Physical Video Media

general
1

Hey; it‘s the thread for folks who like to collect physical video media of all types! There are so many cool types! VHS and Laserdisc are the royalty of outdated media, but let’s not forget Beta or CED! Hey, we‘re even at the point where DVDs are retro and we’ve got some exciting blu-rays out there, so let's not discriminate too much against current formats.

(Below is the original first post in the thread with a focus on laserdiscs before it got merged to be more all-encompassing)
I know we have a couple other LD collectors here. Let's talk about that! What player(s) do you have? What kind of stuff do you like to collect? Any tips for finding LDs in the wild?

I first got into collecting them about a decade ago when I was in a used book store that had several crates of them for something like $0.50/each. I picked up a few, got a player off ebay, went back for more discs, and since then have amassed a couple hundred discs.

I love laserdiscs for a multitude of reasons. Most obviously, I think those 12" silvery discs are EXTREMELY COOL and I get a little thrill every time I put a disc in my player. Plus those sleeves can look VERY cool. I like them more than VHS because the video quality is usually higher and the sound quality is DRAMATICALLY better. I like that unlike DVDs or Blu-Rays, there's no region coding, so importing LDs is no problem. I also love that the format was popular in Japan so if you don't mind no English option, you can find almost any anime release on LD and they're usually quite inexpensive.

I mostly just want animation, horror, and music-based LDs, although I'll pick up just about anything if I can find it in the wild and it's inexpensive. Criterion Collection releases can be cool too, I love finding LDs that have special features that never got released on other formats.

[I've been slowly showing off my collection on Twitter](https://twitter.com/AdvenChrlz/status/1416058831751233545) but if anyone wants to know my full collection, [it's cataloged on LDDB](http://www.lddb.com/collection.php?action=list&user=nemoide)

2

Fun looking at your collection here!

So my laserdisc story is odd - I'd never picked any up because they were huge, but my friend messaged me that this guy on a laserdisc message board was getting rid of his whole collection because he was moving to japan. So this was about 50 anime discs and a Faroudja LD-1000 player with a couple small issues. I got it for a pretty cheap price, and suddenly there I was, owner of a player of which only 500 units were made (apparently) and a sizeable collection already. I then wound up absorbing an LD collection from The Made when they realized they didn't need them, AND later that month there were a whole bunch of good martial arts/etc LDs at a thrift store, so suddenly, even after pruning stuff down, I had like 150 LDs. Wild times. Since then I've been more selective, paring down the collection when I can, but whenever I go to japan it's like... sure, I'll buy the whole rayearth collection for 1000 yen, why not. hard to resist!

I think of laserdiscs as unwieldy pristine VHS tapes with big art. The audio is nicer than a well-watched VHS but not that much nicer than a brand new tape in my experience. And the visual difference isn't huge because I've got a nice SVHS player. BUT it's fun to have that big art and whatever else!

I keep my LDs to specific genres, similar to the above:

  • - anime
  • - scifi/horror
  • - karaoke/music LDs mostly from Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines, etc, where the tech really took off and so you can get essentially wild music videos to put in the background. Pretty fun!

    • Oh, that guy who sold me his collection also gave me his giant Laserdisc sign which he got from a video store that was closing its LD section at some point. It's great. I've got some pictures in my old entertainment center setup which is now dismantled... ah, here we are:
    https://twitter.com/necrosofty/status/1241204054232952832

    3

    I am a relatively new collector of Laserdiscs and I still sometimes have to ask myself why I am collecting these things.

    A couple of years ago I became aware of the existence of Laserdiscs (beyond just vaguely knowing what they were) and in particular I could not stop looking at pictures of anime LDs online. Eventually, I decided that I had to just get a couple, if nothing else for the novelty and then hopefully I would be satisfied. So I got a smattering of LDs from Surugaya, mostly choosing some from series I knew and where I thought the LD artwork looked cool, although I also made sure to get a few whole OVAs. After I got them I could not suppress the curiosity/desire to actually watch these things and so I jumped on yahoo auctions and got myself a Laserdisc player (CLD-R7G) for around 23.000 yen (the player itself has been the only semi-expensive thing I have gotten in my foray into this world so far). I then watched some of my LDs and thought they looked...alright. Good enough that I ordered a whole bunch more before immediately regretting it and canceling those orders thinking myself a fool. Now I kind of regret canceling that order as it had a few discs I have not been able to find at reasonable price since, although I still think it was the correct decision at the time. I still bought a few more discs after that, but more selectively.

    At this point I did not own a CRT TV and I watched the LDs hooked up through a framemeister unit to a modern TV (which I am sure is not the best way to connect a LD player to a HDTV). However, not so long after I decided to try out a CRT (for other reasons mostly). In terms of LDs, it was a bit of a game-changer as my evaluation of their quality went from alright to actually pretty good. They just look a lot better on a CRT to my eyes. Some of the later 90’ies discs even look essentially/almost DVD quality to me. This made me more willing to buy more Laserdics as I had a nominal use-case, even though I could of course in general obtain similar or better results by just playing files on my CRT TV.

    However, this is where the reason I collect LDs come in. The artwork is awesome and the packaging in general is really sweet, although for some box-sets I would appreciate if they had a bit less empty space as these things already take up a lot of space. Also there is just something cool about the physicality of putting that huge disc into the player. Since then I have therefore expanded my collection and generally gone beyond cool-looking cover-art to actually owning the full series of some things and re-watching them on the format (although the aesthetics is still very important, will not get a show if the packaging is not nice!) . Another thing I love about LDs is that they are generally very cheap these days and you can get whole series for a few thousand yen (compare that to any other physical media in japan which is ludicrously expensive). In this way I picked up all of Legend of Galactic Heroes for example, which I’ve always wanted to own (see https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/427-a-place-to-show-off-your-christmas-or-other-holiday-gear/40 .

    So far I have restricted myself to anime for a few reasons. One being that a lot of it has really nice artwork on those LDs. Another is that they tend to look good enough compared to other sources that I can watch them on my SD CRT TV without thinking that I am getting a vastly inferior experience (sometimes nice HD remasters voids this point though). With most older movies I feel like it is possible to get sources that look a lot better than LDs and as they tend to be widescreen I am also less inclined to watch them on my CRT and indeed as many were made for the cinema initially they don’t feel at home on a CRT in the way a lot of TV anime does to me. Finally, by restricting to anime I guess there is a limit to my acquisition of these dumb, heavy things. I keep telling myself that I will get a lot while I am living in Japan and have the chance to buy them for cheap and then when I (presumably) move back home to Denmark in a few years I can bring them all when I will be moving stuff anyways. After that procuring new ones will be a lot harder. But it may just be an excuse I tell myself to feel less bad about my silly collecting...

    I’m generally happy with my LD player, but half a year after buying it unfortunately the remote stopped working which is a little annoying. It is not the remote itself (I have two for reasons), so I think the receiver on the player itself is somehow broken, but I don’t know how to fix it.

    Here are some of my LDs from a picture I took to try to explain to some friends in Denmark why they are cool.
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/Jiy8TyE.jpeg]

    4

    There was a lot of talk in the CRT Thread about making a side thread for VHS, since it's a common interest among a good chunk of us here, and @“exodus”#3 asked that I open with a recent box of tapes I got from a local free group, so here you go!

    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/u7bNI0p.jpeg]

    Huh, in my head there was more horror in this box lol. Although that home-recorded tape in the bottom left is a copy of Meet the Feebles, for whatever reason. I did pick up a good number of other cult/ horror titles recently though, I'll try to get some pics of the whole collection soon.

    In the meantime, here's this sealed copy of banned North Korean kaiju film PULGASARI (1985) that I found at a thrift store recently! Director Shin Sang-ok and wife Choi Eun-hee were kidnapped by Kim Jong-Il in 1978 to make movies for the DPRK. This is the last film they made before escaping to the US.

    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/yMys5xo.jpeg]

    One last note, it's basically impossible to photograph a collection of laserdiscs because the spine text is so small and often kinda beat up, but I've kept my collection documented on LDDB: https://www.lddb.com/account/andrewelmore

    5

    I'm not “a movie guy” but your LD collection sure is a bunch of movies that I totally love!

    Media formats are a weird thing. I don't seem to have the same gene that many other people do especially about older analog formats. I go back and forth with games now if I want to get a physical copy (mostly because I want to be able to loan the games that I like out to my friends) or get a digital copy because they are the things that go on sale more frequently and I'm price sensitive. It's fascinating to see how the physical media market has become a luxury itself.

    My father is a broadcast engineer and thus we had both a Betamax and a VHS deck growing up and my dad always used the Betamax to record until it broke and he chose not to repair it. He was a big fan of the higher image quality recording on Beta which is a component format (independent channels for RGB meant less cross-talk and better color separation).

    LaserDisc is fascinating to me because it was such a high-end product and simultaneously had so many quirky technical features and limitations. Many (correct me if I'm wrong) movies required you to flip the discs over roughly halfway. Digital audio support when most receivers didn't understand digital anything. And all to watch _Alien 3_, the _Alien_ movie which is only "OK". 😋

    So, are you going to give us a rundown on what's up with that _Ridge Racer_ LaserDisc? That looks amazing!

    6

    @“antillese”#p49296 okay in fairness, the assembly cut of Alien 3 owns.

    I've never seen a Beta VCR with any outputs better than composite video, but I haven't looked into it much. I probably should . . .

    Yes there are basically two types of LaserDiscs, CAV and CLV, that utilize the laser differently and encode their content accordingly. All you really need to know is that a CAV disc can old about 30mins of footage on each side, and a CLV disc can hold roughly 60mins on each side but looks a little smeary in a very distinct way. My player thankfully rotates the laser assembly itself internally so I don't need to flip discs, but every player I've had previously required me to flip them manually. But yeah, LD is a fun format! It survived through several different eras of home audio formats, so you have analog mono and stereo, analog four-channel dolby surround, digital stereo and four channel dolby surround, then eventually once you get into the 90s you start seeing Dolby Digital AC-3 which is a proper discrete 5.1 digital mix, with a bitrate that's slightly higher than the average blu-ray disc. Granted, you need a separate device to decode that AC-3 signal so it can kind of be a hassle. Then at the very end there were some DTS digital surround releases that are even more sought after, haha. That's not even getting into all the 1080i MUSE LD releases in Japan.

    The biggest thing holding back LaserDisc is that, unlike VHS which separates chroma and luma (meaning s-video is actually native for VHS, so find an S-VHS deck with s-video out if you can!) LD is encoded in composite at the format level. So no matter what, it's always going to look like 480i over composite video. However, on a good CRT with a decent 3D comb filter, it can genuinely look really good, depending on the release and the quality of the player. That's the other weird thing, since the format is still analog, the quality of the actual player itself has a weirdly dramatic impact on the video quality, similarly to how cartridges work on turntables.

    Okay, the Ridge Racer LaserDisc. I love that stupid thing. [The only semi-notable thing I've ever done on the internet is releasing a 17-track love letter to R4](https://satellitesound.bandcamp.com/album/real-racing-roots-2019). Ridge Racer means the world to me. I found this disc on Yahoo Auctions Japan and bought it, [as well as its accompanying OST CD](https://www.discogs.com/release/3758824-Namco-Sampling-Masters-%E3%83%AA%E3%83%83%E3%82%B8%E3%83%AC%E3%83%BC%E3%82%B6%E3%83%BC-Ridge-Laser) via a proxy service. Only after I bought it did I start doing research to figure out what it was, haha. Basically, companies like Namco and Sega were making these LaserDiscs full of promotional footage of their arcade games, that more or less resemble a feature-length attract mode. These were distributed (sold? idk. it has an OBI strip so I assume it was also a retail product or at least some kind of curio-for-purchase) to arcade operators who would let the disc loop on a monitor in the window to attract the attention of passers-by, or to promote an upcoming release, etc. There are discs like this for Tekken, I believe Sega Rally, etc.

    This Ridge Racer LD in particular is special because it's scored by a specific set of remixed tracks (hence the Ridge Laser CD), and contains a bunch of cool footage of things that can't actually be done in-game, like popping up on two side wheels like that one MIA video. Basically, one side of the disc is a 60fps playthrough of all of Ridge Racer and Ridge Racer 2 captured from an arcade board by someone who is very good at those games, I always assumed it must have been someone in Test or something. Then the other side of the disc is all the wacky attract-mode style stuff that feels like someone's first time goofing around with a Video Toaster.

    Thankfully someone's uploaded the entire thing to youtube already, so you can watch it whenever! It is interlaced to all heck though, so just be aware.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEhN9jqyGY8

    7

    All right, I took some pictures of my tapes.

    There's also a metric ton of older children's tapes (disney etc) my kids watch but those are in a constant state of chaotic disarray.

    Anyway here's some video home system cassettes.
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/dAu8qdw.jpeg]
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/nHXOftw.jpeg]
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/Bh99EFP.jpeg]
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/DnOJsOK.jpeg]

    And the only Criterion VHS tape I've ever been lucky enough to come across in the wild.
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/cw9iABV.jpeg]
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/3Z92FI6.jpeg]
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/cmlcXYL.jpeg]

    8

    Nice tapes everyone!

    I started getting into VHS collecting last year. It had been on my mind when, while walking the dog through the neighborhood, I found on the side of the road a nice stool and a VHS/DVD combo player sitting on top of it... So I went home to get my car and got both. Since then I've been sporadically picking up tapes whenever I happen upon them. My latest find was a VHS copy of Pikachu's Winter Vacation that we had as kids that apparently doesn't exist on youtube so that was pretty exciting.

    The thing I like most about tapes is how easy media is with them. No internet connection, no navigating menus... You pop a tape in, hit play and there's your movie. When you need to take a break you hit stop and you know the tape will pick up right where you left off when you come back. It's great!

    9

    I like the idea of a tape library for kids. I can't ever imagine that having an easily accessible library of media you can just jump into when ever you like has lost its appeal for young people. I would imagine the desire to watch something over and over again is still there. A proper funeral for these tapes. To be used until they break.

    10

    @“andrewelmore”#p49302 I listened to Real Racing Roots 2019 this morning, really great stuff. Thank you for sharing.

    11

    >

    @“robinhoodie”#p49396 Real Racing Roots 2019

    @andrewelmore Uh... wow, this is really good stuff. You're quite talented.

    12

    Would a mod be able to merge this and my Laserdisc thread maybe into a general “physical media video” thread? I feel a little silly repeating myself here in regards to LDs.

    I want to share my personal TOP FIVE VIDEOS in my VHS collection in alphabetical order:

    Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/rBsQbLZ.jpeg]
    Oh man, I loved this tape as a kid and rented it from the library several times. It's got all the popular cartoon characters from the 80s: Garfield, Alvin and the Chipmunks, at least one Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, Slimer, Alf, Bugs Bunny, Huey, Dewey, & Louie, AND MORE. They all come together to tell kids that drugs are bad and teach 5 year olds that they shouldn't try crack even if their friends are doing it. It's definitely very ridiculous and not "good" in a conventional sense but I have an immense nostalgic attachment to it.

    Futuropolis
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/PiJvAAt.jpeg]
    I found this in a box of VHS tapes being given away on a Free Comic Book Day some years back. At the time, I had no idea what it was but it's really cool! It's a goofy ~40 minute sci-fi parody that's filmed using live actors but shot as stop motion animation. It's bizarre and funny and I love it. AFAIK it was never released on any format other than VHS.

    Panzer Dragoon OVA
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/uAMVLB4.jpeg]
    Okay, yeah, this is infamously bad. BUT it was also the first anime tape I ever bought from back when anime was a very niche thing! I was a Sega kid and loved PD; I remember seeing it advertised in a game magazine and new I needed it.
    I was young enough that I could convince myself that it was of tolerable quality, but what REALLY got to me about this tape was that it opened with a full 15 minutes of previews for other anime (including a version of ADV's "Do It Now" trailer) and THAT is what made me think "this anime stuff is cool and I want more of it."

    NiGHTS into Dreams: Sega Official Video Library
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/dfoMqqN.jpeg]
    This tape is full of Nights info and strategies; it's all on YouTube and IIRC none of the information is super essential but I love Nights so I'm very glad to have this in my collection. I bought this off a Nights fan who had fallen on hard times and came to the nightsintodreams.com forum to sell their collection. She happened to live in the same city as me and we met up once: she gave me a bunch of evangelical pamphlets in hopes that I would be drawn to Jesus which was an odd experience...

    Shelley Duvall's Mother Goose Rock N' Rhyme
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/3nPo02m.jpeg]
    This movie is WILD and a total hidden gem. I believe it originally aired on Disney Channel but I don't think Disney owns it. It's absolutely chockablock full of big name musicians: Cindy Lauper, Little Richard, Debbie Harry, ZZ Top, Stray Cats, Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, and MANY MORE! It's got a strong Pee-wee's Playhouse vibe and is kind of a wild time that I find entertaining. The best kind of kids movie VHS!

    13

    @“Nemoide”#p49482 dang, I wish I had known there was a Laserdisc thread! We should totally merge them if we can but now I also just want to post about LDs in the LD thread lol. But yeah, we probably don't need two of these lol

    Speaking of which this post rules! I also have that Panzer Dragoon tape and I agree it's gloriously stupid and pretty bad but I'm just so glad it exists regardless.

    16

    @“Nemoide”#p49482 Haha that dang Cartoon All Stars appealed to my love of cartoons so much that it worked. I could never do drugs, what would all my best cartoon friends think of me?

    17

    Dang, I want that nights tape!! And the Ridge racer LD! I do have a raystorm superplay tape though…

    Anyway my collection is inaccessible so here are the tapes I've picked up since moving, at half price books and the like. Vhs prices are all over the price in stores these days. All these were 2 bucks except prophecy, but I had credit at Streetlight Records so I justified it. Meanwhile, the half price books where I got (most of) these $2 tapes had the ghost in the shell dub for $30. Wild times. Look up how much people are trying to sell penitentiary chances for!

    They also had wheels on meals for $15, but it was the dub which goes for nothing normally. They're all over the place! I miss thrift stores ;_;

    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/JjbqYtC.jpeg]

    18

    @“exodus”#p49620 for real, there‘s a local “chain” of sorts around Seattle called Al’s that just sell all kinds of physical media, but their bread and butter is old video games. They‘re generally really chill and keep most of their prices below what things usually go for, but the one at UW over by Pink Gorilla has started throwing ridiculous prices on any VHS tape that says "John Carpenter’s . . . “ on it or looks like something resembling cult horror. Last time I was there Assault On Precinct 13 was in a glass case, beat to hell, and without a price tag. I asked about the price and the guy just said it was one of those ”if you have to ask you don't want to know" deals. I double checked and even on eBay folks are only asking twenty bucks max. So weird, man.

    Anyway. Thrift stores. Yes. That's where it's at, still. I don't have the energy for garage sales but i can walk into a goodwill and hope for the best. Unfortunately thrift stores as a whole are obviously still sliding downhill and it really depends on the individual store whether you're going to luck out or not (my local value village was charging hundreds of dollars for the fakest yeezys ive ever seen the other day)

    Also wow you weren't kidding, penitentiary chances is all over the place now, what the heck

    19

    @“andrewelmore”#p49663 Ah, this Al‘s chain sounds cool! I’ve never been there in any of my trips there and nobody has ever recommended it to me before now. Rude!!!

    But yeah, VHS prices are very strange. I went to a place in small-town Florida that was selling every tape they had for $10-$20 regardless of what it was. the best/weirdest stuff still comes to thrift stores, but then you have to hope that thrift stores are even accepting vhs tapes as donations because in many cases they don't anymore!! It's wild because they've JUST gotten to the point where folks actually want them again, but thrift stores have finally decided to stop carrying CRTs and vhs tapes. The wrong decision at the wrong time, heh.

    Oh yeah and @andrewelmore I wanted to comment on your 80 tape collection - it's really all over the place there! You got some hot stuff like rawhead rex, dead or alive, existenz, etc and then you've got a bunch of zoolanders and swingers in there too, heh. but I'd probably keep about 10 of these which is a pretty good ratio.

    Your collection definitely looks different from mine, in that I basically won't keep anything that I have in a better format unless the tape is different (or it's like... escape from new york and FEELS like a tape) and I certainly don't keep doubles! you should trade those off to a store that sells tapes and get some good stuff!

    20

    I tried to write this in the LD thread but then they got merged and I lost my draft so I'll try again lol.

    The first time I held a laserdisc was probably 2010, when a buddy and i found a copy of Mean Streets at a thrift store. I was aware of the format obviously but I hadn't actually had my hands on one. I was fascinated. My buddy bought it, joking about using it as a wall mirror or something, which thankfully he never did cause eventually he gave it to me lol.

    Fast forward to around 2013, I'm out thrifting with a different friend, who finds a crappy old late-80s Pioneer player. Then we started collecting LDs to watch, as we had already been watching lots of tapes.

    _I'm pulling all these photos off google images btw cause I'm sure I have pics of them somewhere but I have no idea where._

    2014, I find my own LD player at a goodwill. It was a Pioneer CLD-S201. Very low end, short on features, unfortunate video quality, but it's an LDP and it's twenty bucks. I take it home. Then I started getting movies to watch on LD. Mostly dumb 90s action flicks because that's what was readily available.
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/jHvC3q1.png]

    Sometime later (2016?) I get my hands on a better LDP, also from a thrift store. Pioneer CLD-D-505. The picture quality is a little better, and it at least has Dolby AC-3 out for discrete digital 5.1 surround, which is cool! No TOSLINK out though, and it's still a flipper. But hey, this one's also twenty bucks. Once I got it I sold my S201 to a local collector who just wanted a cheap, dependable backup unit for $20.
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/wJBCDAB.png]

    Then a few years later, I wanna say 2018, I was in a RE-PC (electronics recycling center out here) and found a beautiful Pioneer DVL-909. It was aesthetically gorgeous, and feature-wise had everything I could ever want in an LDP. I didn't plan on using the DVD functionality because I have an old Pioneer Elite DV-06 that I use for DVDs in my CRT setup. But they wanted something like $250 for it, but I was able to haggle down to $100 which felt more appropriate. This is the player I still use to this day on the reg, and it's been absolutely incredible. I know LD is encoded in composite video even at the format level, but I use the S-Video output because it's easier for my video switcher set up and my main Trinitron (KV32-FS320) has a damn good 3D comb filter that it applies to both composite and s-video inputs, and I trust that more than the player's built in comb filter. After I got this, I sold my D-505 on ebay, and packaged it as carefully as I could, but I learned the hard way that to ship an LDP you need to put it in a box full of packing peanuts, then put that box inside another box full of packing peanuts. It arrived destroyed and I had to pay for it. RIP little buddy. : (
    But anyway, this DVL-909 is an absolute joy and I love it dearly.
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/1NXn17a.jpeg]

    And for good measure here's that DVD player I mentioned:
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/kANmeu8.png]

    Okay, the next aspect of this saga was trying to actually be able to _USE_ Dolby AC-3. As @exodus mentioned before, that one specific Yamaha RF decoder box has gotten weirdly rare and expensive. But I found there is a whole other category of "Surround Processors" that also come equipped with the ability to decode the RF of Dolby AC-3!

    I previously had a Pioneer VSP-333 as a surround processor to add two channels to my 2.0 Sony receiver I was using at the time, this was to enable four channel Dolby Surround (pre-pro logic) for SNES/PS1 games and VHS primarily. It did not have the ability to decode AC-3 RF though and eventually I upgraded to a Sony ES series receiver from the early 00s that solved that problem for me, so I got rid of it.
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/suSq5ux.png]

    The first one I got for LaserDisc was this Marantz DP-870U, however at least two of the channels straight up did not output audio and I'm too clumsy with a soldering iron to try and do anything about it, so I got a refund from the seller and moved on to the next one.
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/EhvE937.png]

    Next came the Yamaha DDP-1! This currently takes up an entire shelf above my LaserDisc player and its single solitary function is to decode Dolby AC-3's RF signal, then output to 6 separate channels (L, C, R, SL, SR, SW) to the Multi-Channel input on my receiver. It's about the size of my already massive DVL-909 and this is the only thing it does lol. But even after shipping it was like $40 and it works perfectly! Plus I love the display, it reminds me of some of my Yamaha synthesizers and rack units from the same era.
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/VC7vemz.png]

    So that all goes into the one receiver I use for everything in my CRT setup, the Sony STR-DA1ES. I had a 333ES for a while but it wasn't super reliable and feature-wise was a bit weaker and older. But with this DA1ES from this very specific transitional era of the early-00s, I can route all my audio through it from all my consoles and media players and have all mutli-channel formats decoded natively. Including LaserDisc DTS directly from the TOSLINK out of my DVL-909! Mine's not nearly this dirty though what to heck.
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/V6XS2Zu.png]

    I won't go through my journey of VCRs because that would take all day and there's no way I would remember all of them but suffice it to say my last several have been S-VHS decks over s-video (VHS as a format stores chroma and luma separately so s-video is actually native for the format, unlike LD). I've been through some commercial broadcast decks that finally crapped out on me, but I've got two of these JVC decks from the 90s I found at thrift stores, almost identical models, that have been absolutely fantastic. For this one I actually found a picture from my twitter instead of google images:[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/xwLqQBg.jpeg]

    The only other VCR I have hooked up right now is this Sony RDR-VX555 that is the only VCR/DVD combo I've ever seen that _actually_ outputs the VHS signal over HDMI! Found it brand new at a thrift store in Tacoma with the remote and everything. Unfortunately, as you'd probably assume, VHS over HDMI into a 4K TV looks like absolute horse garbage. I cannot recommend enough that you Do Not Get This.
    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/nl56GJr.png]

    And lastly, man, @exodus I can not beLIEVE you just fell into that LD-1000, that's incredible. That's probably the only machine where using s-video would actually improve the image, and is probably overall the best-looking non-MUSE LDP out there! That rules!!

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    Yeah my general thing with all these has been “luck into a good model from the start,” which is how I got my mitsubishi svhs player (can‘t remember the model number, I’ll look it up when it‘s out of a box) at a thrift store which was pay by weight, so it was about… 5 bucks). Maybe I said this but a nice thing about california is if you’re willing to wait around and keep looking, eventually you'll get the good stuff for cheap/nothing.

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    @“exodus”#p49667 oh yeah man Al‘s is the best, there’s a bunch of them all around up here! At least like two of them went under during the early stages of quarantine though, RIP. One of them took all their product and sent it to another store, except a giant box of DVD copies of various Korean dramas with no subtitles, that they set outside their door with a FREE sign. I only know that because I was walking by as a Korean family pulled up in a car and excitedly loaded it into the trunk. I hope they enjoyed them, whatever was in there! It's cool that that kind of thing can still happen imo.

    Yeah there are some truly heinous CRT graveyards around here now, lots of thrift stores throwing anything bigger than a 14" (or in many cases, anything at all) in a pile in a lot in the back where they just sit there and rained on for eternity. It's tragic! Luckily every place I normally go to (at least around here) still carries cassettes and VHS tapes, and they're aall still a buck or less, but yeah half-price books is still a total crap shoot.

    As for the tapes I have, I periodically go through and get rid of stuff I don't care about. I should probably offload those dupes as well. A lot of the random stuff in there that wasn't from that one big box was stuff that was sent to me from Scarecrow Video. They do a thing where you fill out a survey about your movie tastes along with a donation and they send you a personalized box fulla movies of various formats, it owns. But most of the Good Stuff is gone so I got a lot of random stuff like My Stepmother Is An Alien or whatever.

    As for what I keep, I have lots of stuff across multiple formats, I don't even know why half the time. A lot of it is just stuff that, like you said about Escape, _feels_ like a movie destined for a specific format. But usually I end up keeping the best and worst versions. Like I'll get something on 4K and VHS, or whatever, then give away the DVD or something. I dunno, there's no rhyme or reason.