Are laserdiscs worth getting or am I better off with DVDs?

I think the rights are a bit of a mess I remember Anchor bay was set to get it out once and failed so seems many have tried. I am sure someday it will make it out but until then...

 

In the 1990s I bought Rock Show on LD, it was in an advanced state of rot. So BOTH Let It Be and Rock Show may be rot city on LDs today.

 

time for an upgrade on the thread forget DVD get Blu-ray!

 

Precisely. I never buy laserdiscs these days, haven't since shortly before or after Y2K. By then, stuff like the Max Headroom miniseries and the Roger Rabbit shorts with all of the stealth X-rated gag frames in CAV (both Japan only, I think). For movies, almost all have since made it at least to DVD, if not Blu-Ray and even 4K. And there is little question about picture superiority even of DVD with only a handful of exceptions, and for many movies I can live with Dolby Digital sound. I can still think of a couple of movies or miniseries never released on DVD or bettr, like "Hoffa" and "Inside the Third Reich", which I can live without.

But the case is different for music LDs (both concert and videos), which were, after all, made when the artists were much closer to their primes, especially in voice. Still in their forties or even thirties, instead of their seventies. Also, there are a fair number of MTV era (when the "M" actually stood for music) rock videos. Unfortunately, there is a triage of three categories for all of those music titles:

First are those titles that never made it to DVD at all, much less Blu-Ray or 4K. Some of the artists have had later DVD or Blu Ray releases, but in many cases the performers are in or pushing their 60s, 70s and even recently 80s.

Second are those titles that HAVE made it to DVD, but only with lossy Dolby Digital sound; better picture if done right, yes, but not the way you want to hear them.

Third are those titles that have made it to DVD or better, AND offer uncompressed PCM of the sound, which I have absolutely no problem with.

Of course, there are some music DVDs that were never released on LD in the first place, and only offer Dolby Digital, but that falls into the only game in town category and is not relevant to this discussion anyway.

Now, I care about the quality of the picture as much as the next guy, but with music it is ALWAYS first and foremost about the music never released on DVD (category 1), and about the sound (which implicates category 2). Those category 3 DVDs work just fine for me, but for categories 1 and 2 I need to do something. Some of the ones never issued on DVD at all (category 1) I have transferred to DVDR by a standalone DVD recorder, but for most of those my Pioneer DVD recorder only sends the sound (already converted from digital LD sound to analog) redigitized to Dolby Digital. Better than nothing, but not what I am after. My only Pioneeer DVD recorder that will record to DVDR in uncompressed PCM (DVR-633-H-S) at forty minutes record time per disc, puked its hard drive.

So I am looking for a way to get the right hardware and software to capture LD video and audio (AFM or PCM sound as the case may be), and send converted video via USB to my PC hard drive (right now a laptop), to then burn with uncompressed PCM sound to a DVD, or even, if need be, AVCHD/MPEG4 Blu-Ray. I have a Pioneer Blu-Ray burner (USB outboard) and my source LD player is Pioneer DVL-91 (LD/DVD/CD combi player circa 1998) which has composite, S-Video and component out. So how to I get from point A to point B to point C?

Years ago I tried recording HD video to BRD using Hauppauge for capture and conversion to AVCHD for sending to a PC then via USB, with Sony Vegas software which I could never get to work. Half the time the software turns out to be absolute bloatware that does 87 kajillion things I couldn't care less about, but the basic damned operations must be buried in some sub-sub-sub-sub menu that even Indiana Jones would be challenged to find. I finally gave up on Adobe Photoshop for the same reason.

So given my situation and what I would LIKE to do (make a DVD or even BRD transfer from LDs never reissued on DVD or better, or reissued only with Dolby Digital sound), any ideas, anyone?

 

And to a few obvious threadcrapping trolls (you know who you are), we all on this forum are obviously aware of the superiority of at least the picture on DVD, if not the sound, and the picture and sound for Blu-Ray and 4K, over LD, which was state of the art only until about 1998. But if the rest of us keep pointing out titles (especially music titles) that have never made it even to DVD and likely never will, as even DVD now heads into the sunset, what exactly is the relevance of your point, if you have one? To keep pounding away at a distinction that is not the least bit relevant for titles never released on any format beyond LD, that is classic troll behavior. Now run along, little trolls. Begone!

 

I got a Rock Show $30 still sealed sound 2005 or so, perfect no rot. Sold it a few years before the reissue for $100

Got Let It Be on LD that shows some speckling at beginning of side two only. Funny thing is it never got any worse in the last 20 years. Of course I should check again as it’s been several years since I played it.

But my point is that rot is not always a given on a particular title and it does not progress the same on all discs. MCA / Discovision titles being most likely to show rot, and to get worse as time goes on.

 

DiscoVision LD's don't rot completely like the even worse LD's that were made in 1981-1982. DiscoVision LD's get air bubbles in them but the substrate remains mostly intact. The 1981-82 LD's rot to the extent that they look like blank video tape when played. I have DiscoVision discs that will play although they've lost much of their color and there are spots and sometimes they freeze. Also, the audio goes downhill with digital pops.... The final LD spec was reached in 1983. The first replacement for DiscoVision was even worse!

 

Being many years in LD, I am well aware of that. Sometimes it can even be about how an LD is stored. One knowledgeable fellow told me that when an LD is at the end of a shelf run, with one side against other LDs and the other exposed openly to diurnal temperature changes of the room, that can stress the glue as the two sides expand and/or contract differently, which may ultimately expose that LD to rot. I have always used corrugated LP jacket sized fillers on the end of each shelf run, which I always did for LPs as well, so I have been pretty lucky. There were a couple of Monty Python TV series LDs that didn't make it, and Rock Show, which I bought on eBay and had to return. I always checked LDs for rot before selling on eBay, which to me always meant checking the beginning and end of each side, since earliest signs of rot seem to always start near an inner or outer edge. I was able to transfer Let It Be from LD to DVDR, but I can't recall if it was a rental or if I once had the disc. But since there were many rot reports about that one, it may be one of the earlier titles made before quality control improved. There were some early DiscoVision titles that were rather famously plagued by rot, though there were exceptions even to that rule.

 

The uncensored Roger Rabbit CAV shorts were released in America. I have a copy.

 

I would use Adobe Premiere Elements but you have to go two versions back, maybe 2016, to output to blu-ray. Idiots at Adobe didn’t bother to tell users the newer version no longer does blu-ray, so if you went to the trouble to produce a video and then found out you couldn’t output to blu-ray, you could not open it in a previous version if you wanted blu-ray, and basically had to do it all over again. How nice.

So, after you load it go to “export to disc” and make sure you can do blu-ray. I use that Pioneer blu-ray USB burner as well. Just import your laserdisc and then export. Very simple. I believe you can download a trial version for free, for 30 days, and older versions I believe can be purchased from Adobe as well.

 

Many thanks. And how do you get your LD content imported to laptop hard drive. Should I use the DVL-91 player progressive out, S-Video or composite. Then what do I feed that into. I have that Hauppauge box in the basement (circa 2008) that supposedly converts it to AVCHD burnable to BRD or DVD (though such DVD can only be read by Blu-Ray Player) then sends it out via USB (probably 2.0). Then once on the hard drive try to edit it (chapter stops, etc.) with the Adobe 2016 or whatever, then export to USB Blu-Ray Burner?

If I can get all of that to work (I couldn't before using the Hauppauge with Sony Vegas software) is there a way to finalize the disc too?

Or do you use some other way to get the LD video and audio from the LD player to a hard drive file on your computer in the first place?

I hate to sound ignorant, but since I couldn't ever get it to work before, I need step by step, especially for the transition from one piece of gear to another, then to software, then back out to another piece of gear. None of whatever instructions are provided for each piece of gear or software seem to take account of anything that is upchain or downchain.

 

Maybe my copy was USA too. I don't remember Japanese subtitles, which usually on LD are baked into the image. But one thing for sure is there won't be CAV on any DVD or later technology. I just burned a DVDR from the LD, for the shorts run straight through, then for the gag frame content, going frame number to frame number and recording the frozen frame onto DVDR for about 5-10 seconds each to permit study. I found an online list of all of the gag frames with their frame numbers years ago, about thirty or more of them.

Maybe I thought it was Japanese because that particular program is exactly the sort of thing Disney would go out of its way to suppress like Song of the South (I think I read that the animators were fired because of it). That may be why I haven't seen the shorts program on DVD. But as funny as the hidden gag frames were, one of my favorite laughs was a scene at the hospital where Jessica Rabbit (as a nurse) is sashaying, bumping and grinding down the corridor pushing a cart full of milk filled baby bottles, with the baby bottle nipples in the cart all jiggling and quivering all the way. Then I used a 2 disc case to hold the DVDR with shorts and gag frames along with the main Roger Rabbit movie on Blu-Ray (I think). I sure wish there was more of that kind of stuff coming out today.

 

I like the Richard Thompson concert on LD so much that I replaced the Pioneer disc with the Japanese pressing thinking it might look much nicer. It did not, but looked identical.

Big fan of the Pete Townsend Brixton Concert, got the Japan Only LD which turned out to be mastered (not very well) from a VHS copy. But it looked a lot worse than my VHS Hi-Fi tape. How disappointing.

I’ve learned to keep my prized VHS concerts carefully stored as my concert LDs. Sometimes a VHS tapes blows the LD version out of the water. That great Marianne Faithful concert never got a LD release, to say nothing of DVD how sad.

 

A Blu-ray player plays your DVD's too.

 

You don’t have to finalize in the literal since. Adobe just prepares it for you behind the scenes. It’s a very simple menu prompt procedure. I had forgotten all about that term! You are going to need something going into your computer that will digitize the signal so that Premiere Elements can work with it. You can get a cheap capture card with an SVHS input or better yet, a simple box that will then just plug in via usb...I have one of those. I wouldn’t bother if you have to go RCA out, try and get one where you can use the SVHS round plug as I’m sure your disc player outputs through one. It already isn’t going to look that great as it is, so try getting a vintage device from ebay or wherever.