Laser Disc Digitizing

[obitwan7]

I am bringing this up and forgive me if I am not the first. I did search beforehand, but.....I have heard of a kit called Domesday and it basically captures the RF signal from a Laser Disk player, VHS or anything that has RF in it and captures raw RF data, bypassing the heads, which gives us the best possible quality from that single movie disc.

I only bring this up because we all here digitize our beloved movies, but we can only digitize DVD, Blu-ray or UHD because we can rip them directly and have the best quality possible, but Laser Disc is analogue and there are movies or TV shows that were only released on VHS or Laser Disc and it is a shame that studios don't think certain titles deserve to be upgraded at all so far & I have a list of movies that need to be digitized, but I cannot get them except if I buy that title on Laser Disc or VHS.

I was hoping maybe someone here knows about digitizing Laser Discs or knows a way to get said titles that were already done. I am happy to pay for titles to be digitized if they already weren't, but I don't know enough to spend thousands of dollars on a wonky LD player or even if the Laser Disc movie themselves are in good quality to even attempt digitizing them.

This seems like an untapped market, but there are extras on these movie discs that you cannot get anywhere else and I would hate to waste those or lose them forever. I'm open for discussion and would love some advice on this. Thank you in advance.

[Coopervid]

I am bringing this up and forgive me if I am not the first. I did search beforehand, but.....I have heard of a kit called Domesday and it basically captures the RF signal from a Laser Disk player, VHS or anything that has RF in it and captures raw RF data, bypassing the heads, which gives us the best possible quality from that single movie disc.

I only bring this up because we all here digitize our beloved movies, but we can only digitize DVD, Blu-ray or UHD because we can rip them directly and have the best quality possible, but Laser Disc is analogue and there are movies or TV shows that were only released on VHS or Laser Disc and it is a shame that studios don't think certain titles deserve to be upgraded at all so far & I have a list of movies that need to be digitized, but I cannot get them except if I buy that title on Laser Disc or VHS.

I was hoping maybe someone here knows about digitizing Laser Discs or knows a way to get said titles that were already done. I am happy to pay for titles to be digitized if they already weren't, but I don't know enough to spend thousands of dollars on a wonky LD player or even if the Laser Disc movie themselves are in good quality to even attempt digitizing them.

This seems like an untapped market, but there are extras on these movie discs that you cannot get anywhere else and I would hate to waste those or lose them forever. I'm open for discussion and would love some advice on this. Thank you in advance.

This is widely discussed in the videohelp.com forum. You should look there.

[dcoke22]

This YouTube video is about the Domesday Duplicator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDlbwl3f39Q

[Coopervid]

This YouTube video is about the Domesday Duplicator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDlbwl3f39Q

Whow! Whow! You can spend a lot of money for obsolete hardware and obsolete media. I think it's time to move forward and leave these things behind.

[dcoke22]

Indeed. For a very small subset of movies the best available release is still laser disc.

https://letterboxd.com/michaelhutchins/list/the-criterion-collection-laserdisc-titles/

Some collectors like to go deep down the rabbit hole. While a Domesday Duplicator is not for me (although I would like a blu-ray or 4K release of Dead Presidents (1995)) I'm glad it exists in the world.

[flojo]

TLDR; don't bother.

I have it and have used it on 1 disc, 10,000 Maniacs - MTV Unplugged: https://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/08952/40 ... -Unplugged

For the video, between the VHS copy I captured via composite (Laserdisc video is composite) and directly with Domesday, I can tell very little difference and I wouldn't care which version I was viewing as both are pretty bad quality on any of my 4K TV's :-/.

However, I did _NOT_ use it for the video of that disc, I used it for the CD audio compliant stream. It's the only digital source that has the entire concert and has the 2 extra tracks. The VHS has it as well but the audio quality isn't nearly as good. This laserdisc is a outlier and nearly all laserdiscs have their digital equivalent on CD or DVD.

IMO, unless it is a outlier Laserdisc with exclusive audio, I wouldn't bother with Domesday because the video quality is still poor enough that if you wanted to upscale it with filters, you'd never tell the difference between a source acquired via Domesday or composite video from VHS or a Laserdisc player. But the audio for the 10,000 Maniancs LD can also be captured "bit-perfect" via optical with "arecord" or another program. I tested the final CDDA->WAV from Domesday and the optically captured WAV file via optical-out from the Laserdisc player and both files were identical, so for my purpose the Domesday device wasn't needed at all.

If you want the "Original Trilogy" of Star Wars captured via Domesday, well it's all over the internet as it's hands down the most downloadable Laserdisc capture of all time. As far as setting it up, read any given tutorial, it's simple as long as you can use simple shell commands and disassemble a Laserdisc player.