CED VideoDisc and Player Discussion

[Jesse Skeen]

YouTube would have booted these off so I put them on Archive.org. They are still in proper 60fps frame rate but didn't need to be upscaled to play that way. As there's no streaming device app the best way to watch these is using Airplay if you have that available, or the Kodi addon which is a bit glitchy.

https://archive.org/details/ced-jukebox-1-1
https://archive.org/details/ced-jukebox-2
https://archive.org/details/ced-jukebox-3
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Videodisc and stereo sound- there's no better value around!

[lynx]

Saturday is one of my days off from my job, so I spent yesterday watching these CED juke box videos. They were a lot of fun to watch, so thank you for sharing them. It was probably a good idea to post them on a different web site than You Tube, since You Tube videos just come & go, usually because of legal issues or immoral content. I remember hearing, years ago, when these problems began, and about people boycotting the record companies because videos with any music in them automatically got taken down.



I’ve never heard of a juke box which plays videos; the only ones that I’ve ever seen just play audio. While looking up these CED titles online, I couldn't find any articles or press releases about them. The first two discs are listed here on CED Magic in the RCA CED test disc listing, instead of the title database. They’re not pictured in either the visual CED title database or the CED Magic CD-ROM, but the first paragraph of the test disc listing says that they came in either plain unlabeled caddies, caddies with generic labeling, or caddies with rainbow labels that an RCA worker wrote the playlists on by hand with a pen.



The first disc has the stock number CV-S-20511-1B, and the second disc has the stock number CV-S-20513-1A.



The songs in these discs were very popular back in the 1980s, and I had heard a lot of them before, but I’d only seen the music videos for two of them. Unlike today’s music & music videos, these artists had real talent, and they put a lot of effort in to both their music & their videos. Back then, musicians worked on their recording sessions & videos for a long time. They reminded me of TV networks like MTV and VH-1 during their heydays, which sadly, haven’t shown any music videos in years. It’s also interesting that some of the videos are in black and white, and others are in color.



These videos have superb video and audio quality with very little jitter, so whoever owned them in the past obviously cared for them & took very good care of them. I also liked the fact that they have no advertising or any kinds of graphics or text on the screen, except for a few credits from the record companies. A lot of music videos that I’ve seen on TV had text in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. The only thing I didn’t like about them is that two of the songs were shorter than the recordings on the albums released to the public, which were Footloose by Kenny Loggins, and Separate Ways by Journey, both released by Columbia Records. One video that I was really happy to see was Authority Song by John Cougar Mellencamp, since he is one of my favorite singers. I also think it fits really well with CED, since he is a famous Hoosier, and RCA made all their CEDs & CED players in Indiana, so I’m happy that he starred in a CED title. Footloose is the only CED title that I can think of with one of his songs played in it, which is called Hurts So Good. They were released by Riva Records.



I own two of the music videos on these discs on a Sony Betamax tape, Love Is A Battlefield by Pat Benatar, released by Chrysalis Records, and Say Say Say by Sir Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson as a duet, released by Columbia Records. They're on a tape that someone taped of a Cinemax special from 1983.



I think these CEDs would have been good PAL video standard titles, since some of its songs & music videos were performed by British and Australian musicians. They probably would have been popular videos in those two countries.



Finally, I’m curious about a few things. Has any one ever seen the juke box machine that these discs were played in? Were they used in places like restaurants, bars, night clubs, or concert halls, where music is frequently played? Do they need a special kind of CED player to play them on?



Since there isn’t very much information about these CED titles, I’m really intrigued by them, so please share what’s known about them.
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Let RCA turn your television into Selectavision!

[Jesse Skeen]

The jukebox these were made for never came out. I don’t know the whole story other than that these discs were made but didn’t go further after that. They all come in blue caddies with no labels. There were video jukeboxes that used laserdiscs instead, which were likely more practical.

Not all of the videos on these discs were from the best masters, a few of them are in mono.
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Videodisc and stereo sound- there's no better value around!