VHS, VCDs, and Laserdiscs in Southeast Asia

It'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?

Pioneer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc_player

Did they make writers?

Criterion Collection. nuff said

I 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.

A 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.

One 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.

We call the local public library and ask if they know anyone who would be interested in x-x media we are getting rid of.

They always panic slightly thinking we're trying to give it to them (most libraries are inundated with out of date materials people donate), and are happy to give us names and numbers of churches and elderly centers who might take them.

It's not a ton of work and worth it overall.

I had a Panasonic writer at work for doing vis. there was (I think) an rs232 interface, I wrapped it up in library an made a network api, so I don't remember. the cool thing was from a vis perspective that you could record a single frame at a time. we had everything hooked up to a rs232 controller analog matrix switch that did rs-170. so with that an an rs-170 -> svideo encoder you could put a record-frame call in your animation loop.

the lab I was working at had an internal cable-tv network (which also ran ethernet on some of the channels), so we got a channel and hooked that to the output of the switch.

so you could get live visualization outputs from your office, or route them to the recorder to store your frames, and play them back at a smooth 30fps interleaved whenever you wanted.

My local library does have an annual book and media sale but pretty sure they wouldn't want laserdiscs.

I'll take them from you, pay for shipping

Those writers used different media (and it's in caddies) which can't be read by a normal LD player.