Moth3r said:

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

AntcuFaalb said:

What might be responsible for this defect?

It looks like a video dropout. But I don't know what could cause a laserdisc player to have a dropout at the top of the frame at each scene change.

Not a dropout, as it covers two lines, possibly more through it's hard to tell with the jpeg compression. Dropouts only affect a single line.

It's MPEG-2 compression. The image itself is a (lossless, by design) PNG.

(Unfortunately, DJ's 1985 CAV preservation was only ever released on a DVD5, so it's riddled with macroblocking.)