Badmovies.org Forum

Who the hell still uses Laser Discs, it's the era of the DVD and possibly Blu-ray...although the latter one is still in its infancy?!

Do you know of ANY DVD or Blu-ray release of "Transmutations" or "Transformations?" 

I have been collecting movies for more than a decade, and have quite a few titles that are not terribly common.  I would guess that there are about 300 laserdiscs in the collection.  As DVDs have become available I upgrade to the DVD, but otherwise those titles are important to my reference library.  Just a quick look shows me dozens that are not in print:

The Sisterhood
Invasion Earth:  The Aliens are Here
Nightwing
Master of the World
Radioactive Dreams
etc.

How about a list of all those that are not on DVD, maybe I can find them to watch on the p2p networks..?!

No.

I have a laser disk player  :thumbup:  haven't used it in a long time though

I had not used mine to play a laserdisc in quite some time.  I have one in my office that is a combo DVD/LD player.  It gets used whenever I am working on a review, but most times it is playing DVDs.  When I watched "Transmutations" the other night I pulled my other DVD/LD player out of the closet where it is stored and carted it downstairs to plug into the receiver.  Katie was surprised.

Looking through the LDs, there are a couple I have not watched in a long time that I'd like to watch again.

The place I used to go here in boston video oasis, which was like one mans own netflix and I'm sad it's gone,  had them and my brother in law gave me the player someone had brought into TWEETER and never picked up.   I saw cannibal holocaust and a bunch of kung fu movies and was completely psyched as it was like 10 years ago before dvd players were like 30 dollars and every movie ever had been released.

There were two great LD places that I used to visit.  One was in Georgia, near Atlanta, and the other was a few miles south of Washington DC.  Quite a few of my LDs came from both of those when they switched their focus from LD to DVD (this was around 2000 or so).  I cannot remember the name of either of them.  The Atlanta one had a pretty active online sales business, but I cannot remember the website.

Ah have CEDs  :teddyr:

The damned player never worked, so I don't know how they look; I just use the CEDs as wall hangings.

Only about half a dozen or better though.

It's funny, but sometimes you can find LD players for sale online at $100-$500.
Some people really like them.

There's an antique mall in my neighborhood that has a solid 6-foot long shelf filled with laserdiscs of movies.  One of these days, when I can get me a laserdisc player, I'm a-headin' down there....   :teddyr:

I had a laserdisc player, absolutely loved it, even though I only had a dozen or so movies. But, during shipping, something broke in it and it destroyed a disc when I tried to load it. I had it fixed, which cost about $200, which was about a third of what I paid for the player, only to have it fail again two months later and ruin another disc. I still miss that thing, I really liked it.

You probably know the distinction, but for anybody else who doesn't:

Too many times I have seen, most notably in vendor malls, someone selling CEDs as Laserdiscs. Though an honest mistake, as they look very similar, they are far from the same thing.


BTW, laserdisc players are additionally cool because they can be used to make zombie fighting rayguns; or, at least, something to scare away thugs. :teddyr:

Laserdiscs were large enough to be dangerous when thrown like a frisbee.  I had a couple die of laser rot (the glue holding the 2 pieces fails and it starts to come apart.  One of them was "Yor!"  :bluesad:

Anyway, I attempted a frisbee throw and that thing went a long ways.  The group of us agreed that being hit by a flung LD might be life threatening.

A friend of mine still has a large collection of laserdiscs.  His two prized possessions are mint/sealed copies of the Criterion Collection editions of BRAZIL and ROBOCOP.  He also has a sealed copy of FROM DUSK TILL DAWN.

I remember a friend having a player where you never saw the disc, you shoved the jacket with the disc inside, and it spit out the jacket while it played. This would have been in the early 80's, and idea of what that might have been?

That's a CED

Cool, you know, when I got my LD Player in '93 or so, I thought the one my friend had was also an LD. I thought they re-gained popularity because of what I assumed was a new, more convenient format (CLV). Funny that I just thought about that when you mentioned people unknowingly selling CEDs as LDs. Now it makes sense why it had the deal with the jacket, the didn't want any dust on it.

That and to prevent scratches as a CED is nothing more than a video LP that used a needle just like a phonograph record.

What do Laser Discs have that DVDs don't have?

Actually, Laser Discs have less in terms of memory.  Lots of movies on laserdisc were split up on each side and some players you had to actually get up and flip over  the laserdisc in the player to watch the other half of that particular movie. I had a friend though whose player would play both sides without you having to flip the disc.    Some early DVD's were that way, but once they figured out how to make dual layers DVD's in addition to huge improvements being made in video compression, laser discs were just left in the dust. 

Here's some informational links about some of the older video formats from my bookmarks for the curious:

http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Contrib/EuropeLD/

http://www.cedmagic.com/selectavision.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20071027013535/http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/roberts-radios/ced/pages/whatisit.htm

http://disclord.tripod.com/vhddiscworld/index.html

http://www.videointerchange.com/video-history.htm

It depends on the way you look at it.  DVD video is heavily compressed, but LaserDisc is not compressed at all.  I forget the exact rates, but lossless raw video at DVD resolution is like 2 gigs a minute, somewhere in that ballpark - which means an LD could be considered to have over 120 gigabytes of storage, compared to a dual layer dvd at around 8.5.  But, this is misleading, since LaserDisc video is an analog signal, and can't really be measured in those terms.  It's further misleading as LaserDisc resolution (as close as it can be approximated) is somewhat lower than DVD.  Still, LD is amazingly competitive with DVD when viewed on a quality player.  Just remember the technology are separated by nearly 20 years, as the LD format launched in the 1970s, before even the compact disc.

As far as what LaserDiscs have that DVDs don't - the one major one is quite a few movies, as Andrew mentioned.  A lot of movies on LD will probably never make the DVD jump officially.  There are also cases where the LD version is uncensored, and the DVD is.  Some cartoon collections on DVD, for example, have racist elements altered, which might still be in the LD versions.  Sometimes DVDs are poorly mastered, and the LD is fine - though that's very, very rare these days. 

One more advantage LDs have - the stereo/pro-logic surround is uncompressed.  It can theoretically be uncompressed on a DVD, but it almost never is.  This means on standard stereo and pro-logic soundtracks, the LDs will sound better.

One other advantage LDs may have is durability.  Properly cared for LDs seem to be aging better than DVDs.  This is ignoring the badly mastered ones with laser rot, etc.  I remember reading that DVDs from the late 90s, when scanned for errors on a computer, are starting to have some pop up.  It worries me, as I have a large DVD collection.  But compare this to an LD without laser rot - late 70s discovision titles still play perfectly fine.  Errors on LDs also seem to disrupt playback less often - instead of freezing, you'll get video glitches, which is much less annoying in my opinion.  This is very much a "time will tell" sort of issue though.

I used to have a sealed LD Criterion's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen that I got for cheap, but I parted with it when the new Munchausen DVD came out since it replicated most of the special features, although I kind of wish I'd kept it because I think the commentary track was different (although I couldn't watch it because I don't own a laserdisc player).

There's a special edition laserdisc of Something Wicked This Way Comes that has a commentary track from Ray Bradbury and a couple other folks and that track hasn't found its way to either DVD release.  I may have to get a copy.

Years ago I saw a web page where a guy turned a LD player into kind of a LD-Rom connected to his computer. He supposedly stripped everything off the LD directly to his computer and used that as the basis for VOB files used to make DVDs. The whole reason was that at the time it was said that Lucas was NOT going to release any pre-special edition versions of the original Star Wars Trilogy on DVD. He wanted to make a high of quality as possible pre-SE edition of those movies on DVD.  :question:


Yep, this is just like how analog TV get a little fuzz or flicker when the signal is bad, and digital gets the blocky, pixelated, several-second pause from bad data.