Laserdiscs were huge for being able to stop on a single frame - I worked for a place that used them for language teaching, so you had to stop dead on a sentence for it to make sense. At the time mpeg could only stop on iframes that could be 10 seconds apart, and paying to get iframes mastered where you needed them was mucho expensive (even decoding required hardware… mpeg encoding in software was a pipe dream).
Compressed video still has this problem to some extent but it’s mostly worked around in software.
Also the hardware to interface to a PC was basically a simple analogue capture card and a serial link for the control. Cheap, at least compared to the mpeg decoders of the day.
For sure! The first time I saw my animation professor pull out a laserdisc, I started to have doubts on my colleges budget, but damn, crisp, clean frame by frame of Bugs Bunny. Couldn’t be beat!
Laserdiscs were huge for being able to stop on a single frame - I worked for a place that used them for language teaching, so you had to stop dead on a sentence for it to make sense. At the time mpeg could only stop on iframes that could be 10 seconds apart, and paying to get iframes mastered where you needed them was mucho expensive (even decoding required hardware… mpeg encoding in software was a pipe dream).
Compressed video still has this problem to some extent but it’s mostly worked around in software.
Also the hardware to interface to a PC was basically a simple analogue capture card and a serial link for the control. Cheap, at least compared to the mpeg decoders of the day.
For sure! The first time I saw my animation professor pull out a laserdisc, I started to have doubts on my colleges budget, but damn, crisp, clean frame by frame of Bugs Bunny. Couldn’t be beat!