The LaserDisc format began its adventure in December 1978, but had to wait until the 1990s to gain some popularity. In fact, LaserDisc became the format of choice for many companies when it came to releasing special or limited editions… and thus the need for good preservation arises. Shelby from the Tech Tangents channel shared a video exploring the virtues and flaws of the Domesday Duplicator, an open source device that directly accesses the analog data of LaserDisc, ensuring superior quality…
Some audio and video enthusiasts are running a race against time. Unfortunately, our discs, cartridges, and cassettes are not eternal. Heat, humidity, rust, decaying adhesives, exploding capacitors, companies cutting costs… many factors are working against us. To all this is added a fundamental detail: "Preserving" is not simply making a copy.
That brings us to the LaserDisc. Time is destroying many collections, but there are true geniuses out there determined to win the battle, and some of them created the Domesday Duplicator, an open source device capable of recording a LaserDisc's data at 40 million samples per second. What does that mean exactly? Shelby from Tech Tangents explains:
How to Preserve LaserDiscs with Maximum Quality
At this point someone might say, "it's enough to record the video output" on the player… but that's not true. The Domesday Duplicator connects directly with an internal link and extracts the LaserDisc data, avoiding all the additional hardware of the device (and its conversion).
Another fairly common argument is that the vast majority of movies that appeared on LaserDisc are already available in a superior format… and that's also not true. For example, the version of Star Wars closest to what was seen in theaters only exists on LaserDisc. There are also releases with cleaner audio (meaning it wasn't murdered in a "remasterization"), and there are series that only reached the public on LaserDisc (Shelby mentions Family Dog, the "cult disaster" produced by Tim Burton and Steven Spielberg).
The video mentions other details like the origin of the name Domesday (inspired by the original BBC device for preserving LaserDiscs, which in turn came from an old book from the year 1086), and reminds us of the analog profile of LaserDiscs, but the Domesday Duplicator is anything but plug & play. The project's wiki explains all the connections step by step, and Shelby needed entire weeks and hundreds of gigabytes of space to fully master the hardware/software combination (he has already confirmed there will be a second video). Still, the hardest thing to swallow is the price: A ready-to-use Domesday Duplicator exceeds 500 dollars…
Official site: Click here
