Also this guy is a dumbass for insisting that DVD wasn't better than Laserdisc when it first came out. To my recollection, within about a year alt.video.laserdisc was a ghost town. I remember a guy making a post about laserdisc 4 lyfe dvd sucks! and the laserdisc usenet group blew up with posts calling him an idiot
@sun DVDs were a rare pure upgrade in a storage media timeline of dubious side-grades and downgrades. Laserdiscs are easy to understand as "like blu-ray in how few features they had, but super bulky and you needed four of them for Terminator 2".
@apropos there are non-technical reasons why you could consider laserdiscs superior. for example, laserdiscs were typically for cinephiles and the collectors editions and box sets had better extras than DVDs, which were made for mass-consumption. As an example, Disney released "ultimate edition" DVDs that had far less shit than laserdisc special editions from a few years earlier. If you were a collector, the laserdisc was vastly superior. But the video on the DVD was far better than the laserdisc, so kind of a dilemma.
@sun huh, I never noticed that the market was that distinct for laserdiscs. But the format had 15+ years before the the DVD launch and still wasn't that common, so that makes sense.
@apropos my memory isn't perfect but typically laserdiscs were 29-50 dollars per movie, normal edition. DVDs were between 2 and 14 dollars and immediately bought you just massively better video and moderately better sound.
@why we were told that the reason that laserdiscs rotted was that the discs were simply so large that the layers under their weight would delaminate at the edges from spinning but since DVDs were smaller and lighter this would never happen. Woops.
@threat@apropos the very earliest dvds had some bad encoding but they literally figured that out within a year and the first year of dvd almost nobody had a dvd player anyway so I consider it a moot point.
@sun@apropos your memory is not wrong. some of the laser discs were even more than that. dvds win time over time. especially now with the bulk markets dumping them, it's very affordable to get what you want and digitize if the need arises.
@sun@apropos absolutely. and what did have ill-encoding ended up getting re-minted eventually anyways. biggest pain back in the day was region-encoding, but we got around that in good time.
to this day i'm still buying bulk dvds when i want to expand the library.
@sun@apropos to say they don't make them like they used to is an understatement. i'd love to find a trinitron with dvd/vhs combo for my space. however they are pretty bulky and require a back-brace to lift into place 😓
@sun@shitposter.world It honestly wasn't a blowout improvement when it first came out. Most of the cash grab releases when DVD first came out were quite poor. LD actually had better comparatively audio quality for a decent chunk of time vs the low bitrate DVD early stuff came with. Getting actual full resolution frames on CAV LDs vs the pieced back together mpg streams is still fairly cool. I was in the usenet groups at the time too, still have most of my receipts from ken cranes lol. Shit happened FAST.
Ad far as ripping them to vobs- that didn't happen to much later. DVD drives were expensive. I didn't have a player till the ps3 and a useable drive for pc took a couple years after that.