Janskeet said:
I have never owned a laserdisc player, but it sounds like a primative form of DVD. It sounds like a better format compared to VHS to me because it contains data digitally on a disc so it doesn't degrade over time like film in a VHS tape. I wonder why VHS won the format war over laserdisc? Can people with more knowledge explain the pros and cons of VHS and laserdisc?

Short version, yeah, LD is the basis of what DVD is now. Same basic technology, just in an earlier form.

As for the "format war" of VHS vs LD, at the time, LD couldn't record. CD-Rs were just starting to evolve, and they were limited to computers.

From a technical quality standpoint, video in those days was measured in horizontal lines of resolution, since everything was limited to what is now considered "480i" vertical resolution. Under that standard, VHS was about 240 lines where LD and S-VHS were around 400. This was back when widescreen and HDTV were still just ideas being experimented with in R&D labs.

S-VHS was a hybrid of LD quality recordable on VHS-equivalent tapes, but the tapes weren't electronically backwards compatible with standard VHS machines - you had to have an S-VHS machine to play it. You could put an S-VHS tape in to a regular VHS deck, but the picture would be all bright and streaky. VHS tapes could go into S-VHS decks without a problem though, but S-decks were considered "high end" at the time, just like LD.

S-VHS and LD worked on the same basic premise - video quality was improved by keeping the brightness and color portions of the signal separate, combining them only at the last second in the TV. This eliminated cross-talk and interference between the signals. That's where the S-video connectors started, and the Y-Pb-Pr (Red-Green-Blue) connection on DVD players now is an extension of that concept.

The public has always had this weird love-hate relationship with home video technology. They want something better than what they've got but once they learn that it will cost them money, they change their minds. Blu-Ray is the first time the concept of "new"="expensive" is finally sinking in, but it's still slow going.