc spinning at 2,700 RPM.
If the disc were rolling, it would be travelling at 152.6 kilometers per hour, or about 95
miles per hour.
In your living room.
For more context into this absurdity, a standard Laserdisc spins at up to 1,800 RPM and already
that seems too fast for comfort.
Just listen to this player spin a disc up.
[loud, building whirring noise, with a bassy vibration]
To be fair, this old beast is louder than
newer players, but newer players are still plenty frightening when their covers are off.
[mechanical sounds as transport engages with disc]
[Slightly less loud whirring noise, but still at unsettling speeds]
Now imagine that 50% faster.
Yikes.
Anyway, even though Japan was early for HD, and MUSE Laserdisc was among the earliest
ways to get HD content, it was the Laserdisc of Laserdiscs.
Adoption was very poor, and the players were mighty expensive.
Plus, they required a separate MUSE decoder to actually create a component output to send
to your TV.
But still, near 1080i video on a disc in the mid nineties?
That’s pretty wild.
Today, these MUSE Laserdisc players are highly sought after for numerous reasons.
First is probably their collectability and relative rarity.
And trust me, they aren’t common.
As I write this, on eBay there’s a player with an asking price of $1800, and someone
else wants nearly $4000 for theirs.
Discs are also hideously expensive, commanding $300 or more.
But aside from their novelty, they are among the best laserdisc players available.
These players used their red laser to read standard NTSC laserdiscs too, and the shorter wavelength
of the laser means it could read discs more easily.
Scratched and worn discs play better on a MUSE machine.
Really, all discs play better on MUSE machines because the red laser almost entirely eliminates
crosstalk, and its more advanced electronics produce a better output.
Moving on then, for those that aren’t already aware, karaoke is a BIG deal in many parts
of Asia.
Much of Laserdisc’s success came from Asia at large, and some of this was due to its
seemingly perfect alignment with the karaoke business.
Karaoke, after all, began in Japan.
Pioneer was involved in the karaoke business to a surprising degree, apparently producing
many of the music videos used in karaoke machines.
Which, of course, were made very flexible with the use of Laserdiscs.
Pioneer made various models of Laserdisc jukeboxes that could hold 50 or more discs.
These machines, with catalogs of up to 100 hours of material available all in one place,
helped make Laserdisc the format of choice for karaoke machines.
To be clear, though, there were and are many different types of karaoke venue; those that
would have one of the Laserdisc jukeboxes were probably in a small percentage of the
total.
Still, laserdisc as a format was used fairly widely.
Now, if you weren’t aware, a large innovation in Karaoke was the development of the CD+G
format, that’s compact disc-graphics.
Using the rarely-used subcode channels of an audio CD, the CD+G was able to store basic
graphics (16 colors at a resolution of 300 X 216) alongside the audio.
Karaoke machines displayed these graphics, which were usually lyrics, while playing a disc.
Laserdisc received a similar extension.
The LD-G addition wasn’t quite as impressive, though.
Info on its specifics is sparse, but it appears it was more along the lines of a closed-captioning
system, with white text on black boxes resembling the standard line 21 decoding we have here
in the States.
The actual data was hidden in the audio stream.
While it wasn’t as impressive as CD-Graphics...
it’s a Laserdisc so it has full motion
video going on already.
Plus, the LD-G standard supported 16 different data streams, so multiple languages of lyrics
or subtitles could be supported.
Whether or not LD-G made its way into karaoke is unclear, but it’s still pretty neat.
Well, it seems as though this final installment will be pretty short.
I suppose it is pretty much a “here’s three other things we haven’t talked about
Laserdisc yet!” episode.
Hmm.
Well anyway, the third and final thing is what we are going to refer to as “Squeeze LD”
because that’s what it’s called.
Just as DVD can store the video on discs anamorphically,
whereby the image is squeezed in from side
to side, Laserdisc could do it too!
But only in Japan.
And only sometimes.
So as a refresher, the reason why this is a good idea is that for widescreen displays,
it really helps if the content going to them is also widescreen.
We could create a new 16:9 video standard, but sending a 16:9 signal to a 4:3 display
might get messy.
What we want is something that would be compatible with both.
Anamorphic widescreen is a way to use the existing 4:3 video standard for widescreen
in a non-destructive way.
In a DVD, if the disc is made using anamorphic widescreen, the actual video looks like this.
If this signal is going to a widescreen display, A DVD player will send this as is, and the
TV will stretch that image out to fill itself in.
If you don’t have a widescreen TV, then the DVD player will squish the image downward
and add letterboxes to the top and bottom to restore the correct aspect ratio.
Of course you can encode the video with the letterboxing, but then you’re wasting much
of the resolution on black bars.
This means to fill a widescreen display, you have to zoom it in.
And if you make these chunks go offscreen, you’re making all of that resolution just
go away.
By using anamorphic widescreen, none of the image is lost, it just becomes stretched.
To use digital terms, it takes pixels that should be square and stretches them sideways
into rectangles.
But of course Laserdisc isn’t digital so there aren’t pixels.
Let’s not go down that path…
Squeeze LD was perhaps the first time anamorphic widescreen was found in home video.
But it was rare for players to be able to unsqueeze the image--few Laserdisc players
had the ability to self-letterbox like any DVD player can.
So unless you had a 16:9 television, which was a rare thing even in Japan while Laserdisc
was still current, a Squeeze LD would actually really suck.
As you can imagine they aren’t particularly common, and they were never released in the States.
Well, that about covers it.
I think we said all there is to say about Laserdisc.
Except no!
There’s one more thing!
A bonus fact!
There WERE recordable Laserdiscs!
And in at least three varieties.
Just like the CD-R is a thing, so was the LD-R. Except they were really called RLV for
Recordable Laser Videodisc.
Now, Wikipedia tells us with no accompanying citation that these were developed and marketed
by the Optical Disc Corporation in 1984.
I’ve linked some forum threads down below which shed some light on the issue, and it
could be that fewer than 10 machines ever existed which could write to these RLVs.
But, once written, they were compatible with standard Laserdisc players, just as a CD-R is
with any old CD player.
Usually.
The second variety was actually re-writable.
The Pioneer VDR-V1000 was a behemoth of a machine, equipped with 2 lasers to enable
reading in one place while writing in another, and the caddy-protected discs had a theoretical
lifespan of one million re-writes.
But, this thing was definitely for professional use only, with a retail price of £25,000.
Discs, though, were quite the bargain at only £800.
Sony developed a third, almost unrelated writable video standard called CRV, which rather than
being a midsize crossover...
I mean a re-writable disc, was a write-once read-many format, but it only held 24 minutes
per side.
It was mainly used as a video backup system in the professional market.
Interesting, CRV stands for Component Recordable Video disc, which makes me wonder if it stored
component signals rather than composite.
Perhaps that would explain its reduced runtime.
There might have been more recordable versions of Laserdisc out there, but information on
them is scarce.
A lot of info for this video came from forum threads on the Laserdisc archive, the Laserdisc
Database, and even CED magic.
I’ve put some links down below if you’d like to take a look at these conversations.
I believe I owe particular thanks to Disclord for his knowledge.
Well now, that is all I have to say about Laserdisc.
I’m sure we’ll look at it again in some fashion, especially as I want to get this
machine working again, but I think I’ve compiled everything you might want to know
about the format into video form, if I do say so myself.
Well, I’m sure that’s not true, but hopefully most of it.
As always, thank you so much for watching.
And thank you to everyone who supports this channel on Patreon,
especially these fine individuals.
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