Copying LaserDiscs To DVD?

SBECK asks: "Now that DVD writers are on the market (and are actually becoming affordable), I've been thinking of getting one with the hopes of 'backing up' all my LaserDiscs. I've got quite a collection of LaserDiscs and would like to make sure that I'll always be able to play them in case LaserDiscs go the way of the betamax and I'm not able to replace my LaserDisc player. So, I get a huge hard disk, a video capture card, a DVD RAM, and some software to MPEG encode the video. Am I going to be able to burn a DVD with approximately the same video quality as the original laserdisc? Will I have any problems creating a DVD that I can then play in any standard DVD player? Any suggestions on hardware/software combinations? Any gotchas I should know about?"

Comments

DVD creation

[sid crimson]

Check out this website... and especially the FAQ section...

It should answer most questions. It's liable to cost upwards of $10,000 (probably more like $15,000) to purchase all the hardware and software to take your LDs and transfer them to DVDs.

Laserdisc players are not gone yet -- maybe it's cheaper to get a couple backup players and forget the transfers?

The Pioneer DVL-919 is an excellent combo player.... streets for ~$1,000.

-sid

Why would you want to do this?

[ikekrull]

Since you'll have to re-encode to MPEG-2 to put the contents of a laserdisc onto DVD, it probably won't make a huge difference if you just capture from a component out on an LD player, rather than attempting to scan the contents of the LD bit-by-bit.

Then its no more difficult to put the contents of an LD on a DVD than it is to put the contents of any other video/film medium.

Ideally, you'd either want to take the component out of an LD player and put it straight into a hardware MPEG-2 encoder, or capture at full-res, uncompressed with audio to a big RAID array before software encoding the resulting frames to MPEG-2.

Either way, its going to cost you a lot of money, so unless youve got an extensive library of laserdiscs you really badly need on DVD, i just plain wouldn't bother.