DVD: The Death Knell of Laserdisc

not so much a combination DVD/LD player, but rather a Laserdisc player that has a DVD player stuffed inside it like some kind of digital parasite. That said, it's still not a good explanation for using only the Laserdisc section for CDs. I see no reason why the DVD section couldn't have handled that. I guess maybe they just wanted the infrared section to read CDs in case a 5-inch CD-video disc was being played. In that case, the Laserdisc circuitry would be needed to output the analog video from the CDV disc. But you may wonder, why not use the red laser for everything?

What prevents the player from also using the red laser on Laserdiscs? Well, hold that thought. There were machines that used a red laser, and in Japan this was used for a very impressive

laserdisc

offering that we didn't get in the United States. Like I said, hold that thought. When this machine was released, the art of mastering a DVD had not yet been perfected. It was very common for a 1997 DVD release of a movie to look noticeably worse than a 1997 Laserdisc release. And these early players had really clunky navigation. Do you want to fast forward and perform an image search?

This is the best you will get. That pales in comparison to a CAV Laserdisc. In fact, this machine featured a frame buffer to allow fast and smooth forwarding on CLV discs. Have a look. ♫ Delightfully upbeat music from 1952 ♫ Not fast by today's standards, but surpasses its own DVD performance. But even on a conventional machine, searching on a CLV disc was much better than the slow DVD searching of 1997: but DVD had a number of enormous advantages over Laserdisc that were so evident even in 1997. The most important of them was that an entire film was contained on a single side. a tiny disk.

The brief pause for the layer change was nothing compared to the time it takes for this machine to automatically switch sides on a Laserdisc. The discs were much easier to handle, and because they were the same physical size as the ubiquitous compact disc, everyone was familiar with how to interact with them. DVD was also not as strictly limited in recording time as Laserdisc was. If a movie was three hours long, you could apply more compression and put it all on a single disc. It was very, very rare for a movie to need a second disc. And even if it was, the double-layered, double-sided disc meant you could flip it like a laser disc.

There was never a need for a second disc as was so common on Laserdisc. The digital nature of the format allowed for error correction and the use of cheaper laser sets, although it is true that it is much easier to scratch a DVD to the point of no return than a Laserdisc. And perhaps the biggest advantage DVD had was that its small size meant it could really work for the rental market. Netflix started as a DVD-by-mail rental service in 1998. Try it with Laserdiscs. DVD may have been much more convenient than Laserdisc, but it was still a playback-only format in 1997.

If the ability to record was what led consumers to prefer VHS to Laserdisc, what made DVD succeed where the Laserdisc failed? I think his success came from four main places. First, the home video market was already well established, so people had warmed to the idea of ​​buying and renting movies on tape. Second, the costs of DVD equipment and media plummeted relatively quickly. Third, in the year 2000 people were buying much larger televisions than in the '80s and '90s, so VHS quality defects were starting to become a bigger problem. And the fourth factor, which I think is the most important, was that he shared his physical attributes with CD.

So let's start with things first: the home video market. Because people were now accustomed to renting or purchasing video content, a new format that was more convenient than VHS and Laserdisc was intriguing. There is no need to flip a disc OR rewind a tape. And since everyone already had a VCR for recording television, DVD's inability to record was no big deal. Even when VCRs were common, making the jump to Laserdisc meant dealing with very high disc purchasing costs, limited availability, and also the added inconvenience of having multiple sides and/or discs. Not many people saw all those disadvantages as being worth the investment.

But once DVD players began to drop in price, the jump to DVD brought the increased quality of Laserdisc without any of its drawbacks and with a lot of added convenience compared to VHS. Now let's see how quickly prices dropped. In 1997, the cheapest DVD player cost about $500. But actually that's not so bad. As a reminder, in 1993 the Pioneer CLD-S201, a single-sided player, cost $319 and this CLD-D502 cost $459. In August 1997, this DVL-700 sold for a thousand dollars. But in 1999, you could get a DVD player for as little as $250. VCRs still cost over a hundred dollars at the time, so the price disparity was beginning to narrow.

In 2002, DVD players could be had for less than a hundred dollars. Today, VCRs and DVD players cost about the same, and it was around this time that the ubiquitous combo units began to appear. The image quality advantage of DVD became quite critical in the late 1990s. Even on an average CRT TV, DVD looks noticeably better than VHS. Make it a 27-inch or larger CRT and the difference is even clearer. DVDs could also encode widescreen content without significant loss of image quality. When stretching a standard aspect ratio frame to fit a 16:9 frame, no detail was lost. This was called anamorphic widescreen and worked much like movie projectors.

Widescreen content was produced natively to disk like this. On a 4:3 screen, the DVD player would generate the black bars for the widescreen format and flatten the video down to fit the frame. But if set to a 16:9 screen output, the DVD player would not add the black bars and would produce an image that appeared to be compressed from left to right. It would send a signal to the TV telling it to extend it to both sides, thus restoring the correct aspect ratio. If a movie was released on VHS in widescreen, the black bars appear as part of the video signal, meaning there is less of the actual image on the screen.

Filling a widescreen requires zooming, which drastically impairs image quality. Many early DVDs were not encoded in anamorphic widescreen, so on these releases the letterboxing is unfortunately part of the actual video. These discs also require zooming to fill the frame. Now let's look at what allowed the cost of DVD to drop so quickly. The most important factor is probably that it is essentially nothing more than a modified CD. Take a look at the disc mechanism of a first generation PlayStation. Open any modern optical drive and you'll see the same basic things. A spindle to hold a disc and a laser to read it.

The only thing that separates this unit from what's on the PlayStation is a more powerful and faster spindle motor, and a red laser instead of infrared. The simple fact was that a DVD drive was just a slightly modified CD drive, and we were pumping that stuff like crazy. Computers, car stereos, CD Walkman, PlayStations, portable stereos, and home stereos all had a CD drive. As a personal example, in 1999 I can think of five CD players in my house: my dad's car, my personal walkman, our main stereo, my brother's bookshelf system, and our home computer all had a drive.

CD of some kind. Manufacturing facilities existed around the world to produce these CD drives. All they had to do to start making DVD drives was upgrade the motor and laser. Almost everything else could remain the same. The only really expensive components of early DVD players were the electronics needed to process the disc data into a video output. But as we know, electronics tend to get cheaper quickly. It only took a few years for the price of DVD player hardware to plummet, at which point you could get a DVD player very cheaply. DVDs were also significantly helped by the fact that the computer industry adopted them as a data storage format.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, optical storage was still the best option in terms of storage space. In 1998, the iMac was released with a 4-gigabyte hard drive. A single-layer DVD could store more than the entire hard drive of a typical computer. In fact, the development of DVD was done in conjunction with computer original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Initially there were two competing standards: Philips and Sony were working on the MultiMedia Compact Disc, and Toshiba, Time Warner, Matsushita Electric, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Pioneer, Thomson and JVC were supporting a different format called SD or Super. Density disk. The computer manufacturers stepped in and said, look, either they agree on a standard or they don't expect us to play along.

I understand? It's a good thing this happened, as it prevented another format war. With the computer industry on board, DVD drives began to appear in devices such as desktop computers and laptops. This massive scale continued to drive down the cost of DVD, and also meant that people could now stream their movies on the go with a laptop, or at least use their desktop computer as a second place to watch a movie (assuming their computer was able to handle video). The discs themselves were also much easier to make than a Laserdisc. Although the dual layers added additional complexity, they were made much like a CD.

The production of Laserdiscs, while technically still mass production, was a minuscule business compared to CD printing. When DVDs became available, the same companies that made CDs were able to adapt some of their existing equipment to produce DVDs, and by requiring fewer raw materials, disc production was cheaper in the long run. And then there's the PlayStation 2. Sony, realizing the benefit of DVD's much larger storage capacity, decided to make DVD the format of choice for its new console. And they also made sure it could play a DVD-Video disc. Released in 2000, the PS2 was one of the first DVD players.

Sony really made a cool move there, as their kids were able to persuade parents to buy one "because it can play DVDs too." And it would boost the format enormously. The PS2 may have been the biggest catalyst in pushing DVD into the mainstream. Nintendo missed a huge opportunity by using GameCube mini-DVD discs. Without the ability to play DVD Video, that's a harder sell to your parents. Of course, Sony would repeat the same strategy with the introduction of Blu-Ray on the PlayStation 3. Finally, DVD burning ended up being somewhat common. The DVD-RAM disk was introduced in 1996, and the following year came the more common DVD-R.

It took a while for consumer devices to reach reasonable prices, but by the early 2000s set-top boxes capable of recording directly to DVD and DVD camcorders were available. However, using a DVD burner was not so common. For those who wanted to record television, their VCR was often considered sufficient. And once hard drive-based DVRs came out for recording TV, few people were still using physical media for that anyway. All of these developments bypassed Laserdisc. Being a primarily analog medium, it was rarely used in the computer industry. While an all-digital Laserdisc could have been created, its large size would still have been a drawback.

When DVD was released, it had obvious applications outside of home video. Support from the computer industry (and the gaming industry) made it explode, and economies of scale would ensure that DVD media and the machines to play it would be cheap, cheap, cheap. Now, before we end the video, remember I asked why Pioneer couldn't have used the red laser for all the functions on this machine? Well, there are some Laserdisc players that used a red laser. In my next Laserdisc video, which will likely be the last in the series, I'll talk about the

laserdisc

format we didn't get in the United States: the MUSE High Definition Laserdisc.

That's how it is. HD laserdisc. Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video! If this is the first time you visit thechannel and you liked what you saw, consider subscribing! I would also like to take the time to thank the fans of this channel on Patreon. Channel sponsors are the ones who keep these videos posted. If you are also interested in becoming a patron, check out my Patreon page via the link on your screen or further down in the description. Thank you for your consideration and see you next time! The only thing that separates this album from what's on the Playstation are... things.

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