Hi-Vision Laserdisc – HD in ‘93 [video] | Hacker News Reader

Hi-Vision Laserdisc – HD in ‘93 [video]

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33 pointsrbanffy8 comments

I cannot recommend Techmoan's videos enough. He usually reviews past video and audio formats, some of them are really niche products. Really interesting!

He does spend some time getting around to the point though doesn’t he? This ends up being 40 minutes of video and if you’re just interested in the Hi-Vision part it could probably be 10 minutes. He spends a lot of time talking about the timeline of various video formats, goes over repairing his machine, etc. The interesting part is maybe the last 5 minutes of this video and then the 2nd part.

He's not an engineer that I know of so his videos lean on the history side more, and I am fine with that. The context he puts into his videos really helps you understand the "whys" of the tech.

Something similar from also 1993: D-VHS HD demo tape shot of NYC

https://youtu.be/fT4lDU-QLUY

If you want a more complete (although dry) overview of how we got from NHK's MUSE to the USA's NTSC-8VSB / MPEG-2 system, the book Defining Vision: How Broadcasters Lured the Government into Inciting a Revolution in Television is a good resource:

https://www.amazon.com/Defining-Vision-Broadcasters-Governme...

The TLDR is that the USA took so damn long to make up their minds about a standard (while cleverly keeping the spectrum tied up and away from others that wanted it) that digital coding and compression was able to develop and mature into a system that worked. MUSE was an analog standard that would never fit into a single channel in the US system.

I'd really like to know what happened in Australia. From the outside it looks like the Government tied us to MPEG2 because they were basically giving away the set top boxes to get people to change over from analog TV. I'm pretty sure the BBC in the UK was already using H264 at that point.

Result: we've only just changed over to H264, everything's hilariously low-bitrate and H265 is years away.

There's a little bit about this on the Wikipedia page for LaserDiscs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc#MUSE_LD

From that article: it's analog video, 1125 scan lines in a 5:3 aspect ratio. 1991 technology, super expensive.

Here's a list of disc releases, no idea if it's comprehensive. Star Wars is not on it. https://www.lddb.com/list.php?format=ld&list=muse

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