Domesday Duplicator - Ultimate LaserDisc Preservation
Added 2023-11-17 18:31:11 +0000 UTCHello!
This video kind of snuck up on me. I got a Domesday Duplicator and it was very interesting but very complicated. And as I was testing it I realized I was kind of "stuck" on it because I needed to keep all of my raw rips until I finished the video. So this one forced its way to the front of the line. Then as I was writing the script I realized that this was going to be kind of too much to cover all at once and needed to split it up. So this is just part one of this process. I decided it was important to cover a lot of the technical details as much as I could for this because it doesn't have a ton of coverage out there and it's difficult to get started with.
The Domesday Duplicator is an extremely low level capture device for LaserDiscs that makes it possible to capture everything you can get out of one. It's not cheap, but as far as I'm aware this is the only way to really properly preserve this aging and failing media. So I'm excited to start on this path myself and demonstrate how to do it!
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDlbwl3f39Q
Comments
After running it through ld-compress, which uses FLAC, zipping the output only saves about 1% of the storage size. So it's probably not worth the complexity overhead to use something like that.
Tech Tangents
2023-11-19 00:11:04 +0000 UTCWhat about using a filesystem with native compression, like ZFS with LZ4 or ZSTD?
Kadah
2023-11-18 22:04:47 +0000 UTCYeah, it's a challenge to wrap your head around for sure. That disc is very interesting! Would you be able to upload the LDS file for that one? I don't have any still frame discs and I would love to have a worthwhile example to write a script against for extracting individual frames.
Tech Tangents
2023-11-17 22:11:44 +0000 UTCI still need to fully watch the video but I've had my doomsday for about 1 1/2 years now and only JUST figured out how to use it mostly. When you say complicated, thats just the surface. I have so many discs that archiving and this the best way to do it, but it does need a lot of optimization in the front end pipeline. Because when I started playing around with the device again and went to the discord to read and ask for some help on this thing again and saw you actively posting about some of the same issues I was having, it was nice to know I wasn't the only one. Just last week I got my first LD I successfully archived, its a LD that I got from my old high school. It is a very poorly mastered 3M one sided disc from Texas Tech university with a TON of still images, but its very interesting to look at. The URL on Archive dot org is "the-computing-technology-videodisc" Edit: you mention other laserdisc players, my modded player is a standard Sony MDP-333 player. works well, its just not RS232. And I also am using windows, and to answer your question. all of the features are there on the native windows VHS-decode release since it just uses the LD-decode backend.
Avery G
2023-11-17 21:26:12 +0000 UTC
