HD Laserdisc - HD in ‘93 (Part 1)

a couple of years back I had an idea that I should really try and cover a format that's been intriguing me for quite some time now namely high-definition laserdisc yes something that not many people know about they are normal-sized laser discs but they do contain high-definition video or high vision as it was known in Japan and it's encoded on here using the Meuse system so I spent last couple years getting everything together namely some discs and a machine to play them on decoder all that kind of stuff and it's possibly the worst idea that I've ever had because at the end of this it's cost me about three thousand pounds and all I've got to show for it are a few discs that I can't play in my now broken high vision muse laser disc player but for a brief period of time it was working just long enough to make the video that you're about to see now it's one of the hottest days of the year and I'm here in my garage with all these lights on trying to show you how early news laserdisc was when it comes to home HD video for us for pre-recorded movies so I've got a 20 year timeline here and I'm going to put a few things on here just to show you how it all fits together so let's start off with something most people should recognize we've got HD DVD and blu-ray that came out within three or four months of each other in 2006 now that's the first opportunity most normal people would have had to go and buy a player and watch HD movies in their own home off a pre-recorded former now of course with these things you're not going to get everyone buying it on day one there's always a really slow adoption just to give an example of that DVD it's always mentioned that came out 1996 and it did in Japan right at the end of 96 in the US it came out sort of in the spring of 97 I think March or April something like that but nobody probably bought it then well very few people because it was really expensive in the sales figures for 1997 in the u.s. in the percentage of households had adopted a DVD as a home video format came back as 0% for 1997 now of course there will be some people but it was so low it didn't even register 1998 you get up to 1% and that's the point when I bought into DVD 1998 I imported a machine or got an important mission from Japan and I was the first person that I knew relative I was working in a company that had perhaps a couple hundred people the first one who had a DVD player and I remember bringing it back one lunchtime from the shop that I bought it from and somebody says well sir I said oh it's a DVD player or I said yes sir movies on a disc movies on a disc it was the most incredible response ever it's still stuck around so they say movies are today it's quite the most way I think now we gotta remember laser this could be now since 1978 your supplier but nobody really paid any attention to it and nobody really knew about it in the general public anyway but yeah 1996 DVD it took till 2006 it got to 85 percent of US households but back in 96 basically nobody bought it and that's why I mention this even though actually DVD and blu-ray came out in 2006 you've got to look so probably a few years on before most people even thought about buying a machine that could play all they're gonna you know PlayStation whatever it is and got a couple discs if they did get it right so let's just things are 2006 ish let's find out we have news fits in 1993 so this is in Japan so that's the first time people in Japan with a lot of money I'll go into that later could buy a home HD video format with pre-recorded movies on in 1993 right so that is look at the last 13 years span between those two now I've gotta say back in the US if you were kind of really into your home cinema could have got a D Theater machine in 2002 I've done a video about D Theater its HD movies mpeg-2 on s VHS tapes I'll put a link to that in the video description though just to show you the Muse died very quickly 1997 so it didn't have a much of a spat at all 93 to 97 and you might think that okay well that was something to do with something else taking over whatever that kind of just died out it was too expensive I mean just to put it in perspective laserdisc that had existed since the late seventies well 1995 was the first time you could get a c3 laserdisc also known as Dolby Digital so it's around this point laserdisc really started taking off as her home collectors movie format before the night is it hadn't really had much of an impact there at all with things like AC 3 and DTS in 1997 so you know that's that that's really late in the fall that's life just to give you an idea the last laserdisc title he could have bought in Japan was in 2001 and the last laserdisc machine was made in 2009 now that's the thing that's a bit weird but I suppose people just like to buy machines for the old collection when the old machine dies in fact just to mention her 2002 was the last time you could get a amuse machine that could play these laser discs here these HD laser discs but really I think people were buying these not to play the news discs where the last one came out in 97 but because they're particularly good laserdisc players in their own right so even if you don't have any Muse this this was a good machine to buy if you were really into your laser disc so there you go that's how it all fits together a bit of a long winded way to say but look 13 years before most people got the chance to buy an HD format on a disc people were buying an HD format on a disc Japan was the first country in the world to start regular high-definition television broadcasts although they preferred to call it high vision in 1991 they began broadcasting eight hours a day of what they called test broadcasts but these could be viewed by any member of the general public provided that they had the suitable equipment in their home now just like the very first experimental high vision broadcasts from 1989 these were transmitted to the home via the bs2 satellite high vision laserdisc came along a couple of years later it was really just a physical carrier for the same system and it was a joint collaboration between five major Japanese manufacturers and this was the first major update to laserdisc in the 14 years since it was originally launched since the 1960s NHK the Japanese national broadcaster had been working on a successor to the NCSC system that they'd inherited from the US this book from 1993 lays out their new high vision system in an attempt to sell it to the rest of the world it explains how they decided early on that their new system should double the resolution of NTSC and high vision does just that rather than having 525 lines it's got 1125 some of these are lost to over scanning leaving a thousand and 35 usable lines and in practice a thousand and thirty two of these are active the book is very technical but also fascinating and explaining how they came to various decisions such as the 16:9 screen aspect ratio that we use to nowadays they determined that people would sit nearer to a screen if the image was sharper and therefore the screen would need to be wider to fill out more of the peripheral vision the book also includes a 1993 vision of the future where they suggest that television displays are expected to become flat panels of can be held on a wall possibly even using plasma technology imagine that at the bottom of the page they named the compression system that made it possible to transmit this high vision signal using the same amount of bandwidth as a standard definition wall it's something called muse a raw high vision video signal would require 20 megahertz to transmit which didn't fit into the space allocated for one channel multiple sub Nyquist sampling encoding or muse was a compression system that took this 20 megahertz signal and squashed it down to a more manageable 8 megahertz for transmission the viewer the other end receiving the signal would then use a muse decoder to uncompress it back into high vision video music wired quite a bit of processing power to compress and uncompress so only really became viable as a consumer product in the early nineties due to the advancements in semiconductor technology as the only high vision broadcasts were delivered in the Muse format if you bought high vision TV it would more often than not have a muse decoder built-in although separate decoders were also available because Muse is just the compression rather than the end result the HD laser disapproval until abled us high vision with Muse being relegated to the small prints on the back it's much the same as a DVD you wouldn't refer to one of those as an mpeg-2 disc one thing I haven't mentioned up to this point is the high vision audio standard so let's go into that now okay we're back at the border it's not going to take us love this time I promise I just want to talk about the audio that's on a muse laserdisc you see news came out in May 1939 laserdisc got Dolby Digital aka ac3 in January 95 and got DTS in January 97 so of course it's proceeding both of those it doesn't have either of these formats on muse it's got its own and it's called dance and this stands for digital PCM audio nearly instantaneously compressed and expanded there were two versions of this system B mode was used for stereo broadcasts and discs it gives two discrete channels at 16-bit 48 kilohertz the other variant a mode is the surround sound system that's commonly the one used on the high vision movies it's a discrete four channel system you've got front left and right stereo and a center channel and one rear surround channel however the audio quality is a reduction from the two channel system as it uses 32 kilohertz at 12 bit and no there's no separate subwoofer output channel here as well on the disc this is referred to as 3-1 3 across the front and one rear surround although most people would use a system to split the rear channel into two so they could better fill the rear of the room with audio and both speakers when you do this would of course be playing the same thing as each other moving on to the discs themselves let's have a look what titles were available on high vision in Japan and thanks to the incredibly useful laserdisc database we've got a comprehensive list initially looking at this it seems like there are lots of titles but when you look a bit closer you see that a good proportion of them at videos of fish I think this is because you could buy an artificial which utilized a high vision display in conjunction with a higher vision laserdisc player so these are discs of new fish to restock your tank so if you take away the fish many of the titles left are really just demonstration discs that contain footage of things like scenery museums and artwork now I went through the list counting up the traditional movie titles and it came to just over 30 these discs are 18 to 20,000 yen each cost about two and a half times the price of a normal laser disc but the real cost came in the rest of the equipment according to this 1994 article from the laserdisc UK website her HD CRT TV with her screen size of approximately 30 inches combined with a high vision laserdisc player would have cost the equivalent then of ten-thousand UK pounds just to put that price in perspective with something that most people can relate to in the UK at the time a basic Mazda mx-5 would have cost a bit less than 15,000 pounds if I go back and put that laser disc release list in to date order it reveals that the last high Vision LD title released was Jumanji on the 21st of December 97 but that's quite a big gap after the previous movie which was showgirls and that was released in March 1997 died months earlier but then you have to go all the way back to August 1996 before you find the previous one to that which was out of Africa by the time of those last releases DVD was already on the scene and whilst it wasn't an HD format for many people the quality was good enough it was more convenient and standard laserdisc and considerably cheaper than high vision whilst the early sales figures for DVD might have just been a blip they would have still eclipsed all the previous years of high vision laserdisc sales the real thing though that DVD signaled was the end of analog video formats and the fact that the high vision Mew system was already out of day by the time it made its way to market and nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated by the fact that the magazine I showed you at the beginning that was talking about high-definition television in Japan well that came from the may 1991 issue of popular science but six months later the same magazine had an article about digital HDTV it was clear to everyone that digital was going to be the future and the Meuse system whilst getting there first definitely wasn't going to be the way forward it reminds me a lot of the early days of television with John Logie Baird doing a lot of the pioneering work with his mechanical television system and it was the first one used by the BBC for regular broadcasts in the 1930s but ultimately it was a dead end it was Farnsworth system using a CRT that was clearly going to be the system that would be adopted going forward that's not to say that the work put into both mechanical TV and the muse compression system weren't incredibly impressive pioneering and transformative it's just the alternative systems were superior it wasn't all for nothing though like many people I still watch a large screen 16:9 aspect ratio HD TV that's mounted on the wall and has a surround sound audio system so that's the history and most of the techie stuff out the way let's move back to the present day and I'm going to show you the equipment that I've bought as well as the discs that I'm going to play on it so first off the player is a pioneer HL dx9 this is the last model of high vision player pioneer made all the way up to 2002 the muse decoder is a victor hv md - victor of course being the victor company of japan and if you rearrange those letters you get the more familiar acronym that we use in the west of je-vc the muse decoder outputs it's HD video - a television / component I've got three high vision discs I've got cliffhanger Jurassic Park and back to the future and I've bought all these things over the last couple of years but let's just look at what some of the current UK eBay prices are so if you're going to buy one of these players expect to pay between two thousand five hundred and four thousand five hundred pounds no doubt plus import duties on top of that a working decoder well that's about 500 pounds and this is the one that might shock you between 400 to 600 pounds for one of these movies on a high vision disc so let's have a look what you get for your money well as you can see the artwork on here is a little bit different to your normal laserdisc cover this is one of the Panasonic range of discs they have this theme that runs throughout where they've got a single color on them whether it's silver or gold and then the artwork for the film just goes across the center part of it there it's protected by an outer cardboard slipcover and inside there you get this large format booklet which tells you about the film we've also got a leaflet in here that tells us how best to remove the disc from the cardboard cover that's this thing here and it's a little bit like some of the early DVD cases in a way where you've got a cardboard folder and when you open it up behind this piece of protective tissue paper we've got the disc held in this plastic section at the back it is clamped in using the usual kind of CD type clamp through the centre of the disc just like a standard laser disc one of these high Vision Muse discs can hold two hours of video that's 60 minutes per side so that's just enough to hold the back to the future' film on one disc because it's got a total running time of 116 minutes if it went across two hours they'd have to split it across three sides meaning they'd sell it as a two disc package which would lead to a higher retail price now because I'm using this in the UK I'm using a step-down power transformer but not this little weedy thing here I'm using something that's got a little bit more capabilities because I'm going to be powering the laserdisc player and the muse decoder at the same time while a high vision laserdisc might look very similar to a normal one there are quite a few differences firstly the muse discs operate at 12.5 megahertz of bandwidth and in order to provide this they need to spin at a higher velocity of a maximum of 2700 rpm that's half as fast again as a standard ntsc discs which gets up to 1800 rpm the size of the pits on the disk remain the same but the tracks themselves are perked closer together down from one point six seven microns apart so one point one and as the laser needs to be more accurate to read this instead of using an infrared laser as on the normal laserdisc players a high vision player uses a red laser that can operate at 670 nanometers instead of 780 and all that would be fine if it works unfortunately my machine doesn't I found out to my cost a couple years after buying it and then getting my first a vision disc it wouldn't play it it plays normal this fine but when you put a high vision warning he goes up to that additional speed and comes up with this p5 error looking up online it appears that that might be a problem with the power supply so I managed to trace somewhere in the US that was selling the power supply still for this model I imported one at considerable cost and then when it got here the guy at the door wanted another 60 pounds of import duty so all in this thing cost me about three hundred pounds are still not entirely sure whether this was the thing that will resolve my problem but there's only one way to find out and that's to put it in the machine so here's my naive plan I was just gonna open this up look for that power board in there unplug the various connectors that are attached to it swap it out with a new one I've got but the thing back together and fingers crossed it was going to work unfortunately when I got the covers off this this thing is a lot more complicated than I ever thought I've got no idea where this thing even fits in here this is the most densely packed piece of electronics that I've ever opened up so I got the torch out and started looking around trying to find out exactly where my power supply board would fit and there's no way to get the bottom off this everything has to come out of the top it's all in a big sandwich of layers so I thought I'll open this board up here have a look underneath there and again there's just the mechanism for reading the disks the loading mechanism but it turns out the power supply board is all the way down on the bottom the right-hand side where I'm shine about torch now it's not the one on the side is underneath that one right at the bottom you see the tops of the caps there so to get that you just have to take everything out there's the edge of it and there's the edge of the one that I've got so I'll look to this I thought I had to know I bit off more than I can chew here I don't think I could take this apart so I decided to put the whole thing back together again and I went looking for a repairman in my area that would be able to install that power supply in this laserdisc player unfortunately I actually managed to find one and he was very reasonably priced it's about an hour's round-trip from my house to take the things to him but it was definitely worth the ff2 spending all that money on that player this is the power supply that came out of it one that I gave him is now inside the machine there's no obvious damage to this one I made sure to put a mark on the one he was putting in it just to make sure he did swap it over because I've never used him before but yeah sure enough he put the power supply in that I gave him and it's now functioning properly so you put a hi-vision disc in and it starts off it spins at the normal laserdisc speed and then it recognizes that it's a high vision disc it moves up to those higher rpms and HD pops up on the screen it starts playing the disc normally but that's where we're going to have to leave part one of this two part video because I'm aware we've gone past a 20 minute mark where many people tend to zone out and there's still plenty more left to cover so whilst you're watching this I've been working on finishing the final part in which I'll go into more detail about how everything fits together and more importantly I plan to show you some captures of high vision discs being played and do some comparisons of those against a standard laser disc and a blu-ray but that's all for next time part 2 should follow along in a few days subscribe and press the bell to get notified when it's ready to watch but that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching 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Channel: Techmoan

Views: 652,773

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, Laserdisc, Hi-Vision, HD, MUSE, Hivision, Japan, 1993, Video, Format, History, Retrotech, 1990s, High Definition, Television, Earliest HD Video

Id: LkQEobE2RUk

Length: 23min 17sec (1397 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 14 2018

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