Talk:LaserDisc

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Transmissive vs. reflective

Many sites go along saying reflective discs have decisive advantages over transmissive ones, but few if any care to mention what those advantages are.

Granted, transmissive disc are known to be sensitive to dust and fingerprints, but this appears to be taken care of with the use of caddies.

On the other hand:

• ability to read both sides without turning the disc : looks like an overwhelming advantage for video as well as for data
• no metalization, hence no possible rot
• no need to glue both sides together
• without those two operations, less machinery and time needed, and probably a much higher yield, hence reduced costs. It seems possible to get much closer to the initial MCA dream of stamping them out like vinyls. Clean rooms would still be needed, but since they need to house much less machinery, they could do with a reduced area.

One thing i am wondering about is, the discs seem to be curved in the reader, that would mean any point on the disk would undergo two bending and unbending events per rotation. Would that wear out the material? Though if it is designed to sustain that for the time it takes to read a disc, it can probably do it forever.

I'd love to see one of those Thomson-CSF transmissive systems in operation, though the He-Ne lasers are probably no longer functional. They were short lived on the market, but a few french and US institutions seem to have tried it. Probably some solid state laser replacement could be designed.

But one thing that keeps amazing me is that those flexible discs are so reminiscent of those little advertising 33 rpm discs you could find in magazines, yet instead of poor audio, they are able to produce high quality video and sound.

Surviving Laserdisc collectors still seem to discover new cases of rot in their stock these days. Will there remain readable discs in the future ? I'm beginning to think transmissive discs would have been more resilient, especially if stored without much use. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Metazoaire (talk • contribs) 21:47, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

Laserdisc vs. DVD, analog vs. digital

I have once again corrected the following claim:

" The variable quality of analog media are theoretically capable of higher quality than the fixed quality of digital A/V carriers such as CD and DVD (example: ED Betamax produces over 500 lines of resolution, while DVD is commonly reported as only 480 lines by manufacturers). "

One: no, there is no inherent advantage (or disadvantage) of analog over digital, assuming that the basic specs such as analog bandwidth (resolution) and signal to noise ratio are the same. Please see Nyquist, Shannon, et al.

Two: The example given of ED betamax over DVD is irrelevant, because the basic specs are different. It is obviously possible to show opposite examples: digital media with far superior performance to analog. But if you match the basic specs, and if lossy compression is not involved, then the performance will be the same.

The LD/DVD issue is confused because lossy compression IS involved on the DVD side. But this has nothing to do with "digital media." It has to do with the storage and processing requirements of lossless-compressed video, which made it impractical to use such on a DVD-sized disc. Please, don't make this into an analog vs. digital (or head contact vs. air bearing) war. Jeh (talk) 02:21, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

You are correct. I have eliminated the phrase "analog media" and "digital media" to focus on the Laserdisc versus DVD comparison. ----- BTW digital media is not perfect. If you take into account the Kell factor (~0.8 horizontal), that reduces resolution. As does the lossy compression (which you mentioned). ---- Theaveng (talk) 13:17, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

An excellent rewording. Thank you. Jeh (talk) 00:26, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

I never said digital was "perfect", nor is perfection required here: Only that the claim of inherent superiority due to analog's "continuous" nature is unfounded. A digital signal chain with a given bandwidth (Flow, Fhigh, tolerance) and SNR will, within that tolerance, reproduce any signal that an analog chain of similar specs can reproduce - and, of course, vice versa. Jeh (talk) 00:26, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

BTW Kell factor is much more about stationary test patterns than real moving images. But even WITH Kell factor of 0.8, DVD's 720 pixels per screen width supports horizontal resolution of 432 line pairs PPH, so LD still doesn't have an edge. Then there is chroma performance, in which DVD is far superior, although again because of digital compression and 4:2:2 sampling and all that, it is different and difficult to compare directly. Nevertheless DVD can usually "resolve" details across a horizontal line that differ only in color much better than LD can. Jeh (talk) 00:26, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

A DVD at 432 lines (not pairs) would be only slightly better than laserdisc's 425 lines. If that DVD has been compressed to squeeze more video into 4.5 gigs, it's measurable resolution might fall below 400... inferior to laserdisc. (Overall the best format was actually ED Betamax with over 500 lines.) ---- Theaveng (talk) 20:33, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Damn! I can't believe I made that "line pairs" goof! I know better, and I've even quoted the relevant part of the RS-170 specs at people who didn't believe that "tv lines" counted both the white and black lines, unlike photography's "line pairs"! Argh. Thanks for the gentle correction. Anyway, yes, very true. On the other hand, as the article states, LD performance isn't always right at the edge of the spec either. And very few images need that much detail everywhere at once -- the whole point of the compression algorithms is that they can put the bits where they're needed. And sometimes they do too much of that, or they do it too sloppily, resulting in blockies... Jeh (talk) 20:52, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

I hate blocks. On one of my DS9 dvds, there's a dark scene lit by a fire. The fire looks like it was made from orange-colored Legos instead of a natural plasma.  :-( I wish the engineer had spent more time cleaning that up. ---- Theaveng (talk) 13:03, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

One thing about ED-Beta being "better" than LD - ED-Beta's "500" lines of horizontal luminance resolution could only be maintained with super-duper clean heads - after an hour or so of playback, it would start to drop off below 400 until the heads were cleaned again - ED-Beta was INCREDIBLY sensitive to head-clogging. Also, the color resolution of ED-Beta was 40 lines MAX and often much worse - Sony originally claimed that the chroma res would be extended to 100 lines for ED-Beta but they didn't do it - S-VHS chroma sucked too. LD's chroma res was the full 120 lines for Orange-Cyan (I-Axis) colors (40 lines for RGB Q-Axis) and later Kurary, Sony DADC, and (finally!) Pioneer LDC mastered/pressed discs had 2 MHz of full RGB (not just I-Axis) chroma bandwidth - which was encoded with Faroudja's SuperNTSC system. The nasty Technidisc never bought a Faroudja encoder - their discs would have probably looked even worse if they had higher chroma bandwidth! Warner Bros WEA pressing plant started the higher chroma/luma encoding bandwagon which caused them problems when LD owners, who had their sharpness and color level controls set too high - they saw more noise and thought WEA's pressings were no good, when it was their televisions settings that had the problems. WEA was encoding 2MHz bandwidth and 450-460 lines of resolution a few years before the others started... by the time Faroudja had the SuperNTSC encoder available, WEA had shut down their LaserDisc pressing plant.

Oh, one other problem with ED-Beta and SuperVHS as compared to LaserDisc - their luma bandwidth is too high for the noise levels of the tape - in other words, they made ED-Beta and SuperVHS sharper so you could see more of the noise... in terms of the 'optimal' resolution level VS noise tradeoff, SuperBeta and Super High-Band Beta-Is were just about optimal. If JVC had set the resolution limit of S-VHS to around 300 lines or so, it would have been a much better 'match' to the noise levels of the format and a better picture would have been the result... it's amazing that neither Sony nor JVC increased the chroma bandwidth... JVC had numerous patents for VHS to expand chroma bandwidth to beyond 100 lines for all 3 colors but in a backwards compatible manner - it worked in a similar manner to the 16-bit, 48kHz digital audio extension to S-VHS that was, sadly, never allowed to be released here in the USA. It was encoded by a depth multiplex 11MHz carrier "under" the video along with the analog AFM audio.

Sorry for being so long-winded here - the LD format has been a passion of mine since we got our first player in the late 70's. I've talked to MCA DiscoVision engineers, Philips VLP engineers, have single-sided "flexible" test pressings from 1975/76, technical papers, patents, you name it... and I own every MCA DiscoVision title ever released - plus I have a new, still-in-the-box Magnavox Magnavision 8000 player bought by Bruce Springsteen on the launch day in Atlanta - he gave it as a gift and the recipient never opened it! It probably doesn't work now. Disclord (talk) 20:52, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

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BetacommandBot (talk) 00:57, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Laser rot

It says in the article that a citation is needed to account for the statement on the rot of some of the early LD discs.

There is an excellent discussion mainly on this topic that took place in 2003 here: [1]

It also has one contribution from someone who has rot on his LD of the Clint Eastwood film Unforgiven issued by Warner Brothers - which dates to 1992 (which may or may not be the year of the production of his LD copy). Now this would indicate that some production plants still (1992-ish) manufactured discs that would develop laser rot in as little as 10 years, before 2003.

Not to confuse the concept laser rot with a similar defect found with some DVDs, the laser rot on LD occurs because some humidity was trapped between the sandwiched layers of the LD. While the DVD rot is a different beast, by which the discs aluminum surface is contaminated and develops corrosion. Both may render discs unplayable. Or affected audio tracks that are digital beyond listening while the analog audio track remains less affected. One of the benefits of the LD format is the level of backward compatiblity which enabled both digital and analog versions of the soundtracks on many discs. Although the NTSC format would allow for ocasional mastering of alternative audio track such as commentr on the analog audio track, it may make a film viewable one last time, or perhaps at a transfer to VHS, which - all faults aside - is a slightly more viable media, being entirely analog and not suspectible to the mares of the digital rot.

I do not know the etiquette and protocol of what constitutes a reliable source for a citation, but the discussion is made several years ago and remains quite sober and informative, and also gets around other subject of life with LD, offering an insight into the wealth of knowledge several of the contributors of the discussion has on the matter of LD.

As a newcomer to the LaserDisc format myself - I reckon have owned 8 films for less than 36 hours at time of writing as very new - reading the discussion linked to above left a very positive impact on me. Also I have owned a nice working Pioneer CLD-D515, unfortunately wo the remote, for little over half a year with no way to test it until now.

83.73.92.144 (talk) 00:21, 9 March 2008 (UTC) -Mikkel (mibm@tdcadsl.dk)

I own over 200+ LDs, and I have a good deal of minor to severe laser-rot. MGM LDs tend to get a minor degree of rot, displaying blue and red specs in weaker players (like the LaserActive models), which high-end players have no problems playing these LDs. Warner Bros. and Paramount have a good deal of rot, depending on the movie. For instance, DiscoVision version of Three Days of the Condor's sound is totally gone, as is the picture of The Shootist, and a copy of Superman II that I had to re-buy after rot totally wrecked the all of the discs. Sony-made discs are the worst. Brand new copy of Heavy Metal, and I watched it a mere two weeks later and it was totally gone, until I bought a very expensive model that takes up to two discs at the same time. The Lawnmower Man extended cut (New Line movie, but a Sony release) is also gone at the end Side B of Disc 1, and totally gone from Side C from Disc 2. So it's mostly hit and miss.

Recently, an old videophile has sold me LDs he's been storing in a shed in the middle of the Nevada desert on his property. It gets over 125 degrees in the summer in the shed, and below freezing in the shed in winter. All of his discs play just fine, and out of the 50+ movies I've bought from him, none have rot.

Just to conclude, Sony's discs have the worst cases of rot, MGM has the least cases of rot. Everybody else is in the middle. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Coffee4binky (talk • contribs) 03:56, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

ODC

"...and that company is still the world leader in optical disc mastering technology." If this is true, why isn't there even a stub for the company? I'm removing this, as it doesn't contribute to the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 161.165.196.84 (talk) 02:44, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Merger proposal

I think that DiscoVision should be merged into this article cause discovison is a very small article and most of it just talks about the background of Laser/discovison and how Pioneer bought DiscoVision Associates. It should be easy to merge into the laserdisc history Speer320 (talk) 01:18, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

• Support - As per the above stated rationale.--Kevin586 (talk) 15:17, 30 October 2008 (UTC)
• Support - I'm all for it. 66.11.243.185 (talk) 00:15, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
• Support - Agreed. LaserVision, LaserDisc and DiscoVision were essentially the same technology and were interchangeable. DiscoVision was not a known brand in Europe anyway.Delverie (talk) 13:28, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
• Support - For all the reasons listed.24.190.34.219 (talk) 20:22, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
• Support - As above. I would do this myself but I don’t have the user privileges yet. Jarl82 (talk) 18:38, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

After a very long time, i will now at least do the “insert old page into new one” thing. I fix grammar and stuff. That's really just it. (talk) 19:27, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Computer Chronicles Episode

There's an old Computer Chronicles episode that shows how LDs are made in a few video clips:

http://www.archive.org/details/computerchronicles

It's somewhere on that list.

Coffee4binky (talk) 12:20, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Low-level format?

The article lacks any significant info on the low-level format used to physically store the signal(s) on the disk surface. Does it use the same "pits and lands" as a CD? Please add. -- 92.229.113.185 (talk) 05:07, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Just for information, this is largely answered above, though with one or two errors. The video information is frequency modulated onto a carrier wave which is then converted from a sine wave into a square wave. The square wave can be written to the disc using a pit on the disc to represent the high level of square wave and a land to represent the low level (it would work equally well the other way around). The replay laser detects the lands which reflect the beam into a detector, appearing light, and the pits which scatter the beam and thus appear dark. The resultant recovered frequency modulated square wave can then be directly demodulated to recover the original video signal. It is not necessary to filter the square wave back to a sine wave as either can be demodulated equally well. Indeed in an analogue FM receiver, the sinusoidal carrier (at the intermediate frequency) is passed through a limiter which clips off the tops of the sine wave turning the signal ito something more closely resembling a square wave. Although the modulated square wave signal would appear, at first glance, to have inherent digital characteristics, it fails to qualify as digital because the pits and lands don't just represent 1's and 0's. The length of the pit or land is important and thus the signal is resolutely analogue. 86.180.84.186 (talk) 18:28, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

That is complete nonsense. Mainly because the signal is not frequency modulated as you claim. It is pulse width modulated (completely different). 86.144.88.101 (talk) 16:46, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

The frequency modulated carrier is pulse width modulated onto the disc. That is what was said above (though it was in a round about way). 86.171.173.14 (talk) 13:28, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Advantage or Disadvantage?

Could someone clarify this:

"One important factor in newer DVD releases' small advancement over Laserdiscs is their opting for 16bit/44kHz sound in lieu of the DVD standard's little-known 24bit/96kHz capabilities."

It's under LD vs DVD - advantages. This statement is so confusing I don't know where to start. --Victoria h (talk) 06:39, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

I removed it. I don't know what point it was trying to make either. Lowest resolution DVD audio is 16-bit 48 kHz for starters. --Zilog Jones (talk) 20:24, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

The point is that the DVDs' advantage would be a lot greater if they used the maximal capability instead of skimping at the minimum specifications. 81.226.241.215 (talk) 19:58, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Technical information

"All of these timing parameters are based on the NTSC standard of 29.97fps. The PAL and SECAM standards of 25fps increases the playback capacity of all the various formats by 20%."

I'm pretty sure this is wrong! While NTSC has 20% more frames per second than PAL, the latter has 20% more lines per frame than the former, so that the total bandwidth is virtually identical. Actually, since the NTSC frame rate is 30 * (1000/1001), or ~29.9700, fps, NTSC should take up ~0.1% less space than PAL, but that's only a difference of 3.6 seconds per hour.

Since I'm only about 6 hours old here on Wikipedia, I'm not going to make any changes to the actual page yet. If nobody else does it first or shows me to be wrong, I'll soon just delete the quoted sentences from the article. Since I won't be adding any content, I won't be adding any citations either. Aarons510 (talk) 07:30, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Laser rot - A misnomer?

I read in the article that laser rot in LaserDiscs are caused by some stuff in the adhesive between the two halves of the disc. That stuff then makes its way into the aluminum layer, making it unreflective. Because the laser of the player probably has nothing to do with that problem, I suggest the name might be a misnomer. 210.4.120.4 (talk) 04:14, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

The word "rot" normally refers to organic decay -- and metals aren't organic (unless, perhaps, you're a silicon-based lifeform -- and before you jump on me, silicon isn't a metal). But the process produces holes in the reflective layer, which apparently grow larger with time. Is that not a form of "rot"? (Yes, that is a form of rot!) Calling it LaserRot is a reference to the system as a whole -- not the laser itself. If you want to get really picky about it... the term should be LaserDiscRot. WilliamSommerwerck (talk) 21:17, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Deteriorating He-Ne Lasers

The article neglects to mention that, as helium passes easily through glass, He-Ne lasers can slowly deteriorate. Owners with this problem would remove the laser and stuff it in a helium balloon for several days. This would usually restore sufficient helium to get the laser working again. WilliamSommerwerck (talk) 21:17, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Manufacturing Cost

The following is broadly incorrect...

"Laserdiscs were cheaper than videocassettes to manufacture, because they lack the moving parts and plastic outer shell that are necessary for VHS tapes to work, and the duplication process was much simpler. A VHS cassette has at least 14 parts including the actual tape while laserdisc has one part with five or six layers. A disc can be stamped out in a matter of seconds whereas duplicating videotape required a complex bulk tape duplication mechanism and was a time-consuming process."

Though it's true LVs could easily be stamped out, two were required for almost every recording, and they had to be carefully centered before being glued together. This largely offset any production-cost advantage. Though videocassettes had to be turned out one at time, this could be done with a bank of dozens of recorders, and the only "post-processing" required was sticking a label on the cassette. (By the way, LVs intended for use in "industrial" environments -- such as commercial video games -- were often glued to aluminum disks, to keep them from warping from the heat.)

LaserDiscs also use a different plastic than CDs and DVDs. The article doesn't discuss this, or the reason for it, though it might be better-covered in article on optical disks. WilliamSommerwerck (talk) 21:17, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Interesting, as for the industrial LDs, was the aluminum disk portion used as the "dead side" of the disc, much like how white plastic was used for the dead side of later consumer single-sided LDs? misternuvistor (talk) 17:24, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Disadvantages...and disadvantages.

Why are there two sections in this article about disadvantages? Somebody ought to merge them, preferably to the section right near the Advantages. 76.19.4.2 (talk) 01:23, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

One is disadvantages compared to VHS and the other is disadvantages compared to DVD. The article is messy, though, and anyone is more than welcome to try to clean it up.--Jorfer (talk) 05:05, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

I have merged the two disadvantages sections under a common heading. Jarl82 (talk) 18:36, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

There is a substantial amount of repetition throughout the article like: the audio formats supported, crosstalk, time of a CAV/CLV disc etc. This article is very disjointed and needs a common tone applying to it. A one person gentle and conservative edit? I would also suggest a tidy up of this discussion page too. Swapshop1 (talk) 23:53, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

I have begun to clean up the article to remove redundant information and make the tone more consistent. Jarl82 (talk) 18:36, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

Squiggly lines

Since 2004, I've noticed many of my LaserDiscs, made at least since 1993, are starting to get these "squiggly lines". I can't find any information on the Internet about these occurring on other LDs, but I have many, many movies with these problems. It could damage caused by extreme temp. variations, or discs being stacked. I don't know. Apple8800 (talk) 19:49, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

If you are storing your discs stacked they could be getting warped causing poor tracking. Ideally you should store them vertically. Jarl82 (talk) 23:51, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

Length of LD track

Does anyone know exactly how long is the track of a laserdisc? After doing a little math, my calculations appear to suggest 31 miles (49 km). However, I'm not sure if this is accurate. 119.93.67.178 (talk) 13:05, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

I make it 21.25 miles. (for a CAV 525 line disc playing for 30 minutes). 86.180.84.186 (talk) 18:33, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Need for Editing

There is a need for this article to be edited and cleaned up as the LD format retreats further into the past I see a need for a clearer and more concise article that is less an omnibus with so many technical particulars and more a good general overview for readers. Currently, some sections read too much like a technical manual. Anyone have some ideas or suggestions? I also see the potential to split off a lot of the content from some sections into new articles. Jarl82 (talk) 23:49, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

Following from my original call for action I have made some initial changes to this article to start the process. I’ve cleaned up the Introduction and worked primarily on improving the Comparison to Other Formats section as I think this would be of particular interest to readers unfamiliar with LD. Previously this was split into VHS and DVD sections and I’ve merged this into one section with subsections for VHS, DVD, Advantages and Disadvantages. I also removed the former Comparison to other media section as it was overly technical listing resolution information that is easily found elsewhere without adding much to the article. I added a link to the relevent section of the video resolution wiki article in place of this section. I also removed the video game information from the Advantages subsection as there is covered elsewhere in the article under Variations and I edited the computer game information in this section. Any reactions or comments on these edits? Suggestions for further improvements? Jarl82 (talk) 18:32, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

I remembered finding may interesting technical details the first time i saw this article, and now they seem to have vanished. Details like FM center frequencies for PAL and NTSC, how much bandwitdh was available, why PAL did not have so many sound options, etc. I am opposed to suppression of detailed technical information, the more the format recedes into the past, the more every single piece of information has to be preserved, as chances of finding it elsewhere will dwindle. Please reinstate that information, only make a clear separation between generic and detailed explanation, so that any reader can choose to skip sections he is not comfortable with. But please don't prevent technically oriented people, even geeks, to find here things they have desperately and unsuccessfully searched for elsewhere on the web.

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: not moved -- JHunterJ (talk) 02:05, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

---

Laserdisc → LaserDisc – Consistency with pretty much every other CamelCase term in this place. If that's false, it needs to be corrected. Despatche (talk) 21:10, 24 April 2012 (UTC) Orig. time stamp 11:55, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

• Moved from WP:RM#Technical requests. Favonian (talk) 21:10, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose. From this n-gram it would appear that the CamelCase variant is less common than the current one. Favonian (talk) 21:10, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose. There is little evidence of consistency in usage out there. Favonian's ngram report is useful; this expanded one shows even more diversity and uncertainty, with camel case relegated to a very low position. Several of the external links for the article show internal inconsistency. This Googlebooks search, restricted to 21st century, gives further evidence of diversity. In such cases Wikipedia's preference for plain vanilla styling (see WP:MOSCAPS, and WP:MOSTM) resolves the matter simply and efficiently. Noetica^Tea? 23:08, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

• Comment - I'm going to use {{correct title}} right now. Therefore, you can decide whether it is right or now. --George Ho (talk) 19:39, 25 April 2012 (UTC)
  • Never mind, I must have misused it and realize it is intended for technical restrictions. --George Ho (talk) 19:45, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Reverted

I just reverted a number of edits that were changing the spelling from Laserdisc to Laser Disc. The editor also uploaded his own artwork showing the different spelling, but I'm pretty sure that can't "prove" the spelling itself. I don't actually edit here, so uninvolved, but reverted solely because it was such a huge change from the consensus version and it looked incorrect, and under the spirit of WP:BRD, feel like now a discussion should take place. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 00:59, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Encoding details? Picture formats?

The article woule benefit from a bit more technical details about the used encoding, similar to what can be found in the VHS article. How do you even record an analog signal using pits and lands? Does it use "color under" with the subcarrier recreated by the player, like VHS? Does it use FM? How is digital audio stored inside an analog video track? Does LD use specific frequency bands for color, luma and audio just like VHS? How is the motor speed regulated? Etc.

Also, what picture formats were common on LD? Were there anamorphic discs? Or was it mostly either 4:3? and if so, what was more common, pan&scan or letterboxing? Thanks! -- 92.226.3.37 (talk) 17:10, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Spelling

The logo clearly reads "LaserDisc" as one word, with a capital L and a capital D. All occurrences of "laser disc", "laserdisc" and "Laserdisc" should therefore be corrected, in my opinion. 78.22.96.22 (talk) 15:07, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

"Binary Nature"

I hate to be that pedant everybody gets tired of, but I think describing laserdisc as being encoded in a "binary nature" ("although the encoding is of a binary nature...") is sort of inaccurate. The pits and lands do represent on/off and there's only two states, but they're not numeric, which I believe would be required to consider it to be "of a binary nature". Perhaps a more accurate way to phrase it would be "although the encoding does rely on pits and lands to represent states of 'on' and 'off' much like the binary encoding required for digital media" or something similar? I just don't think you can call something binary unless it's representing numbers in a base 2 manner.Cmactaggart (talk) 19:23, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

I just reread the above and realized that I must have been sick or something because that doesn't make any sense. I retract the above. Cmactaggart (talk) 17:23, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Spiral Track Length

The page claims "The spiral track of a LaserDisc is 42 miles (67 km) long." This number is uncited.

I'm very confused about this number because there is a similar number given on the compact disc page: "The program area is 86.05 cm2 and the length of the recordable spiral is (86.05 cm2 / 1.6 µm) = 5.38 km."

Why does this bother me? Well, I can't find a precise number for the track width on a LaserDisc but everything I have found says that it's about the same as a CD. I don't know the program area either, but as an absolute upper bound it certainly can't be more than the physical area of a LaserDisc. So if we apply the same calculation on the CD page in reverse to the LaserDisc track length that implies a "program area" of 1072 sq. cm. A 30cm disc is only 900 sq. cm and that's before subtracting out the inner, unnused area. It's a completely unrealistic overestimate of the available program area yet apparently the LaserDisc's program area is even larger than that...

So there are a couple possibilities: 1. The track width in LaserDisc is smaller than for CDs by a non-negligable factor. I have not been able to figure out what this number is for LaserDisc, but everything I have seen says it's "about the same" as CD so I don't think this is the most likely explanation. 2. The calculation used on the CD page is wrong and the CD spiral length is more than 5.38 km. True this is a simplistic calculation that treats the data more like a series of annuli than a true spiral, but as far as I can tell that ought to be a fairly negligable difference. 3. The 67 km number is wrong. I can't find a source for this number, that's what I'm most suspicious about.

I actually have a textbook about this. It verifies that the "average track pitch" is 1.6 µm. I could not find any calculation for the length of the spiral track, but agree that 67 km seems long for the reasons you state. The length I calculate for LD is about half that; perhaps the writer intended this for a double-sided disc? Anyway, without a citation we can't verify the claim, so I think it's fine to get rid of it. Fnordware (talk) 21:54, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

If the track pitch of a standard laserdisc is 1.6 micrometers like CDs, that gives us a track density of 15,875/in. This sounds reasonable as a visual inspection of a laserdisc suggests a track area of about 3.7 inches, and we know from the specification that there are 54,000 tracks per side on a standard CAV disc. This would yield 14,595/in. The inner diameter of the track area is about 4.13 inches and the outer diameter of the track area is about 11.56 inches. Using a program to loop through each track within that span, calculate its circumference, and add it to a total length, I get 32.19 miles for the lower estimate and 35.02 miles for the higher estimate. ParticularG (talk) 16:34, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

Are you sure in your calculations? Mine yield quite different results. For example, let's assume that the track pitch p is 1.6 microns, and the track area has the dimensions you quoted above. Then the inner radius r1 is approx. 52.5 mm, the outer radius r2 is 146.8 mm. The length of the spiral track then is approximately 3.1416 * (r2^2 - r1^2) / p, which is about 36.9 kilometers - which is much less than your estimate of 35 miles. 217.145.83.141 (talk) 11:06, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

As to how long the spiral track of laserdisc, perhaps it's like this. Firstly, there's a CD-based format called CDV. Like laserdiscs, CDVs use analog video. Because of the CD's small size, only 5 minutes of video can be stored whereas a laserdisc can hold an hour. This suggest that a laserdisc has 12 times the capacity of a CD. Therefore, when finding out the length of a laserdisc's spiral track, perhaps it's 12 times the spiral track of a CD. 173.55.37.52 (talk) 04:04, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

But the CDV holds 20 minutes of audio along with that 5 minutes of video. They're not really comparable formats. Jeh (talk) 06:55, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

We know that a CAV LD plays for 30 minutes. And we know that each frame on a CAV disk is one "track." (Look at the picture of the CAV disk. Those two narrow "deltas" are the vertical blanking intervals between fields.) 30 minutes x 60 sec/min x 30 frames/sec = 54,000 tracks. Over 3.7 inches of width of active area this gives 14,594.6 tracks per inch, matching nearly exactly ParticularG's track pitch number. Fine.

However, @ParticularG:'s final result fails a simple reasonableness test: If we take the maximum track diameter of 11.56 inches, that's a circumference of 36.3 inches. 54,000 times that... it works out to 30.9 miles, even less that ParticularG's "lower estimate". And my "30.9 miles" assumes all tracks are the max length, which they obviously are not; the true "spiral length" must be considerably less. If you assume all tracks are the length of the innermost track you get 11.1 miles. Average the two (and I see no reason why that shouldn't work; the relationship between track radius and circumference is a linear relationship) and you get 21 miles, close enough. That comes to 34 km, which is darn close to @217.145.83.141:'s result of 36.9 km. Jeh (talk) 06:55, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

What about the 2002 Laser Juke LDs?

How come the 2002 Laser Juke LDs are not mentioned as the last produced (assuming there were not later produced LDs)? 2002 is more recent than 2001 right? 27.32.141.11 (talk) 20:48, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

References needed. Jeh (talk) 23:59, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

References needed for what? I have no need to provide a reference to a fact - an encyclopedia should be as factual as possible... And... a reference to another website isn't fact either. Go get a Pioneer Laser Juke catalogue if you can find one still, or their promotional material 60.242.142.84 (talk) 04:37, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

WP does not regard things as "facts" just because someone claims they are facts. Please see WP:RS, WP:V, WP:OR, etc. Quick summary: If you want this information to appear in the article you're going to have to provide sources that meet WP's criteria. (Some web sites do, many do not.) In the meantime, we can't just take your word for it. But if a ref can be found it is indeed something that should be in the article. I should mention that claims of "last produced example of a product category" are often hard to reference; it's a little like proving a universal (one counterexample anywhere in the world disproves your "proof") and it's not as if the manufacturers of LD are likely to brag about the ending of their businesses. Personally, I never heard of "Laser Juke", so I'm probably not the best person to try to find their catalog. Please note though that catalogs and other promotional material are often prepared and published long before the product is shipped, so a product's appearance in such is not proof that the product ever existed, only that it was planned. Jeh (talk) 06:45, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Let's then pretend Laser Juke exist and let's also note that whoever made up the fact that the current mentioned laser LD was the last (actually it does state last in each region - but decides to ignore the last within Australia - that the fictitious laser juke i guess... didn't exist)... I would rather NOT provide references that you could easily find on Google or heck... ebay for the sake of knowing that this is yet another 'take with a grain of salt' article on Wikipedia - because their rules as quoted even if followed do NOT prove anything, they only lead to potential greater credibility. 27.32.141.11 (talk) 12:17, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

It appears that you are suggesting that I do your research for you. Well, I'm not the one wanting to add what you want to add to the article. You could of course add the material you want but include {{cn}} tags; perhaps others will find the needed refs. Otoh, they may simply revert you. Much of the rest of the above, I find simply argumentative. Let me just say that you will not get much of anywhere arguing that your edits somehow do not need to meet WP's policies. With that, I'm withdrawing here. Jeh (talk) 13:32, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

However, there's more to do here than simply removing this oft-used word

This article used to contain 15 "however"s. The "Design" section, though, needs a bit more than just pruning "however"s; it needs a major rewrite. Working on it. Jeh (talk) 09:11, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

@Jeh: It's just one of many "filled pause" type of junk words, that bears its own editorial mention! These redundancies accumulate with multiple myopic incremental editors. Or I guess, speakers of gratuitously formal antiquity. ;) Also, I tend to perform "de-also-ification". Thank you. — Smuckola(talk) 09:05, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

External links modified

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I Don't Understand The Design Section

By which I mean, I don't understand the description of how PWM is used. The article states that the system has a 50% duty cycle, but isn't the whole point of PWM that variation of the duty cycle is what creates the signal? Either that bit is erroneous or some more explanation is needed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2607:FEA8:2CE0:B7B:C4D7:EBBC:5763:6E7 (talk) 21:04, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

It has a 50% duty cycle long-term. But short-term variations occur. Jeh (talk) 02:53, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

This 50% duty cycle piece is rather misleading and not very useful, better to remove it. What happens is that the original baseband video signal frequency modulates a carrier, which results in a signal with continuously varying frequency. if you run an horizontal line through it and decide every part of the signal above it will be a pit and every part under will be a land, then you have your variable length pits which encode the information. When reading, you can extract the variable frequency carrier (should not matter whether it is square rather than sinusoidal) and demodulate it to yield the initial video signal. No PWM involved at all, just good old fully analog FM (projected along the spiral track so to speak), used for video instead of audio, and some peculiar modulation parameters to fit inside the available bandwidth. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.8.76.118 (talk) 20:49, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Biased and incorrect use of North America

Over use of the wrong terms show bias. It is not appropriate to refer to one region of the world (North America) 15 times in the same article. Other regions were mentioned far less often: IE: Europe and Asia 3 times. Only Japan was mentioned more than North America and the reasons for this were explained in the article. The article does not explain the obvious overuse and mis-use of "North America".

The so called "North American" market for LaserDiscs was a United States market. It consisted of US companies manufacturing US movies on discs in US factories for sale and distribution in the US. Some of these discs were later redistrubuted in other North American countries and worldwide. But that does not change the fact that there is no single "North American" market for movies. There are many markets in North America. Same goes for music. When CDs are released in a country such as Canada they are different releases than those in US, Mexico, etc.

Also place names such as "United States" are generally placed in link quotes on their first appearance in the article. Adding link quotes one time is NOT overlinking. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.126.89.172 (talk) 15:31, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

As I have said recently in edit comments - "North America" is widely used when what is meant is "several countries in North America", sometimes even only one. Something that happens in the United States happens in North America, doesn't it? As far as I can tell there is no precise definition of when we are justified in claiming "North America". The claim does not have to apply to all of N.A. to be correct, not unless the claim is specifically "all of North America". Which it is not.

What if it's really "most of North America"? Well, by population alone, the US is more than half of the population of N.A. Hmmm. Ok, no, I'm not really arguing that that justifies saying "North America" in cases where it was really only the U.S. But what if it was, say, all but three countries? What if an item is "generally available throughout" in N.A.? As far as I know there is not even a general guideline on this anywhere.

It is not news to me that a release in, say, Canada is a separate release from U.S. But at the same time, there are many, many countries that don't get their own "releases". Nevertheless, the items are legitimately sold retail in such places.

Anyway... if you want to change "North America" to more specific place names, fine - but please provide a reference for each change. Granted that the current text is unreferenced in most of these points, but changing one unref'd claim to another unref'd claim is not an improvement.

About your accusation of "bias": Such a claim is not supported simply by counting mentions. If 15 things relevant to the article topic happened in Ruritania, but only three in Aldorria, then reporting it that way is not "bias" against Aldorria; it is accurate reporting. We're not going to omit 12 of the mentions of Ruritania just to avoid offending the Aldorrians. To show "bias" you have to show that the article authors had a reason for the disparity other than the actual numbers of mention-worthy events.

Of course, if the problem really is that some WP:DUE mentions of Aldorria are missing, then the correct response is to add them. With references, of course.

Regarding wikilinks and overlinking - Have you read WP:OVERLINK? You probably should, since you're arguing about what it means. You will apparently be surprised to learn that "United States" is mentioned specifically as an example of a place name that should not be linked! So is "Japan".

This article is overlinked in other ways, mostly in that technical terms are linked more than once - many of them far more than once. I'll be fixing that. Jeh (talk) 16:29, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

No contact VHS Tapes?

Can someone have a look at this and figure out if this unknown user just said that from its mind or if a source can be found to collaborate this idea?

(cur | prev) 04:22, 11 June 2010‎ 24.20.86.224 (talk)‎ . . (74,000 bytes) +115‎ . . (→‎Comparison with VHS) (undo)

He added the following: (though later in VHS' lifespan, engineering improvements allowed tapes to be made and played back without contact)

It would be great if this text, if true, could be clickable to forward us to the page where we can learn some more about that special technique that allows to read a vhs tape without touching it! — Preceding unsigned comment added by VeganTommy (talk • contribs) 05:44, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

Laserdisc Modulation

The French page contains a useful [image of LaserDisc modulation](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laserdisc#/media/Fichier:LaserdiscModulation.png) that I remembered from a brochure, and that really caught my imagination back then, but now that I thoroughly understand modulation techniques I had trouble finding it online. Maybe it is a useful addition to this page [but I don't read French, so I cannot translate the content]. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:980:93A5:1:15C3:5FA6:A45C:30B6 (talk) 07:34, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Phonograph record link?

Including a link to laser phonographs might be just about justifiable, but I think replacing the "Videodisc" link with Phonograph record is pushing it. Anyone else agree/disagree?

Ubcule (talk) 17:39, 16 May 2021 (UTC)

Deleting unsourced material

Erpert proposes deleting swaths of this article because material is unsourced. There are {{or}} and {{refimprove}} tags on the article as a whole but the specific material has not previously been challenged and there is no stated objection to the material other than it being unsourced. We generally don't delete unsourced material unless the content is challenged. A similar deletion was proposed and is being discussed at Talk:Cassette_deck#Decline_in_popularity. ~Kvng (talk) 15:18, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Patents and sale

This statement "Optical video recording technology, using a transparent disc, was invented by David Paul Gregg and James Russell in 1963 (and patented in 1970 and 1990). The Gregg patents were purchased by MCA in 1968" is puzzling. How could MCA purchase 1970 and 1990 patents in 1968? Or have I misunderstood something? 86.161.218.84 (talk) 19:12, 14 April 2024 (UTC)