Capturing from Pioneer LD Player

[houtx67]

Hello,
I have an old Pioneer LD Player (LD-4200 I believe) that has a parallel port on the back. I have been told that you can use this to hook up to your PC and that Win95 has the drivers on the disk. I haven't ever tried this because I bought it used w/o manuals. My question is: Does anyone know if I can create VCD/SVCD's using the LD player as the input (vs an onboard DVD-Rom)? Also, I think LD's are supposed to be MPEG-1. Would that mean I could take that file and go straight to burning (no decoding and encoding)?

ANY help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[niteflights]

houtx67

Laserdiscs are not mpeg anything. The video track is analog. Newer laserdiscs have digital audio tracks similar to CDs but they are 48KHZ. The parallel port on the back of your LD is not to trasfer video but to control the unit remotely via a computer (this was an industrial unit).

Actually the analog nature of laserdiscs is why some still prefer them to DVDs. Very sharp and smooth video without and artifacts!

One question I have for any LD rippers is should I turn TBC on or off when capturing a LD to my capture card?

Best regards,
Niteflights

[Chopper Face]

Well I don't even know what TBC mean but I just plug my s-video output from my LD player right into my capture card and it works great. I do 640x480 capture that looks like this: http://meowmixxx.homestead.com/files/face2.jpg Makes me wish I had a TV which could actually make the most of this.

I totally agree that LD looks better than VCD. No matter how well encoded a VCD, SVCD or even DVD is there's always some artifacts. You don't get any of that with LDs. Of course they're huge and impractical compared to a DVD so I guess we're probably better off.