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. Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed the
video! If this is your first time coming across the
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see you next time! The only thing that separates this drive from
what’s in the Playstation are… Things. Sh*t
