CED VideoDisc and Player Discussion

[rsrendfeld]

In the CED in the History of Media Technology 1981 entry - RCA Prototype Random Access Player at VIDCOM -. Dr Jon K. Clemens mentions "...a low cost solid state memory device could be developed to provide repeat picture capabilitiy..."

I wonder if anyone in this group could develop such a device? Maybe offer it as a kit?

Ron Rendfeld
Indianapolis IN

[RT9342]

Hi, Ron. I like that idea, but it's been a long time since I've done anything like that. I once tried doing something similar, only it was to try to take the video from a handheld video game system and display it on a full TV screen (you can put the video from that system on a TV screen using digital circuits, but it produces a small image in the middle of the screen with a large colored frame around it). But it didn' work so well. Actually, I kind of gave up on electrical engineering all together (I was taking that as a major in college, but I've since changed majors...and schools). But with your idea, and some other ideas from other members (like HDMI output) and some of my own ideas, I'm considering trying to get back into electronics just for the sake of us CED folks. But I don't know how successful I would be. Hopefully I can get some competition - I'm sure anything I come up with, someone else can do better. (If you look at my suggestions for adding A/V jacks to a CED player and the responses I got, you'll see what I mean - I don't always exactly come up with the best solution).

[rsrendfeld]

The DTV Digital to Analog Converter I bought this week has a pause / freeze frame feature. I wonder if some one who knows about electronics could reverse engineer a pause / freeze frame devise?
The DTV converter is PHILCO brand manufactured by FUNAI model # TB 100 HH9.

Ron Rendfeld
Indianapolis IN

Gravity always wins.

[Jesse Skeen]

For a while they were making VCRs with digital freeze-frame, so you could freeze anything off of live TV or through the inputs. I have an NEC that had this but something went wrong with the boards and I had to have them disconnected in order to still use the VCR. It was great for watching TV because you could freeze anything you wanted to take a close look at without recording, and I also used it for still-framing CEDs and CLV laserdiscs, since the player I had at the time couldn't still-frame those. I couldn't believe it when I tried to find a new VCR with this feature and found it had been long discontinued.

It seems like a lot of the newer TVs have freeze-frame now; I'm hoping to finally get one by the end of 2009 but we'll see what happens!
_________________
Videodisc and stereo sound- there's no better value around!

[RT9342]

The digital freeze frame worked without having to record & play back, huh? Interesting. I'll have to try that on one of those commercial VCR's with digital freeze-frame to see if they can do the same thing. I wish mine had that, but I have an older commercial model that just uses additional heads (it has 8 heads on the video drum - 2 for hi-fi audio, 2 for video recording, 2 for normal video playback, & 2 for freeze-frame/slow video playback - all SP, because that VCR doesn't support LP or SLP). I do want to try to get another one, with digital slow/freeze-frame and component video output, so when I do, I'll see if they can do that. But I agree that it's a real shame that consumer VCRs just went downhill, when they just started dropping features, rather than making the features cheaper to produce. What really gets me is how almost all "hi-fi stereo" VCR's from the '90s have a mono analog head, so they can only play tapes in stereo if they have hi-fi tracks. A lot of '80s VCR's that I've seen, as well as the commercial models, can record & play the analog tracks in stereo as well (what's cool on most commercial VCR's is that they have seperate inputs/outputs for the analog & hi-fi tracks, so it's actually possible to record & play a 4-channel audio signal on those machines).

Well, sorry if I kind of drifted away from the whole CED deal again. I'll try to check into all of the converters & VCR's we've been talking about here and see if I might be able to come up with something that would benefit CED players.