Interest Check: LaserDisc testing service.

Nondrowsy

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I've got a few working laserdisc players and I noticed that most people selling discs sell them untested which is a big deterrent to potential buyers. I know it's a niche market at best, but would there be any interest in getting your discs tested. I figure you ship, I charge $20-$25??? total, which would include return shipping and my time to test the disc, take and post pics/video of it working/or not, repackage and ship back.

Just throwing this out there, Obviously be a deep discount on multiple discs. Please feel free to give feedback on the idea or interest. Thanks!
 
I've got a few working laserdisc players and I noticed that most people selling discs sell them untested which is a big deterrent to potential buyers. I know it's a niche market at best, but would there be any interest in getting your discs tested. I figure you ship, I charge $20-$25??? total, which would include return shipping and my time to test the disc, take and post pics/video of it working/or not, repackage and ship back.

Just throwing this out there, Obviously be a deep discount on multiple discs. Please feel free to give feedback on the idea or interest. Thanks!

Interesting idea (especially since I have a stack of discs and no working players).

How do you propose to test? Are you going to sit and watch and listen to the disc play 100% from start to finish? In my opinion, that's the only way to verify it's 100% good. Discs can have a few seconds of laser rot here and there that could easily be missed if you just play it for a few minutes. Or if you start it from the beginning and then don't watch it, but come back to see that it played through to the end successfully. Also there can be brief freezes or jumps that clear themselves and you wouldn't know unless you watched them the whole way. And sound can drop in and out too. Again, another item that could be missed if you don't watch it every second it's in.

Certainly not hard to test a disc if you have a working player, just put it in and watch it. But, assuming a disc is 30 minutes and to test it well, you need to actively watch and listen the whole time, that will take some time and I imagine gets really, really boring after the 2nd time through DL.

Like I said, interesting idea, but cautioning you that I hope you realize what you might be getting yourself into on this one. At least this is what I'd expect if someone tells me they tested my discs.

It'd be crazy in my house to try to do this on a regular basis, 3 kids, 2 dogs, 3 cats, wife, everyone has their own cell phone and home landline and devices playing all kinds of music all the time. I need to wait until everyone goes to bed. And then I'm usually too tired myself.

Best of luck though. I agree, selling untested is a deterrent to the buyer and hurts the seller prices too.
 
I'm not even sure watching it is good enough. Watching it may be good enough for the things Joe pointed out, but it's not like you are going to get blocky images like you would with a digital source. How do you detect the start or slight degradation of an analog source reliably by watching it?

It would be a good service if you can work out the specifics.
 
yah thats the thing... its like saying you will test a cd.

It may only skip in one spot so you need to listen to the whole thing.

I had some laserdiscs that had pretty random issues you would never see just by popping it in for a bit. Some would bug out for a few seconds then be fine.

20-25 bucks to watch a 2 hour movie or whatever doesnt seem like that good a deal for you.
 
yah thats the thing... its like saying you will test a cd.

It may only skip in one spot so you need to listen to the whole thing.

I had some laserdiscs that had pretty random issues you would never see just by popping it in for a bit. Some would bug out for a few seconds then be fine.

20-25 bucks to watch a 2 hour movie or whatever doesnt seem like that good a deal for you.

A CD is digital though. Except for skips you should be able to take a digital copy of the data and compare it to an another source. How do you do that with an analog signal?
 
A CD is digital though. Except for skips you should be able to take a digital copy of the data and compare it to an another source. How do you do that with an analog signal?

There's no practical way to do it. But, theoretically, you could record the video signal of a known-good disc with an oscilloscope (which in the case of a LaserDisc is a composite signal consisting of chroma, luma, and sync), and then record the signal of the disc you're testing, and compare the two to see if they are a good match. They will never match 100%, because analog signals are never generated exactly the same way twice.

The main reason that isn't practical aside from the time/effort factor is the lack of known-good signals to compare to.

With CDs, people use EAC ripping software and then compare the resulting rip to a database containing rips that other people have made of the same CD. If it matches everyone else's rip you can be assured with a very high level of confidence that it's accurate. Even though a CD is digital, most players and ripping software are rather sloppy about extracting it, which is the reason that EAC and the database comparison method is used by people who want to be sure they are getting an accurate copy.
 
Capture to AVI and see if there are any dropped frames.

Dropped frames only tells you that your capture hardware and/or software couldn't keep up with the necessary capture rate (30,000 ÷ 1,001 frames per second for the NTSC video on a LaserDisc). Missing/corrupted frames in the source disc won't be recognized by the software as dropped frames, because it has no way of "knowing" what frames are supposed to be there in the first place.
 
You could digitize the disc and write a video and audio analysis program to compare it to the rips used for Daphne. Obviously it wouldn't be a simple comparison, but instead a score based on similarity of video and audio quality. It could flag any bursts of video or audio problems. It'd likely get a bit out of sync after a while, so you'd need to periodically resync.

Not easy to do, but in the amount of time you'd spend watching 100 laserdiscs start to finish, you could probably have written it. ;)

DogP
 
Also, Dragon's Lair II for example, is not easily watchable on most players because it has automatic stops built into the disc. I don't know if that kind of setup is common but it would make checking discs like that really difficult.
 
I don't think it is worth the effort either. When you sell a thing as untested, it would have a lower price, or a buyer would have a lower maximum price they would pay for it. Myself personally, if I were to find something online (or in person I suppose) of unknown quality, then I would make sure that the price I would pay for the item would not be too much if the item was faulty. In other words, I can feel OK with paying $5 for a LaserDisc that doesn't work because it is only $5...

The price quoted is too high also, because you would have to take into account that you are providing a service to a buyer or seller. And then that price you charged for the service must be included in that sale price. Which would either mean LD prices would go up or seller percentage would go down, to include the testing fee.
 
You could digitize the disc and write a video and audio analysis program to compare it to the rips used for Daphne. Obviously it wouldn't be a simple comparison, but instead a score based on similarity of video and audio quality. It could flag any bursts of video or audio problems. It'd likely get a bit out of sync after a while, so you'd need to periodically resync.

Not easy to do, but in the amount of time you'd spend watching 100 laserdiscs start to finish, you could probably have written it. ;)

DogP

I think that all of the differences would introduce too many variables to get useful results from a video/audio analysis comparison. The first difference comes from the LD player itself. Because LD contains analog video, the video signal generated by the player varies drastically from model to model. You can get anything from near-DVD quality from the Pioneer HLD-X0, which sold for nearly $10,000 new (and still sells for a lot of money these days; $1,480 to $4,600 according to completed eBay auctions) and weighs ~80 pounds, to barely-better-than-VHS-or-Betamax quality from more run-of-the-mill LD players.

Also, countless more variables are introduced during encoding. For your own capture, you can capture and leave it as raw video (or compressed with a lossless codec like HuffYUV), but the Daphne rips are almost certainly encoded with a lossy codec. I've never looked at them, but if they weren't, they would be huge: 1.54 GB per minute of raw 640×480, ~29.97 FPS, 3×8-bit video, and lossless codecs only offer about 2:1 compression at best. Even if you knew the exact codec and settings that were used for the Daphne rips, it wouldn't help much, because the encoding variables proceed from the playback/capturing variables.
 
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