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?

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.