Posted by Ted on 01/30/07 16:18

Doug Jacobs wrote:
>
> In alt.video.dvd Ted <nospamforted@nospam.com> wrote:
>
> > Yes there was. It wasn't much of a fight because no one in their right
> > mind wanted DIVX to win that war, but it there was a question of whether
> > or not the studios would successfully cram DIVX down the throat of
> > consumers. mInstead they successfully crammed DVDs down our throats, as
> > many a laserdisc enthusiast will tell you...
>
> Divx came out too late to be a serious threat to DVD. DVD had already
> started to accelerate in the market when Divx showed up abruptly one
> Christmas.

I was still reading the LD group at the time, and there was continuing
chatter about the format war. DIVX was largely hated more deeply than DVDs

>
> Problem is, although the DVD players and DVDs were more expensive than
> Divx players/discs, the extra cost was easily justified.
>
> As for LD vs. DVD, doesn't DVD still win out because of higher resolution
> video and better audio? Or is this just a matter of capacity != format,
> meaning you could concievably use LD to hold a DVD-quality movie - it's
> just that the studios decided to move on to DVD?

More than anything else, DVD won out by weight and size. Laserdiscs are
incredibly heavy and take up huge amounts of space. The size also
probably led to a minimum cost relating to shipping weight/shelf space
that is substantially higher than for DVDs; DVDs were almost immediately
cheaper than LDs. As LD players also need to cope with that weight, they
themselves need to be similarly large, and that almost certainly leads
to increased cost as well.

There are certain other issues with laserdisc that DVD avoids; disc rot,
cross talk, and disc flipping among them. Many early DVDs (and lots of
cheaply done current DVDs) had lots of digital compression artifacts
tho, and LD avoids that.

Laserdisc is supposedly theoretically analog; however, it also was made
using pits and lands, meaning I don't understand how the hell it's
supposed to be analog; it is at the very least not digitally compressed.
In theory, if it is truly analog, the underlying video information could
be far more exact than on any existing digital medium. But even if
theoretically true, it doesn't happen in practice (think of the audio
fidelity of an analog meduium like wax cylinders compared to a CD;
analog isn['t always better). The video on LDs is also composite, and
while comb filters can improve this issue, DVD avoids it entirely.
General experience of laserdisc quality could have been improved with
continually improving player technology, but LD had some problems and
had had a successful but never breakthrough 20 year run.

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