A retrospective on a forgotten format which was ahead of its time.
The first three Star Trek films and a dozen episodes of The Original Series were released on CED.
Movies on Vinyl: The Capacitance Electronic Disc
- Thread starter Cryogenator
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A retrospective on a forgotten format which was ahead of its time.
The first three Star Trek films and a dozen episodes of The Original Series were released on CED.
I didn't even know that format was a thing until Linus presented it.
I read about it at the time but I never saw a CED or a laserdisc player for sale in the UK in the early 80s. They would likely have been too expensive for me to consider buying. I didn't even own a VHS player until 1992. I did own an HDDVD player and about 20 discs for it around 2008, but as we know, that format also died commercially. A big plus for it was no region encoding so I could play cheaper imported discs without region hacking.
Was regionlock bypass difficult or expensive then?
It certainly isn’t now!
Also, 4K Blu-ray is mandatorily regionless (although about thirty of almost thirty thousand 4K discs have been illegally regionlocked).
It certainly isn’t now!
Also, 4K Blu-ray is mandatorily regionless (although about thirty of almost thirty thousand 4K discs have been illegally regionlocked).
The whole thing blows my mind. The idea of a record-like mechanism for video is fascinating and it really feels like the kind of technology from an alternate or parallel universe, and it does makes you wonder, what if? What if they had actually succeeded. It's too bad they ended up being so fragile. The big sleeve makes it look like a big floppy.
It was neither cheap nor ubiquitous at the time. I don't have many 4K discs - only for really good movies that benefit from the enhanced resolution and HDR.
Is region locking of 4K really illegal? In which jurisdictions? *
It's analogue, not digital, so not really that high tech. Pushing the physical limitations much too far to support video encoding really destroyed CED's marketability as the discs had limited replayability before the noise and track skipping made them unwatchable. It should be possible to use a laser to read the discs as has been implemented for audio on vinyl. But with the video being SD quality and far better digital alternatives being available, no-one in their right mind would bother.
* A web search tells me region locking is illegal in Hong Kong and Australia and that region hacking is notionally illegal in the US. Haven't verified that. I assume copyright holders care mainly about video piracy.
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Regionlocking of 4K Blu-rays is globally prohibited by the Blu-ray Association, so anyone who does has illegally violated the licensing terms.
I still have somewhere the device I bought to get around VHS copy protection.
Of course, but that's part of what makes it so fascinating and the very fact that they even attempted such a method. It would have been pretty high-tech for its time. RCA were pretty much the experts when it came to record playing technology at the time, and they thought they could use the same method for video. The fact that it took so much time to develop and for them to figure out leading them to being late to market when other things like VHS were starting to emerge, is what led to its downfall. Not so much the technology itself. Had it been faster to the game, it could have been successful. And they were marketing them towards the home user for owning movies, sold at 50 bucks each. VHS on the other hand, being priced at around $100 each was too expensive for most people, which had a hand in establishing the video rental market.
I don't think region locking was really a thing until DVD came along.
VHS had copy protection but that was simply that - stopping duplicate copies being made but didn't apply the country you were in (there it was more a case of PAL vs NTSC).
Yes, region locking was DVD and HD Blu-ray. There are ways around Macrovision to create DVD versions of VHS movies and shows that never made it to DVD, but we're not supposed to discuss such things.
There's a rule against "promoting piracy," but there isn't one against discussing legal formatshifting, timeshifting, and personal backup creation. Furthermore, while a moderator has told me not to discuss removal of digital rights management (despite there being no such prohibition in the rules as written), that obviously can't apply to the analog formats we're discussing here—nor, for that matter, to using the unavoidably omnipresent analog hole to legally formatshift, timeshift, or create a personal backup of any and all digital media without circumventing digital rights management.
(CEDs and LaserDiscs have no anticopy protection.)
Amusingly, there's also a rule against "near nudity" because "our advertisers comes [sic] down hard on that." Despite this, I frequently see advertisements with near nudity here in addition to the omnipresent scam ad spam, despite the rule against spam.
The HD-DVD release of the first season of The Original Series is still definitive because it has less digital noise reduction than the Blu-rays and streams.
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I agree with your points. However, the legality of personal backup creation depends on jurisdiction. As far as I'm aware it's still illegal where I live, although I've never heard of anyone being prosecuted for making a copy of something they've bought. Even if they don't sell the original, so no-one has been harmed financially, it could still be counted as a crime.
There's also a rule here against promoting ad-blockers, yet some of the ads I used to see were for ad-blockers. Sometimes it feels like we're living in a modern version of The Trial by Franz Kafka.
I saw all of this in the pages of Popular Science (and I still have every issue). My high school had 3/4" U-Matic VCRs (JVC top-loaders, no less) back in the late 1970s, which were fed out through a campus-wide 4-channel (later 5-channel) cable system. And after I graduated, they got one CED machine. Which we couldn't patch into the cable system, because it only had an RF output (can you imagine that today?!?).
And I was perpetually pissed off at both manufacturers and consumers, for sacrificing quality for recording time. VHS is crappy enough at the 2-hour rate; how can anybody stand to watch it at the 6-hour rate?
As to copy protection, I will note that when digital audio tape came out, it had a built-in form of copy protection: commercial recordings were to have used the same sampling rate as CDs, while non-commercial ones were to have used a slightly different one that would have made digital-to-digital copying (at least with any decent quality) impossible. The recording industry killed it, proving that they feared self-publishing more than they feared piracy.
Incidentally, it was when I took a semester of TV production in high school that I first got hooked on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: when we weren't sending out a tape on any given channel, or recording something off-air, we kept the tuners on the VCRs (yes, there were U-Matic toploaders with built-in tuners!) set to KOCE 50, a local PBS station, which was running MRN in the afternoons. And I discovered that the production values were better (and the writing more intelligent) than most of what was targeted at prime-time audiences. (And I also discovered just how attractive Betty Aberlin was at the time.)
And I was perpetually pissed off at both manufacturers and consumers, for sacrificing quality for recording time. VHS is crappy enough at the 2-hour rate; how can anybody stand to watch it at the 6-hour rate?
As to copy protection, I will note that when digital audio tape came out, it had a built-in form of copy protection: commercial recordings were to have used the same sampling rate as CDs, while non-commercial ones were to have used a slightly different one that would have made digital-to-digital copying (at least with any decent quality) impossible. The recording industry killed it, proving that they feared self-publishing more than they feared piracy.
Incidentally, it was when I took a semester of TV production in high school that I first got hooked on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: when we weren't sending out a tape on any given channel, or recording something off-air, we kept the tuners on the VCRs (yes, there were U-Matic toploaders with built-in tuners!) set to KOCE 50, a local PBS station, which was running MRN in the afternoons. And I discovered that the production values were better (and the writing more intelligent) than most of what was targeted at prime-time audiences. (And I also discovered just how attractive Betty Aberlin was at the time.)
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