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VHS, VCDs, and Laserdiscs in Southeast Asia
- Svip 1y agoWhat's the usage of the word 'factoid' when its use is clearly to just say 'fact'; considering the word 'factoid' actually means something that looks like a fact, but is – in fact – false? The fact that it should mean 'false fact' but may be used as 'true fact', makes the opening of this piece rather confusing.
- thunderbong 1y agohttps://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid I was only familiar with the second definition - - a briefly stated and usually trivial fact
- happymellon 1y agoI was only familiar with the first for a long time, until I realised that other people were using it in the same manner as literally.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago[dead]
- reaperducer 1y agoWhat's the usage of the word 'factoid' when its use is clearly to just say 'fact' What's the use of the word "usage" when its use is clearly to just say "use?"
- jnaina 1y agoBrings back memories of VHS copies of bootleg and other questionable content (Pr0n) being sold in certain shops in Singapore (if you know where to find them) in 80s.
- TrackerFF 1y agoWere bootlegs popular? The first time I traveled outside the western part of the world, I was (naively or not) surprised by the sheer amount of bootleg tapes sold in regular stores. Same with DVD when that time came around.
- idontwantthis 1y agoTFA
- goosedragons 1y agoI'm pretty sure they're still popular outside of the western world. At least for some things. eBay is filled with bootleg DVDs of Anime, TV shows, etc. There is no official Simpsons Season 21+ DVDs for example and yet they are not very hard to find...
- fidotron 1y agoBootlegging of everything is a huge business. Back in the 90s Singapore was such a big market for this that it acted as the major driver for motivating globally synchronized releases. i.e. for Reader's Digest magazine* in the US in 1995 if you did not release it on the same day in Singapore it would be easily available in pirated form within days, removing any ability to make money in that market for the legitimate product. In UK pubs circa 2000 it was notorious that certain people would approach your table to sell you bootleg DVDs, and that if you indulged them you'd then get access to their "special" selection. * And yes, that example is totally serious.
- GlassOwAter 1y agohttps://youtube.com/shorts/EodajlNi0k4 https://youtube.com/shorts/EodajlNi0k4
- jgalt212 1y agoVery popular. Even Seinfeld got caught up in it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Kicks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Kicks
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- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- magnio 1y agoFunnily enough, the article spent a paragraph explaining the initialism and acronym, only to refer to VCD as an acronym later.
- DidYaWipe 1y ago[dead]
- OneFriend2575 1y agoLoved this, such a good reminder that for a lot of us in SE Asia, VCDs weren’t just a format, they were basically the bridge between VHS bootlegs and early DVDs. Karaoke, bootlegs, family movies… it was all mixed in. What’s interesting is how much the timing of official releases shaped all this. If you had to wait months for a cinema run or home video, the “street version” was too tempting to pass up.
- justsomehnguy 1y ago> the bridge between VHS bootlegs and early DVDs What about DivX/XviD?
- reaperducer 1y agoWhat about DivX/XviD? VCDs had broad hardware support, and were more mainstream. I used to travel around Southeast Asia a bit, and whenever I was in Hong Kong, I'd load up on VCD movies at mainstream stores like HMV. I still have VCD copies of The Incredibles and On Her Majesty's Secret Service I bought at HMV.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Projectiboga 1y agoVCD were a format that put compressed video and sound onto a standard CD. That is where Mp3s sort of come from. The VCD actually used MPEG1layer2 for sound, but layer 3 came along and computer enthusiasts used that for audio in the mid 1990s. SVCDs came out in the later 90s They used the MPEG2 like Dvds and were often spread over multiple discs. DIVX came from a Microsoft program that had MPEG4 inside of the software, this and the wrapper AVI came together for the first internet distribution focused format. There was a Chinese DVD player and some mainstream ones that supported VCD and SVCD and later avis. There was an active scene modding certain Phillips DVD players in the early 2000s.
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- 2muchcoffeeman 1y agoYou can buy a vhs cleaner that accepts some alcohol and then fast forwards and rewinds through the tape. The alcohol would soak into a sponge bit and wipe the tape. At least this is my recollection.
- mlinhares 1y agoMemory unlocked, incredible. I just clearly remembered doing this to re-record some stuff.
- dylan604 1y agoAt the VHS dub house I worked, each of the recorders would be taken down once a month to have all of the rollers, head drum, and other parts of the tape path that made contact with the tape cleaned by hand by the engineering department. In the head end where the masters were played, we'd do the same thing on the master playback equipment at the beginning of each shift and possibly more frequently if the masters were of less quality or really old. The 1" machines were easy to clean, but the cassette formats were more difficult in having to pull the units out of the racks, remove the cover, blah blah. At least this is my recollection. <shivers/> the really bad ol' days
- ssl-3 1y agoMemory partially valid. An important part of using a head cleaning tape was to use play mode, not FF or RW. Only play (or record) modes would have the tape wrapped around the head while FF/RW would disengage the tape completely from the head. This is done to save head wear, and to help prevent magnetizing the head. (Except on examples like this weird, late-model Sony deck I have: On it, the tape is always engaged with the head from the time it is inserted to the time it is ejected. And the head itself is "self-cleaning.")
- Brian_K_White 1y agoThey are talking about a winder that cleans a tape, not a tape that cleans a player.
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- esafak 1y agoIt's interesting that LaserDiscs were popular. They were quite niche in the West so I imagine they must have been expensive to produce. Who even made the machines?
- CharlesW 1y agoPioneer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc_player https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc_player
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- esafak 1y agoDid they make writers?
- ghaff 1y agoI think they existed for (doubtless very expensive) niche professional purposes though formats were probably different. But not for consumers. Have a stack of lasdiscs in my garage which I sort of hate to just chuck but probably will someday.
- elliottcarlson 1y agoA decade or so ago, we got rid of a huge collection of about 350 laserdics - a guy drove from two states over to pick them up for his small towns community center where they would play movies for the town.
- ghaff 1y agoOne of the frustrations about things like that is that you pretty much know someone would want them but I'm pretty much not going to go to the effort of connecting with that someone.
- Scoundreller 1y ago> It’s wild to me to think people can simply move overseas and interstate now and watch the same intertube programming, but that’s a different post. This is still not easy without piracy, at least for liveTV.
- dylan604 1y agoNot easy, but not hard either. Same for the physical media. It just takes different ways/methods of skirting the same rules.
- DidYaWipe 1y ago[dead]
- xxr 1y agoI’m a little surprised that one of the supposed advantages of Laserdisc over tape is resistance to humidity. Wasn’t delamination/corrosion (LaserRot) a not-uncommon problem for LD? I’m guessing humidity issues (particularly mold) were much more pronounced with tape.
- acuozzo 1y ago> Wasn’t delamination/corrosion (LaserRot) a not-uncommon problem for LD? It comes down to the glue (and distribution of said glue) used to bond the sides at the pressing plant.
- maxglute 1y agoOne of my neatest Beijing finds was an usually eloquent huckster (i.e. not a country bumpkin) leading me through maze of alleys and hallways to a VCD shop that repackaged discs into really nice matching spines and covers. Kind of like criterion collection / Nintendo switch games. Like analogue custom plex art - they had service where you can colorize your collection.
- prmoustache 1y agoI remember burning SVCD (Super Video CD) which were encoded in mpeg2 for shows and movies I was recording with my Pinnacle aquisition card. That was a bit before DivX then Xvid codec became popular enough for any DVD player to support it. SVCD provided a near indistinguishable quality difference with DVDs when using most CRT TVs and had the advantage of being supported by any DVD player dinxe the same video and audio formats were used. You could burn the movie into 2 CDR if you wanted to maximize the quality, 2CDR were still cheaper than 1 DVDR.
- tshaddox 1y ago> SVCD provided a near indistinguishable quality difference with DVDs when using most CRT TVs From what I remember, SVCD uses roughly the same MPEG-2 video compression as DVD-Video, but with a much lower maximum bit rate. Even with a movie split onto two CDs, the bitrate was still less than half the bitrate of a professionally mastered DVD. I always found the quality of SVCDs to be noticeably poor.
- prmoustache 1y agoOn an high end LCD monitor the diffrence was very visible but on an average CRT TV in didn't make a huge difference.
- naravara 1y agoIt’s a shame the evolution to DVD and later Blu-ray went with the VCD/CD size rather than Laserdisc sized discs. It was the right call for the time, that makes them much easier to transport and store and allowed the players to double as CD players and let game consoles double as blu-ray/HDDVD players. All huge perks to encourage adoption. But now that we are entering a world where physical media is largely an enthusiast past-time I think something laserdisc sized is much better suited for appealing to geeky collectors as a “trophy” or collectible item. It’s more pleasing to flip through them, the size of the sleeve ends up functioning as a display poster. Commentary about “warmth” aside, it’s the same reason music nerds have revived vinyl, with even half the vinyl market consisting of people who don’t even own turntables and just listen to the music off the included digital download codes that come with the records. Plus, the sheer size would mean you can encode a LOT onto this hypothetical next-gen laserdisc before having to resort to compression and exotic layering tricks to increase data density like they do with these 8k Atmos releases now.
- aspenmayer 1y agoI have a possibly mass produced bootleg SVCD of Star Wars in a folding jewel case, but it has some nice printed paper finishes and a retail box, so I guess it could be legit. I can't remember offhand if it's the whole trilogy or just the first movie. I think it's from the same era as the VHS and Laserdisc THX editions, pre-CGI re-release. It's from Malaysia iirc. It turned up at the computer repair shop I used to work at, and no one remembered from where, and no one wanted it, so I claimed it the same way I got my new-in-box new old stock Slackware 6.1/2 I think it was.