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. I know I’ve said this before, but support
from Patreon literally is what keeps these videos coming. Very soon this channel will become my full-time
job thanks to the amazing support you’ve pledged. Thank you. If you are interested in supporting the channel
too, please check out my Patreon page. Thank you for your consideration, and I’ll
see you next time!
