Anyone have one of these? (Laserdisc player & DVD)

[Malc]

Is there anyone that uses this board that has a Laserdisc player? or has at least seen one running?

What is the picture like on these things and do you think that £40 with Star Wars (the first one) and Indiana Jones & The Temple Of Doom is overly priced?

I have a DVD player but just thought I'd grab one of these while it's in the neighbourhood and maybe purchase the Back To The Future Laserdiscs (does anyone have these also?)

Let me know...

Yup, i've been watching alot of Laserdisc movies.

About the picture quality on these things:

A VHS gives you 500 dpi, Laserdisc 700 and DVD 800.
so laserdisc is quite good, and they support THX and DTS sound aswell.

I think £40 is a quite alright price. The only downfall is the laserdisc themselves. They're the size of an LP and are quite heavy

Hope that helps.

P.S. I'm not sure if its called dpi, but the numbers are correct.

Yeah MosMensk, dpi deffinately sounds right. It stands for Dots Per Inch.

However I would not agree that £40 for a film is a reasonable price. It may be reasonable for laser discs but it ain't reasonable when you can get most DVD films for under half that.

I was considering getting a LaserDisc player just before I noticed DVDs were starting to appear in shops and I plumped for the Digital Versitile Discs instead.

Laserdisks are huge and, I may not be right, but sometimes they are flippers aren't they? If you don't know what a flipper is, it means that you have to flip the disc over at some point during the movie for the second half. Like I said I'm not sure about some of them being flippers, but I would say that I don't think they are the format to go for now.

About the flippers. The "newest" laserdisc players do support flipping. Meaning you don't have to turn the disc.

But I agree with you. DVD is the new kid on the block. But hey.....Amiga fans like us just looove old stuff

I agree with Gibby, I think DVD's are alot better.
I don't think the Laserdiscs will last much longer.
The DVD's have suprised everyone by the way they've taken off in such a big way.
I would never pay £40 for a film when I could get it for £15-20.

At the present time I own 51 DVD's, not bad considering I've only had my DVD player for about 1 year. I'm trying to get hold of all the classic films from the last 4 decades.

Long live the DVD

The only problem is that here are also some DVD flippers on the market, unfortunately I own one, Starship Troopers. Luckily they're aren't that many cos they're a pain in the arse!!!!!

[Malc]

Originally posted by Gibby
However I would not agree that £40 for a film is a reasonable price. It may be reasonable for laser discs but it ain't reasonable when you can get most DVD films for under half that.

No no no, I'm not paying £40 for the Laserdiscs, the £40 is for the player and two laserdisc movies.

Like I said I have a DVD player and I'm not paying over the odds for a laserdisc when I can by the DVD at half the price on a lower sized, higher quality media.

course if u had a dvd rom drive on yer pc, then yer into the dvd ripping game and converting the vob files into a video cd format
it takes a fair amount of time to do, but if u get it right, its great
the quality is quite good, depending upon how far u compress it, u can also convert to the svcd standard which is a higher quality
the downside to this is that vcd's mostly take up 2 cdr's and the sound is stereo, in order to keep the file sizes down, u could encode the discs with the original DD soundtrack, but the file sizes would be huge and probably take up 10 cdr's

Originally posted by Gibby
Yeah MosMensk, dpi deffinately sounds right. It stands for Dots Per Inch.

im pretty sure the numbers quoted are reffering to lines
the amount of lines in pal vhs will be 500
svhs is around 600 and dvd is around 800

I have a DVD-ROM drive and I tried to get into the DVD Ripping game on the recommendation of one of my friends.

He recommended starting off by trying a trailer or something small rather than a whole film. Unfortunately it took ages for my computer (a PII 400) to decode the VOB file and encode it to something better and that was just a trailer.

My friend is in the Ripping game quite a bit. I am not, I hate having a film on more than one disk, I'd rather have my 125 originals than 200 or so Ripped movies.

My friend rips them using the new(ish) DivX codec. This allows the rippers to get films down to CD size and still retain a lot of the quality. The sound gets ripped to MP3 or WMA as well to try and keep the sound part down in size. Most of the time he rips them to 2 CDs just to make sure that the quality is superb but that means having the two CDs in both my drives and using something that has a playlist feature but it still leaves a small, anoying gap.
Ripping them to VCD isn't worth it unless you want to watch the films on a DVD player it also takes ages to rip to VCD.


Flippers - there are some DVD Flippers out there but they are very old now - I don't think I've seen a new DVD come out as a flipper since Jackie Brown(I think) over a year ago. I too have Starship Troopers, however I got the Region 1 copy because the film is not interupted. The disc is still double sided but it is only the extras on t'other side.

MALC - oh £40 for the whole caboodle well if you are a huge Star Wars fan like me then maybe go for it, yeah. Just to have Star Wars in a digital format that will never wear out. But then George Lucas might get round to releasing the Star Wars films on DVD eventually. All of my VHS copies of the trilogy (all 4 of them) are wearing out.

it takes me just over 4 hours to rip and convert a dvd to vcd using a 1.1ghz Thunderbird Athlon
if the black lines are still there then, he's forgetting to change the aspect ration of the film from 16:9 to 4:3
it all depends on what software is used in the process
i dont watch my vcds on my computer, i use my standalone dvd player to watch them, i dont mind having to get up and insert the 2nd disc ive even created a little insert disc 2 mpg just for the fun of it
plus it reminds me to get a cup of tea or something.
just like being at the cinema when they used to have a break in the middle of the movies

I'd be very interested in ripping and converting a dvd to vcd, would I be able to do it with a Pentium 3 - 733mhz , 128meg?
What software would I need? Where could I get it from?

Thanx for any help in the matter.

sure that computer sounds like a good spec

u can get a great guide on the whole process from here http://www.dvdripguides.com/prod01.htm
it lists what software u need and exactly how to use it
it has links to the software as well,
its very easy to rip a PAL dvd rather than a region one NTSC release as they require a bit more work
hope this helps

time wise for your spec of machine and depending upon how fast your dvd rom drive is, should be around the 8 - 10 hour mark for compression, could be faster although its very dependant upon how big the dvd files are
most of them will take up around 4-6gigs of space when they are ripped to your hard drive

Thanxs for the info Torch!!!
But 8-10 hours, wow that's a long time!!

Shouldn't he use DivX for this sort of thing?

yeah, but if u want to play them back on a standalone dvd player its a better option

...... if you want to play on a standalone DVD player. I think. I am not aware of any DVD players that can play avi and mpeg movie files off a disk.

With VCDs the movie file is a .DAT file and the player will recognise that it is a VCD or a SVCD and will play it (if your standalone DVD player can play VCDs and/or SVCDs)

If you want to play the movie on your computer then I would recommend DivX from what I've seen. VCD doesn't compare well with DivX from my experience. With DivX it is possible to have an entire film on one disk and still have good quality. Although a DivX movie on 2 CDs is superb quality.

Where can I find more out about DIV X guys?
Where can I download the ripping software from?
Where can I download a DIV X player from?

Please help, I want to try & put my whole DVD collection onto CD rather than use the original DVD's, that way they'll last a lot longer.

Cheers for any help in advance

[RCK]

For *ALL* stuff need to encode DivX (with tutorial, etc)
I suggest you the excellent http://www.doom9.net website.

I learn to procude maximum high quality divx movie here.
my personnal combo is :

- encode video with FairUse 0.26 (24 - 48 hours)
- grad dvd with SmartRipper 225
- decode sound to wav with vob2audio
- encode final movie with VirtualDub-1_4d (direct video source and 128 kb mp3 compression for wav audio)

Originally posted by Gibby
...... if you want to play on a standalone DVD player. I think. I am not aware of any DVD players that can play avi and mpeg movie files off a disk.

With VCDs the movie file is a .DAT file and the player will recognise that it is a VCD or a SVCD and will play it (if your standalone DVD player can play VCDs and/or SVCDs)

wrong, with vcd you're aim is to convert from the vob files into mpg so that u can burn those files onto disc, the files are stored on the disc as mpg (at least they are when using nero)
my standalone player is a Pioneer DV 535 which can play back vcd's and also svcd's
check out this page for a list of dvd players that can playback vcd's http://www.vcdhelper.com/dvdplayers.php

you're right about the avi files though, they cant be played back on a standalone dvd player