The ultimate laserdisc player is the Pioneer HLD-X0; it's the best laserdisc player ever produced, period. But quite impossible to find, and really really expensive.
Second, very close and still expensive (around half price of the X0) is the Pioneer HLD-X9 - I have one, I could assure the video quality is astonishing!
Third (IMHO) could be the Sony HIL-C1 (and its clone Panasonic LX-HD10), then fourth the Sony HIL-C2EX (and its clone Panasonic LX-HD20 - I own this one too).
All these laserdisc players are MUSE & NTSC compatible, with red laser (like DVD) and not the usual infrared laser you can find in the normal ld players; this feature help to read less-than-perfect or rotted discs, and improve the video quality of well mastered ones.
After these hi-end players, there are other very good players... first of all, avoid all the Sony ld players (apart the MUSE) not because their video quality is low, but because they are really unreliable.
The best are from Pioneer; from top quality down: CLD-97, CLD-99, CLD-79, CLD-59. The industrial players are quite good too: LD-8000, LD-6000.
Also, I love Runco LJRIII as this is the only THX laserdisc player ever produced. The Panasonic LX-900 and LX-1000 are good.
If you need PAL players, I sadly tell you that the best PAL laserdisc players were at best on par with mediocre NTSC ones... by the way, here you are the best models (again, IMHO): Pioneer CLD-D925 and CLD-2950, LD-V4300D; the Philips LD-WS600 is the best of its brand.
You don't need a separate TBC because every ld player has one built-in; hardware processor could be useful but don't know if they are still SO useful today... at the end, when the analog signal is captured, it become digital, and so you could do any processing you want in the digital domain.
For the software, maybe all you need is VirtualDub and AviSynth - for info about these ones, please ask to someone more expert here in the forum, as I'm still "fighting" with them... ;-)
Hope this will help you!
