I want to say that I don’t believe that three of you have laserdisc players but let’s be honest here you probably do
The one in my living room can play both laserdiscs and DVDs!
It’s currently broken (like so many laserdisc players) but I have a Pioneer LD-W4: a FOUR SIDED laserdisc player.
It looks like just a slightly bigger and thicker player but you can load two discs into it and it’ll play the top side of the first one, then the bottom side, then the top side of the second disc, and then the bottom side. All with only one laser head: it has a complicated mechanism to move it around as it swaps discs/sides.
penis poll
Did someone day LASERDISC PENIS? I’ve got that too!
(I had to slightly censor this laserdisc cover, by putting furry porn on it. Strange world)
But see? Peter North! Famous porn star dick.
For a moment I thought that there was furry porn on laserdisc.
on a completely unrelated note, does anyone know how to make custom laserdiscs?
That’d be awesome.
But no, you can’t. No one can make laserdiscs anymore.
The closest you can do is a Sony CRVdisc which is a laserdisc-related format, and even there you’re looking at a couple thousand dollars at minimum to acquire and refurbish one.
No one can make laserdiscs anymore.
How come? What sort of money / technology would it take to do it?
They required special equipment to make, much like CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays. But unlike those three, they haven’t made any in about 17 years. So the factories that make them have been repurposed into other things, the machines destroyed or recycled.
Basically you need to be able to make gold or platinum master discs, then stamp the aluminum layer, then cover it in a resin. Unlike other disc types, this is only one half, so it then has to be glued onto another disc-half.
Doing this right is tricky: the wrong glues were used in early discs and after years, they broke down and ate holes in the discs, making them unreadable.
So your best bet for getting a laserdisc made would be:
have lots of money. Like, lots.
talk to one of the companies still making other optical discs. they have the knowledge on how to make discs, some of them might even have made laserdiscs in the past
pay them a few hundred million dollars to build you (and only you) a new factory to make them
Back when the factories did exist, laserdiscs were something like 10$ each to make, with a minimum run of about 10,000$.
So getting a custom disc made was around 100,000$, back when factories existed. Now that they don’t? I doubt you could get laserdisc production back for less than a 100m$, unless it turns out one of these companies still has a laserdisc production line they haven’t torn down yet and can just un-mothball it, which I doubt. Keep in mind the last time this machine would have been used in 2007.
Reblogging to my Tron followers for larger sample size and to skew sampling bias in favor of people likely to have laserdisc players
….seriously we Tron fans are freaks. I bought my Laserdisc player because I saw one isolated YouTube comment suggesting that the Deleted Love Scene was longer on the Laserdisc (…it wasn’t, but guess what, I still think the experience of the Laserdisc player was worth it)
