Laser Disc digitizing

[djobitwan7]

Sorry for injecting myself, but.....does anyone know of people that actually digitized their Laser Disc movies or TV shows on Domesday (Preferable) or have a good quality capture with commercial equipment?

It would be great if a person could just buy movies released on LD or VHS (those rare movie titles are only on those formats), but outside of that.....it's not easy to know if you can get a good LD player in working order and then try everything out, just to find out that the quality is not great. I'm not expecting DVD quality, but Laser Disc looked good to me back in the 80's when I first saw it, so I know what to expect. Heck, some LD's were in 1080i, so those should look better than all DVD movies, but I think that was PAL movies (I'm not sure anymore with my memory).

Would just love to know if anyone does this or can covert LD's for me. I can buy the movie or buy directly from the converting person doing it, but I am not sure which LD discs have disc rot or other defects. I just want a copy of some titles that were not released on DVD, much less Blu-ray or UHD. Thanks all and hope I hear back soon. I appreciate it.

[dellsam34]

LD is not 1080i, it's slightly better than VHS and inferior to DVD, DVD can be 480p on a good day. LD if digitized correctly it will give you 480i but the actual horizontal resolution is equivalent to 300 samples per scan line, though the output after conversion will be 720 pixels per standard.

Very few LD that did not make it to Blu-ray, but finding those discs is the limiting factor not to mention their high value, digitizing them is another cost that will be added to the equation.

As to the differences in releases, I don't see the need to spend more money so you can watch a deleted scene or an alternative ending, but hey if you find that interesting and worth the money go for it.

[clashradio]

I also live in MI and am able to do DdD captures with laserdisc and vhs. its very time consuming, so it's only worth transferring if the vhs or LD isn't already on dvd or BD.

[dellsam34]

I agree, The doomesday and VHSdecode are very time consuming, Unless someone is converting a very rare tape or LD that has a sentimental value, it is not worth it for mass produced commercial media.

[lordsmurf]

I agree, The doomesday and VHSdecode are very time consuming, Unless someone is converting a very rare tape or LD that has a sentimental value, it is not worth it for mass produced commercial media.

- Yes, ld-decode (Domesday) is quite superior to analog Laserdisc transfer methods.
- No, vhs-decode is not, still quite inferior, lots of problems, especially ringing/halo that did not exist on the original tape.

And yes, both are extremely time consuming, require lots of drive space, gamer computer specs..

[djobitwan7]

LD is not 1080i, it's slightly better than VHS and inferior to DVD, DVD can be 480p on a good day. LD if digitized correctly it will give you 480i but the actual horizontal resolution is equivalent to 300 samples per scan line, though the output after conversion will be 720 pixels per standard.

Very few LD that did not make it to Blu-ray, but finding those discs is the limiting factor not to mention their high value, digitizing them is another cost that will be added to the equation.

As to the differences in releases, I don't see the need to spend more money so you can watch a deleted scene or an alternative ending, but hey if you find that interesting and worth the money go for it.

I only referred to some LD's in Japan that was a pre-cursor to blu-ray. They were only in Japan, but were specialized players and discs. They were near 1080i resolution (1035 visible lines). Heck, there were even HD VHS (known also a D-Theater) as well, but those are probably rare and not sure if those required different hardware as well. From what I have read recently, there were only around 95 titles and those started around 2002. 6 years after DVD's started, but still a good try to keep the VHS format relevant. If the price was reasonable......they could have possibly done it, but......ease of use that DVD's offered were way superior in almost every way. Heck, I remember the original Divx and I saw that before any DVD releases in stores, but......DVD's did come out first. Rant ended, LOL.

One of the movies that I wanted to digitized was called "Watch It! (1993). It was only released on VHS or LD and I figured that LD would be the superior format to choose from. I realize it won't look as good as a DVD version would (if it was released in DVD format), but it is the only way to view whenever I get the inclination. I found there were many of this title on eBay, but knowing the condition of said LD is another factor. I can only purchase this and send it to someone who is willing to digitize it for me & go from there.

My curiosity to figure out Domesday would make this version pristine as possible, but outside of attempting to get ahold of one and find a LD player and not having any soldering skills to get the test point right is another factor as well. I do have plenty of space on my NAS to keep the RAW data on it and then shrink this down to manageable levels of space, but doesn't do anyone doing this for me any good.

I would love to have this movie digitized & if anyone is game...just let me know. I may have found a professional company that says they can do it for $30, but not sure how they go about things. Thank all for any insight.

[dellsam34]

If you have Hi-Vision LD discs the doomsday duplicator may not help you as it is designed to capture composite SD, The Hi-Vision format (MUSE) has a resolution of 1125i lines, This was also recorded on HDVS tape format 1" reel to reel for professional use, A similar analog HD format called W-VHS was made for consumer HDTV recording in Japan. JVC made their own digital HD format called D-VHS to record HD-MPEG-2 1080i TV channels, D-Theatre are commercially recorded HD tapes were only available in North America and Japan I believe.

[clashradio]

A Domesday-captured laserdisc can look as good as if the title was originally released on dvd. I have a few that do. Megadeth Evolver and Warrant Chery Pie come to mind. If you have a company that can do it for $30 be careful; you get what you pay for. The decode time alone would cost more than 30. Not to mention capture time itself, export, deinterlace, restoration, creating menus, rendering, burning to BD. Like I said earlier; extremely time consuming.

[aramkolt]

How laserdiscs are you looking to convert and what are the titles? Agree that if they did have a DVD or bluray release that there wouldn't be really any point in capturing.

I'm also in Michigan, looking to be about 1.5 hours away. I have a domesday V3.1 unit and I have dabbled in laserdiscs before.

The least expensive option would be a traditional capture and a high quality comb filter within the TBC (I have something like 10 different professional TBCs I could try) as laserdisc is natively a composite format and can be done in realtime. There are some laserdisc players that have S-Video output, but that's just using a Doing it that way first would give you a good idea if any significant disc rot is present before going more advanced with the duplicator.

[djobitwan7]

How laserdiscs are you looking to convert and what are the titles? Agree that if they did have a DVD or bluray release that there wouldn't be really any point in capturing.

I'm also in Michigan, looking to be about 1.5 hours away. I have a domesday V3.1 unit and I have dabbled in laserdiscs before.

The least expensive option would be a traditional capture and a high quality comb filter within the TBC (I have something like 10 different professional TBCs I could try) as laserdisc is natively a composite format and can be done in Realtime. There are some laserdisc players that have S-Video output, but that's just using a Doing it that way first would give you a good idea if any significant disc rot is present before going more advanced with the duplicator.

If I could go Domesday Duplicator, I would love to do that (if possible). Heck, I'd love to learn the process (step-by-step). I can visit ya (if that's cool with you) and see how it's done. My main problem is.....I didn't see how I can get ahold of the Domesday Duplicator for the basic price. I saw it for $1k awhile back. I think it started around $250 originally. If that changed...I'd love a link to get it. My 2nd problem is finding a LD player and then soldering it to the test point. My skills with soldering is probably poor. If I am shown how, I can usually do decently well. Knowing where doesn't hurt either. If the price is reasonable, I would just send in the titles to be converted, but I'd love to know what the videos through Domesday are converted to. Is it MP4, MKV? I mean after Domesday and LD-Decoder.

[The 14th Doctor]

If I could go Domesday Duplicator, I would love to do that (if possible). Heck, I'd love to learn the process (step-by-step). I can visit ya (if that's cool with you) and see how it's done. My main problem is.....I didn't see how I can get ahold of the Domesday Duplicator for the basic price. I saw it for $1k awhile back. I think it started around $250 originally. If that changed...I'd love a link to get it. My 2nd problem is finding a LD player and then soldering it to the test point. My skills with soldering is probably poor. If I am shown how, I can usually do decently well. Knowing where doesn't hurt either. If the price is reasonable, I would just send in the titles to be converted, but I'd love to know what the videos through Domesday are converted to. Is it MP4, MKV? I mean after Domesday and LD-Decoder.

If it's anything like some Sony VCRs, you don't need to do any soldering work as it seems like with most pioneer players all you need is a DuPont to BNC cable.

Also if it's anything like how VHS-Decode spits out the files, they'd be spit out as lossless mkvs.

Can't seem to find any listings for the Domesday itself, seems like you have the buy the components then build it yourself. Closest I can find is this listing

[djobitwan7]

So $150 to put the 3 components together or $445 with the "Player Hookup Kit". Not sure what that entails for the Player Hookup Kit, but probably that DuPont to BNC Cable thing. I'm not sure what the Dupont thing is, I've seen a BNC connector though.

[The 14th Doctor]

So $150 to put the 3 components together or $445 with the "Player Hookup Kit". Not sure what that entails for the Player Hookup Kit, but probably that DuPont to BNC Cable thing. I'm not sure what the Dupont thing is, I've seen a BNC connector though.

I mean a cable like this

[djobitwan7]

So is that what the Player Hookup Kit is? or do I need this on top of having all 3 boards? Just want to make sure.

[The 14th Doctor]

That's the cable you plug into the laserdisc player and Domesday Duplicator, the smaller red and black wires go into specific points inside the player and silver end plugs into the Domesday Duplicator from my understanding

[aramkolt]

Yes, that's essentially the domesday duplicator I've got. To actually connect to the player, you really just need any 50 ohm BNC cable (both the cable and the BNC connector should be 50 ohm) to go from the duplicator to the RF test point on the LD player.

From there, it's just getting the software to work.

I would reiterate that you'd need to have something pretty rare to make it worth capturing it that way (something unavailable on DVD or BluRay) because the capture files will still be huge and it'll take quite a while for the RF capture to process into the 10 bit mkv file. You'll also have to capture the audio separately and then add it to the video later.

I'd recommend you watch this video if you haven't that goes over the general process of using Decode, though they do it with VHS, the process is the same for LD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEzmbw_Y-Tw


Whether you go that route, again, would depend on what the content is and how many discs actually need converting. Further, it kind of depends if you plan to upload to YouTube as that YouTube re-encode may lose much of the benefit gained from Decode.

[djobitwan7]

Yes, that's essentially the domesday duplicator I've got. To actually connect to the player, you really just need any 50 ohm BNC cable (both the cable and the BNC connector should be 50 ohm) to go from the duplicator to the RF test point on the LD player.

From there, it's just getting the software to work.

I would reiterate that you'd need to have something pretty rare to make it worth capturing it that way (something unavailable on DVD or BluRay) because the capture files will still be huge and it'll take quite a while for the RF capture to process into the 10 bit mkv file. You'll also have to capture the audio separately and then add it to the video later.

I'd recommend you watch this video if you haven't that goes over the general process of using Decode, though they do it with VHS, the process is the same for LD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEzmbw_Y-Tw


Whether you go that route, again, would depend on what the content is and how many discs actually need converting. Further, it kind of depends if you plan to upload to YouTube as that YouTube re-encode may lose much of the benefit gained from Decode.

The movie Watch It (1993) was only on LD or VHS. If it was out on DVD, blu-ray or UHD I would've bought it. I digitized my entire collection of discs. I have around 1.3K of them total. I wish I didn't have to do anything to get this movie, but studios only feel it worth their while when the movies make money. I remember when a lot of movies were just for fun and entertainment. Some became cult classics, but not they are greedy. Thank for the heads-up and maybe I can hear back from someone above, since he has a Duplicator. I'm willing to learn, but $500 + $200 for a player is an upfront steep price for a $30 movie at best. I'm sure there are other titles I need, but would have to remember the B movies I am missing that I remember watching as a kid.

[The 14th Doctor]

Only other user I know of who can capture LaserDiscs with a Domesday Duplicator would be Ethan Nunn where he charges $20 for Laserdisc.

[ozymango]

Would just love to know if anyone does this or can covert LD's for me. I can buy the movie or buy directly from the converting person doing it, but I am not sure which LD discs have disc rot or other defects. I just want a copy of some titles that were not released on DVD, much less Blu-ray or UHD.

Well as luck would have it, I recently came across a laserdisc of the pilot TV movie for the 1980's TV series "Call To Glory," which I loved when it was first broadcast (yes I'm that old), and I have some semi-decent recordings of the series on tape (VHS, taped off-the-air) as well as a VHS studio release of the pilot TV movie -- but there have been no DVD or better releases of any episodes of "Call To Glory." So when I discovered that there was an LD release (of the pilot TV movie), from back in the 1980's, I started looking for copy -- and found a shrink-wrapped never-been-opened LD on ebay, for twenty bucks! Huzzah!

I have a Pioneer CLD-909 LD player that I purchased back in the 1990s that still works great today (imagine that!), probably because I only fire it up long enough to transfer the LD to digital format using a vintage Compro VideoMate capture card (Philips SAA7134 chip), which works fine with VirtualDub, etc etc and long story short, the LD capture looks a lot better than even the studio VHS tape, more detail, better color, when played back on my HD TV. I've got a JVC SVHS deck as a playback device so I think I'm getting about the best output I can from both my VHS and LD sources.

All that being said, you first need to get a copy of whatever LD(s) you want to transfer to digital, no matter how you do the transfer (plain vanilla VirtualDub import like I did, or large/expensive hi-tech geek transfer), and how do you know if your disc even looks good to start with? I mean I lucked out with finding a pristine (no laser rot) LD of "Call To Glory," but it was the only LD copy I've ever seen for sale, it cost me $20, I already had a good-known LD player to at least watch it on, so my investment was pretty minimal.

In any case, I don't see how you can get around first getting yourself a working LD player to at least preview your movies on. No point in springing $$$ for some hi-tech conversion if you haven't got a good source to work with. And you'll have to decide what you're willing to settle for, visually, for starters. Plus if you start with a good LD player, then you can try converting an LD yourself, using your various variations on the VHS capture workflow, and see if it's good enough for you right there.

And of course if you don't already have an LD copy of "Watch It" from 1993, I'd definitely be searching ebay and Amazon and anywhere to get a copy.

Oh, and if you also need an LD player, you don't need to get one with an S-Video output -- laserdiscs are pretty much pure composite video from start to finish, and the comb filter in your TV set these days is probably a heck of a lot better than the one in your LD player, and ... well I'm sure there's a thread somewhere here on VideoHelp that'll tell you more if you search on LD S-video vs composite output.

EDIT: Now if you're kinda thinking you'd like to play around with a Domesday Duplicator, I'm right there with ya and could easily see myself going down a rabbit hole of spending $$$$ and months on end, to digitize a copy of a movie that I'll probably only watch once every few years. But also I'm old and have a lot of free time, plus a few $$$ in the bank, so it wouldn't break me to put together some amazing collection of tech gear in order to squeeze a few more pixels of resolution out of some old recording of something or other. But also realistically I'm rather on the skeptical side of a lot of things, and somebody is always coming up with a super spark-plug that'll increase your gas mileage while improving your engine's performance, and a filter for your oil that also increases your gas mileage and performance, whilst making your engine oil last 1 million miles before replacing, and the super-duper in-line RF filter that lets you watch more channels on your TV than you could before, with better resolution, and don't wait, order before midnight tonight ... ...

Anyway I've seen a few videos people have shared about their Domesday Devices, where you get ten minutes of them talking while cutting to a bunch of shots of circuit boards and soldering irons and waveform monitors, and maybe ten second of sample video, which they say, "Looks much better in reality than on YouTube because YouTube turns everything into crap," yeah, where have I heard that before ...

Which is why I heartily recommend first you get yourself an LD copy of whatever you want to digitize, and an LD player, and watch it for yourself, and see how it looks to you. Then -- if you're really serious and have $$$ -- you search around for somebody who actually does video transfers for a living, and contact them with questions about doing an LD transfer, and listen to them as they tell you what's involved, what equipment they use, how much it'll cost (estimated), and if they'r the least bit competent, you'll be able to tell pretty quickly. Grifters tend to give themselves away pretty quickly, as they have lots to say but no samples to back up their chatter.

[lordsmurf]

Anyway I've seen a few videos people have shared about their Domesday Devices, where you get ten minutes of them talking while cutting to a bunch of shots of circuit boards and soldering irons and waveform monitors, and maybe ten second of sample video, which they say, "Looks much better in reality than on YouTube because YouTube turns everything into crap," yeah, where have I heard that before ...
Which is why I heartily recommend first you get yourself an LD copy of whatever you want to digitize, and an LD player, and watch it for yourself, and see how it looks to you.

^ This man is speaking sense.

[Alwyn]

But also realistically I'm rather on the skeptical side of a lot of things, and somebody is always coming up with a super spark-plug that'll increase your gas mileage while improving your engine's performance, and a filter for your oil that also increases your gas mileage and performance, whilst making your engine oil last 1 million miles before replacing

This man is speaking sense.

[aramkolt]

Where decode should really excel is dropout compensation since it can look at frames before and after the dropout to imply what the line should look like as opposed to repeating the last "good" line like almost all internal dropout compensators do. This is essentially a type of 3D noise reduction, but "before" dropouts get compensated for by the internal compensator which typically can't be turned off. Plus, it should know what lines are and are not dropouts based on the level of RF at that moment.

If you could turn off dropout compensators, I think AI tools could more easily spot the static/random noise on individual lines and then essentially set those to motion average the prior and next frame "good lines" and substitute that area. "Remove dirt" or Neat Video filters if you know what you're doing can work ok at the cost of often softening the overall image (not saying that I know what I'm doing when it comes to that), but I think they'd do better if they didn't have dropouts already compensated for by the machine which can muddle what really is a dropout and what isn't.

That's the main advantage I could see in decode specifically, but I haven't seen that demoed on a tape with lots of dropouts vs a standard capture plus maybe some filtering compensation (like "remove dirt"/NeatVideo) for dropouts. I believe LD has additional benefits to using Decode in that multiple disc RF waveforms can be pooled together to compensate for areas of rot to make a transfer better than any of the discs individually.

[The 14th Doctor]

This really feels like something you'd have to a lot of passion for to commit to. Like a lot of hobbies. Do you really want to spend the money and time doing it yourself or paying somebody to use a Domesday Duplicator for you just preserve one LaserDisc that you might only watch once or twice.

And since it's a movie it'd most likely get nuked due to YouTube copyright. Even a promo VHS tape of an anime isn't safe (had clips from the show and cast interviews, but obviously not any full episodes). Yeah got hit by a copyright strike. Feels like the only anime that is safe for YouTube are those old OVAs and other obscure shows that ain't as famous.

Anyway this would probably cost $600 to $800 it seems. $450 for Domesday Duplicator and $200 to $400 on the LaserDisc player...

[aramkolt]

At guess at least the good thing about YouTube is you usually don't get copyright strikes these days, they just won't allow it to be publicly visible in the first place (which is definitely preferable to a strike) - you get the fun of finding that out when the upload completes.

I did find a sealed laserdisc copy of the movie you mentioned (Watch It (1993)) for $15 on ebay, so I did pick that up just to mess around with if I'm able to find a decent player. Seems all the "desirable" models are all in the $400-$1000 range. Probably won't be going quite that fancy if I can avoid it. After looking at all the models, I can see why Decode might be more beneficial - seems the sharpness, various artifacts, and scalers people go through to try to get the best picture out of these is on a whole other level, but I think most LD enthusiasts want to be able to actually view their laserdiscs in realtime, so that puts a little fly in the ointment for some I am sure. Most people seem to say the crystalio II is the best real-time scaler and comb filter for laserdisc, but they are no longer made and even when they were, they cost well over $1k.

I'm mainly interested in it because I have quite a few hardware chains that I'm curious what some of those devices can do with laserdisc specifically, but the trick here is that if all the players have quite a range of composite output performance, that's going to affect the rest of the test since that's the starting signal for the rest of the chain in a traditional realtime capture.

The extreme variance of laserdisc player output differences might make it so that one player and chain combination may look extremely similar to Decode where another might appear miles ahead. I guess the idea behind decode is that you get something consistently good, regardless of the player you have. Though then you can read up on discussions of the wavelength of the laser that is used can vary on different models and that shorter wavelengths could actually read better, therefore affecting the RF result also.

I found this video kind of interesting, a comparison of two Panasonic models where the HX-900U is generally one of the "more recommended" models out there, but the other one in the comparison on the right looks much better to my eye in terms of detail. There's a decently priced 900U on ebay right now, but I also read that all of these machines cut off the right 5% of the image which is also shown in the comparison video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfNfDm2Jp3s&rco=1

In that above comparison, if you had told me that they both were the same player and the right one was decode, I'd say that'd be a big enough benefit to go ahead and use Decode if you really liked that movie. ....But they aren't, they are both realtime captures, just using different players.