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Comment by Jaruzel | Hacker News Reader

Nitpick: the BBCs Doomsday project used a proprietary data format on standard laserdisc medium, which is why they ended up not being able to access the data decades later as the custom hardware to decode it no longer worked.

The laserDisc format was a standard format, and working players can still be found for sale on eBay etc.

Compared to DVD and VHS, it's true it wasn't a commercial success though.

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It wasn't a blow-out-the-doors commercial success, but it was successful enough that players and media were produced for 20+ years. It had broad adoption in Japan, where the random-access functionality was particularly useful for karaoke bars well before DVD and hard-drive based players.

Indeed the attempts to turn it into an interactive media platform, such as LaserActive, were rather less successful and much shorter-lived than Laserdisc as a home theater video distribution medium.

Following on from my comment which you replied to, I had over the years at least 50 discs and 2 different players. I loved the format, it was a good middle ground before DVDs finally took over the world. By importing Japanese discs, you could also get Dolby digital 5.1 sound. I even managed to get Phantom Menace on LaserDisc within a couple of weeks of the UK theatre premiere!

Also, if you're interested, there is a robust community around re-creating the Domesday project with modern hardware [0], as well as capturing LDs via the player's raw RF output, using both bespoke hardware [1] and off-the-shelf [2], then decoding the output in software [3].

[0]: https://www.domesday86.com

[1]: https://github.com/simoninns/DomesdayDuplicator/wiki

[2]: https://github.com/happycube/cxadc-linux3

[3]: https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode

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