Laserdiscs were huge for being able to stop on a single frame - I worked for a place that used them for language teaching, so you had to stop dead on a sentence for it to make sense. At the time mpeg could only stop on iframes that could be 10 seconds apart, and paying to get iframes mastered where you needed them was mucho expensive (even decoding required hardware… mpeg encoding in software was a pipe dream).
Compressed video still has this problem to some extent but it’s mostly worked around in software.
Also the hardware to interface to a PC was basically a simple analogue capture card and a serial link for the control. Cheap, at least compared to the mpeg decoders of the day.
For sure! The first time I saw my animation professor pull out a laserdisc, I started to have doubts on my colleges budget, but damn, crisp, clean frame by frame of Bugs Bunny. Couldn’t be beat!
This is great.
Another music related oddity I only recently found out, Laserdiscs are analog not digital…
Technically later ones used digital audio. But yeah, it’s because they use frequency modulation rather than binary pitting
Laserdiscs were huge for being able to stop on a single frame - I worked for a place that used them for language teaching, so you had to stop dead on a sentence for it to make sense. At the time mpeg could only stop on iframes that could be 10 seconds apart, and paying to get iframes mastered where you needed them was mucho expensive (even decoding required hardware… mpeg encoding in software was a pipe dream).
Compressed video still has this problem to some extent but it’s mostly worked around in software.
Also the hardware to interface to a PC was basically a simple analogue capture card and a serial link for the control. Cheap, at least compared to the mpeg decoders of the day.
For sure! The first time I saw my animation professor pull out a laserdisc, I started to have doubts on my colleges budget, but damn, crisp, clean frame by frame of Bugs Bunny. Couldn’t be beat!
What a blip on the radar they were. I remember watching a video on acid rain in first grade, so early '90s, and that was it, never saw it again.
If you like that, you should check out this video series on the RCA CED: https://youtu.be/PnpX8d8zRIA
Let me guess? Technology Connections?
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https://piped.video/PnpX8d8zRIA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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