Anthony DiSano Verbatim have bee excellent media for me. As has Maxell for DVD-R and CD disks. Fuji also makes good media.KAO was also excellent media. I have some LAO CD-R disks from more than 20 years ago that still play fine.I find that the slow speed write disks, that are dark green or blue for CD-R or dark purple for DVD-R are superior to the light colored CD-r or the light vilot DVD media. dark dye needs more laser power to burn, this the slower speed, but that makes more contrast, and provides better playback S/N.

DrCassette I am sure glad that 20 or more years ago I bought over 100 Fuji CDR disks that work with everything. I have a bunch of old DVDR disks that also play are pretty much everything. I use these for archiving personal stuff only. Stuff for clients go on the cheap media.

Recently I heard about a format called the M-Disc, it's essentially a Blue Ray disc, but the layer that records the data is chemically similar to stone. They claim it lasts 1000 years. DVD-RAM is relatively reliable too, they say. But it won't help with the reliability issues of CD and DVD because all that media needs special equipment for playback...

DrCassette At this point, I pretty much will only rely on discs made in Japan, which are usually made by Taiyo Yuden, which is currently owned by JVC. Unfortunately, those are getting harder to find these days, except when ordering online. There's also AZO discs by Verbatim, which are also excellent. But, you have to make sure the Verbatim discs you get are AZO, as signified by the inclusion of the AZO logo or labeling on the packaging. They also have non-AZO discs and they're nothing special.

I buy discs called A-one white label printable dvd and cd discs ive been using them for about three years and never had any problems with them ive tried hyundai discs and some work ok some dont burn properly whether it was a bad batch or something i dont know another spindle of the hyundai discs i bought said rw on them but they were not rw discs obviously a mislabelling at the factory

+morrisonAV Yes I hear you there too. I had a box mostly of concerts. Then a neighbour that was a big collector gave me their collection of literally hundreds of movies. I have 3 full boxes with probably 50-60 disks each. Lots of rare hard to find LDs.I should be getting rid of this stuff not collecting more of it.

That's just like the problem my Playstation 2 had when playing CDs. (although the sound was MUCH worse, kind of sounded like a dental drill cutting into concrete.)

+Rick Hannah Excellent, glad to hear. I like rescuing this old stuff. People are so fast to toss away perfectly good items. I received this player, and about 200 laserdisc movies that were being thrown out. Got a bunch of highly collectable and rare laserdisks because that format is not the flavour of the month anymore.

@@12voltvids 17 years.. pffff is a teenager 😂 🤣 .... i have to said this is more or less right up my alley... I've been recovering some vintage CD player and CD writers for PC.. you know.. old Creative SoundBlaster .. some Matsushita .. YAMAHA .. Plex and Pionner off course.. from earlier and mid 90's .. and usually what I need is to blow some air can to the sides of the lens 😶...... to remove the dust from the prism that redirect the laser light towards the lens... and remove the dust from the head of laser LED it self inside the lens assembly 🤫... other times messing around with the potentiometers in the laser assembly board .. to increase the laser light.. so it get through.. despite the grime on the inside part of the lens.. which as far as I know ... you cannot cleaned otherwise 🤷‍..... any way... the electrostatic from the air can 🙁.. I do not know ..... maybe it is because the unit is grounded when i work it ????... or because I wear the antistatic wristband and I'm probably touching the case or the laser assembly and through me it is also grounded???... anyway .... that is a beautiful unid..🤤🤤 . all that engineering to make that device work..... all those moving parts..... we don't have anything like that for the average consumer this days.. 🙄... We are once again the savages that Colon found when he arrived in America .. you know.. buying thouse silly "little color mirrors" ... that we all have in our hands now..😔 .

James Hamilton Yup I know. My daughter was born in 1997, and she is 17, 18 later in the year. However, I said it was 17 because I bought the unit in the fall of 97, about the time my daughter was born, so even though it was made 18 years ago, it was put in service about 6 months after it was made, by the time it made it to the store!

Ooh..., I see :)

Nelson De Silva I used to rent laser disks from a shop that was on the other side of town. The guy that ran the shops name was "jack frost" believe it or not. Talk about having a tough name with a name like that. That's ok, I shot a wedding about 30 years ago and one of the groomsmen was named jack rabbit and his brother and sister Peter and bunny were guests.

I don't think laserdisk ever had DTS. They did have dolby ac3 and you are right. They used one of the analog tracks for ac3 data. The other one carries the mono sound track for older mono players. On laserdisk there were multiple uses for the analog sound. They had discrete stereo, matrix stereo (that's mono on left and l-r on right for compatability with mono machines) mono plus ac3, mono plus second kanguage, mono plus commentary track. The digital track had the stereo sound track. I always wanted a laser recorder but when i found out the cost of the blank media i didn't even ask the price if the recorder

Gordon Freeman I have worked on the 5 disk CD player with laserdisc. They are a little more complex mechanism wise, but from what I remember they were not really more problematic. Certainly a collectors item, I will have to seek out.Pioneer made the best LD players. They made more than anyone else, and all the other companies like Sony and Panasonic that jumped on the bandwagon late in the game were just trying to cash in on laserdisc popularity in the videophools playground.In my opinion, the Panasonic, and Sony units weren't bad, but there were several rungs down the ladder from the better pioneer units..

12voltvids OK, I'll see if I can get the LD 5CD player, thanks.

Gordon Freeman Provided that it's fully working, get the CLD-D502. It will have automatic reverse, where you don't have to manually flip the disc over in the middle of the movie. However, the CLD-S250 will be the simplest in terms of mechanical design. Both the CLD-S250 and the CLD-M90 are single-side play machines.

***** Thanks man, I think I might get the 502.

Gordon Freeman You're welcome.

polyman2 Both are DVD-R disks, the one that played a Maxell, the one that didn't a Memorex.I haven't tried a DVD+R as all I have is DVD-R. I should get a +R disk and try it. I know my Panasonic DVD recorder only supports -R -RW and RAM, but I believe my Toshiba supports both -R and +R disks.

also the unit is a CLD-V820 and it is stuck in the down (loaded) position with no disc and couldn't for the life of me find out how to manually get it up and eject the tray

+Bri G. Laserdisk was still in production right up to Jan 15 2009. That is when Pioneer officially stopped making them.

Marius Percutii This was a big box store, they only sold hi-fi stuff. I walked in one day and saw a stack of pioneer players in the corner they were selling them at discount so I grabbed one. this was back in the 1980's.

I agree, I owned the Pioneer stereo in the 80's. The home stereo I regret that I sold when I lost my job and needed money, and the Pioneer Supertuner I had installed in my car was stolen.

+MusicVideoStudiosTasmania Loading belt.

DVD player use a red laser cd uses infra red. The way recordable media works is by burning holes in the dye so that the area not burned will absorb the laser light and burned areas will allow the laser to hit the reflective layer. The dye layer is wavelength sensitive. The red laser of pre dvd/cd-r passes through the dye. Th next gen DVD players had duel wavelength laser and phase change detector to allow rw disk playback. Nothing you can do. The unit has the wrong type of pickup.

12voltvids Ah oh well. Not the end of the world I guess...

Another fact about old CD players. It is the type of disk you use, not the speed you burn it at. Some older CD players will play the older CDR disks just fine. That would be the old KAO, Maxell, TDK ect that there dark green, or dark blue. Originally they used gold, yes real gold for the reflective layer on CDR. These were the best CDRs ever made, as gold does not oxidise. Then the aluminum reflective disks came out, and the dye payer was made more sensitive for faster burning, and compatibility with legacy CD players went out the window. I have a few VERY OLD CD players, a CDP40 and CDPX555ES and they both play the old disks was 20 years ago just fine. The ES player plays everything, never had an issue but the old CDP40 is picky.New silver disks no good, old dark blue or green, no problem.I was fortunate, I stocked up on a ton of the old X4 and X8 disks when they were still available so I have enough to last my lifetime. Have a bunch of Fuji disks. Had a friend that worked for Fuji, and he got me a case of disks, and I think there were something like .25 a disk before the .29 per disk tax came into effect in Canada. Today you would be lucky to find a CD-R for less than 2.00! I guess it is supply and demand.

12voltvids Nice collection! I really desire to own that 200 disc changer you have. When you said when they are relocated, then turned on again, and it snaps discs as it moves the discs around when they are all spilled inside made me laugh. I can imagine that really ruining someones day if their costly entire collection was in there, especially if their unit was SACD capable and it had SACDs in there.

Personally I use good old hard drives. I have an e-SATA docking station and I just buy cheap bare 500G or higher hard drives and dump all my raw files onto them, and then put the edited shows on them as well. When it fills up I swap it out and put a new one in. For important data I make a backup, and store the drive off site. If the drive isn't spinning the data isn't going anywhere. I use DVD-R and BD disks as well, but keep multiple backups.

Ok, that's sort of what I've been doing anyway. I've burned loads and loads of DVDs and I will keep them in the dark! I want to free some of those HD's up and get the cost of long term backups down as I often save massive uncompressed video files for editing. Also it's been weird (but kinda fun) to run at least 5 DVD drives at once to reconstitute large files. 3 computers is a bit much though, hard drives are most convenient but expensive for me (I get 400 gigs for 5-10$ US on LTO 3 but it's really really slow) - Thanks!

I picked up a bunch of 320 and 500 gig drives from a company that does cable box re-furbishing. When these cable companies sent their boxes back the refurb company as policy swaps the drives out. I picked up a lot of 50 drives for 150. Out of those there was 5 drives that had problems, but the rest of them formatted and passed tests with flying colors. I forget the name of the place off hand, but they were down in LA. They are all segate and WD drives.

That's a good idea, instead of waiting for friends to give them to me (thought I've had generous donations!). I'm sure if I look around enough I will find a good deal about like what you got, double copies if the drives are too much cheaper and funky. I am prone to use them longer then I should... occasionally for experiments and laughs.

i use a software called hd shredder its a free download it totally wipes the hd of anything that has ever been on the hd ive also found the hd works better after having this done as its obviously like near new and the write speed is really fast ive got a 1tb as a c drive and 1tb 2tb and 500gb drives as external drives making a total of 41/2 tb!

It plays laser disk, and cd video. Dvd video, audio cd. It does not play dvd-r or CD-R as far as i remember nor does it play vcd or svcd. You have to appreciate that this was out long before dvd-r and cd-r became a reality.

This player does play CD-R discs when its burned to CD-DA standard, I've used those colored CD-R from Memorex, burned some songs up to 80 mins and it works. I do recall someone played a CD-R on a Sony CDP-101 (World's first CD player) and it works

Does not work with VCD and CD-RW though

Neil Robinson At least they sold the surplus electronics, my friend worked for a university and when they renovated some of their buildings, surplus electronics went straight into the trash, even including super expensive DV decks and other broadcast equipment that was in like-new condition.

DrCassette In Europe people are so paranoid about heath and safety issues that they would just rather trash all the surplus electronics rather than sell them off, i know as i am originally from the UK, the home of health and safety madness.

I guess in that case it was not just due to health and safety regulations but due to the laziness of the people involved. Why go through the trouble of selling something that is not yours when you could just as well trash it :P

Sorry for being so late, but this is the first time ive seen this vid, could be something pulling too much power, something being shorted out or maybe its getting too much power.

Rob And just how is having the cover off going to affect playback.

12voltvids - In rooms with bright lights when the cover is removed, the light bounces off the reflective discs and can screw up the reading of the discs, it happened to me.

Makes no difference. It is the brand of the disk that makes the difference. Has to do with the wavelength of the laser. When DVD-R came out, dvd player manufactures had to modify the wavelength of the laser to improve play-ability. It just so happens that the older 2x and 4x disks have a slower dye, and require a hotter laser to burn it. The resulting burn has higher contrast. The exact same thing is true with CD-R. My old CDP40 first generation Sony. It will play my old 2x - 12x gold (green recording surface) disks no problem. It will also play the first generation silver disks with the blue recording surface. They wont't play the 52x disks at all. Won't even spin up.

That's very interesting, I will have to try some older disc's vs the newer ones... Thanks.

Anthony Kurtzweil Pioneer made a few interesting LD players.Other companies also made LD players, but none were even close in quality to Pioneer. Funny thing is Pioneer didn't invent Laserdisk, Magnavox did, whom was bought out by Philips. Pioneer saw the laserdisc for what it was, the best possible playback device of the time, and did a good job of marketing it throughout it's life cycle.DVD eventually killed LD, but like Beta, there are still plenty of LD collectors out there, and there is still tons of content floating around that was never released in any other format.

wow thats interesting....personally growing up we never had a laser disc player...off hand i dont know if i ever watching anything from one...my old neighbor acroos the street had a bata machine,watchinched a few movies on my neighbors parents machine.....the first vcr we got was in the late 80s from sears...that lasted for a long time....

wow thats an interesting mess...last summer i went out thrift saling and someone had a laser disk player and a bunch of disks for cheap....well mabye someday ill get to watch one for myselif

+12voltvids _"RCA used their MCA affiliation to only release MCA titles on CED, and not LV or Laservision"_ I beg your pardon, but LaserDisc was jointly developed by MCA and Philips. Among the very first production LaserDiscs in 1978 were feature films from Universal released under the MCA DiscoVision brand, starting with "Jaws." And, there were plenty of MCA titles on both CED and LV in the early 1980s.

+Watcher3223 Actually that was a quote from Wikipedia, MCA was involved in the development of laservision with Philips. RCA marketed the CED format from 1981 to 1984. It just so happens that RCA was in acquisition of MCA in 1984, and for a period of time while the companies were in merge mode, MCA titles were only available in the CED format. CED format was pulled the same year that RCA was attempting to take over MCA, and that put an end to the exclusive MCA CED releases. Had you owned a laserdisc or CED player during that time you would have known this. I worked for an RCA dealer at that time, and we carried CED players and movies. In 1985 RCA bought back all the players in dealer showrooms, and the unsold disks, and rental disks that the store had.

None of the laser disk players had a good comb filter. The comb filter is just for the S-video output to trick consumers into believing that it would improve the output. It does not. Laserdisk is a composite format. The chroma is already mixed with the lumanence signal. A half diecent analog TV has a much better comb filter in it. Especially some of the later Sony models with the 3D digital comb filter. That was about as good as it got for NTSC video.

+12voltvids The comb filters in the actual top of the line players made a BIG difference. The CLD-D99 was the best player released outside of Japan. The players such as the LD-S9 and CLD-R7G were heads and shoulders above anything released over in the US. That is not even mentioning the legendary HLD-X0 and X9 o_O The combo players were crap for LD playback.

The combo players were crap for DVD playback as well. I have another unit, forget the model off hand, but it is an auto reverse unit, and it plays disks at as good of quality as I have seen for laserdisc

i know, actually using a X9 my self, and a crystalio ii as comb-filter/scaling/de-interlacing

+ducklandwikeno HDMI wouldn't improve the picture. Laserdisk was a composite analog format. What many people do not understand about HDMI, is it doesn't improve the picture quality over component. Component and RGB analog video can look every bit as good as anything sent over HDMI. The ONLY reason HDMI exists is so the content owners can place limits on what you can and can not do with the signal in transit from 1 device to another.HDMI causes us more headaches with compatibility than anything else.We switch to component, and the compatibility problems are resolved.

JRushPixel I should try a dual sided DVD and see if it plays the top side.

12voltvids would be interesting to know. People ask why i have a sony blueray with a £18 tesco dvd player on top... I explain my many many legal backups play on my cheapo dvd but not my expensive Sony. I should of bought a japanese VCD player/Audio cd and a USB input from 2013. lovely looking maxhine but i did not know they still used svcd/kvcd formats still. i mean blueray rips can be under 500 meg now.

JRushPixel Bluray rips under 500 megs look like crap.They look fine in MPG4 at 3 or 4 gigs on a DVD-R in AVCHD mode, but I have never seen a 700 meg BD rip that is watchable on a large TV.The old BD players from prior to 2012 work just fine for the pirated content. After 2012 they have to detect copyright signals embedded in the sound track, and will refuse to play.I have an Insignia BD player from 2010 that plays everything, and it has a USB port on it to boot.

mkv container for blueray streaming is superb. And now we can stream watch torrents via xbmc i love iit. I have all my movies on a huge 9 terrabyte server and the new xmbc and popcorn time means i buy films and never physically em... jealous of your lazer discs though. very rare over here.

JRushPixel Oh I know mkv is good, but I still see compression artifacts on the majority of the films I have streamed via XBMC. The more you compress the more compression artifacts that creep in. You can't get around that. A well encoded BD will blow the doors off it's mkv clone unless the mkv is done at a relatively high bit rate, and then the file won't be no 500 megs, it will be a couple of gigs per hour of streaming.