VHS, VCDs, and Laserdiscs in Southeast Asia

https://rubenerd.com/vcds-and-laserdiscs-in-southeast-asia/

by mikece • 1 year ago

92 59 1 year ago

Svip• 1 year ago

What's the usage of the word 'factoid' when its use is clearly to just say 'fact'; considering the word 'factoid' actually means something that looks like a fact, but is – in fact – false? The fact that it should mean 'false fact' but may be used as 'true fact', makes the opening of this piece rather confusing.

thunderbong• 1 year ago

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid

I was only familiar with the second definition -

- a briefly stated and usually trivial fact

happymellon• 1 year ago

I was only familiar with the first for a long time, until I realised that other people were using it in the same manner as literally.

reaperducer2• 1 year ago

What's the usage of the word 'factoid' when its use is clearly to just say 'fact'

What's the use of the word "usage" when its use is clearly to just say "use?"

jnaina• 1 year ago

Brings back memories of VHS copies of bootleg and other questionable content (Pr0n) being sold in certain shops in Singapore (if you know where to find them) in 80s.

TrackerFF• 1 year ago

Were bootlegs popular?

The first time I traveled outside the western part of the world, I was (naively or not) surprised by the sheer amount of bootleg tapes sold in regular stores. Same with DVD when that time came around.

goosedragons• 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure they're still popular outside of the western world. At least for some things. eBay is filled with bootleg DVDs of Anime, TV shows, etc. There is no official Simpsons Season 21+ DVDs for example and yet they are not very hard to find...

idontwantthis• 1 year ago

TFA

fidotron• 1 year ago

Bootlegging of everything is a huge business.

Back in the 90s Singapore was such a big market for this that it acted as the major driver for motivating globally synchronized releases. i.e. for Reader's Digest magazine* in the US in 1995 if you did not release it on the same day in Singapore it would be easily available in pirated form within days, removing any ability to make money in that market for the legitimate product.

In UK pubs circa 2000 it was notorious that certain people would approach your table to sell you bootleg DVDs, and that if you indulged them you'd then get access to their "special" selection.

* And yes, that example is totally serious.

GlassOwAter• 1 year ago

https://youtube.com/shorts/EodajlNi0k4

jgalt212• 1 year ago

Very popular. Even Seinfeld got caught up in it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Kicks

joeblubaugh• 1 year ago

Bootlegging was massive in Malaysia. Whole floors of some of the high-rise malls in Johor Bahru were VCD shops.

selimthegrim• 1 year ago

Rainbow Centre in Karachi was a highlight of my childhood.

Scoundreller3• 1 year ago

My friend that lived in Iran said you basically would have a guy that goes around and basically opens his trunk and offers bootlegs.

Sometimes they’d disappear for a while and you’d have to work with your existing collection or find a new guy.

But that was pre ubiquitous-ish high speed internet.

cgh• 1 year ago

In Thailand in the ‘90s, there were street vendors selling every dvd and cd you could think of, all bootlegs, complete with copied artwork and packaging. It was completely out in the open.

GuinansEyebrows• 1 year ago

same in Mexico. i remember buying a ton of nu-metal CDs from street vendors on vacation as a kid.

dylan6046• 1 year ago

Even in the States, there were computer swap meets in my town, and VCDs were everywhere in the 90s at them. I remember the first time I saw one, and asked where the VCR was, but realized it looked different than a VHS would look. I had no idea at the time, but I would later go to work for a company that started with making interactive CDs, VCDS, and eventually DVDs. Not sure the bootleg market had anything to do with it, but I was at least knowledgeable about the format when asked in job interview. So evidence of one, bootlegging isn't all bad!

bombcar• 1 year ago

Yeah, some of the best places to get bootlegs even into the 2000s were swap meets and other small businesses. It wasn’t until decently later (and even then) that torrents and trackers would have a similar breadth. Everything had the BIG releases, but the swap meets had also sorts of strange things you’d never heard of.

CYR1X• 1 year ago

Copy protection for physical media was so rudimentary back then. VHS tapes literally just have a piece of plastic you could break off that acted as copy protection. Everyone had CRT's so no one was a quality freak either, really.

criddell• 1 year ago

VHS tapes literally just have a piece of plastic you could break off

I think that made the tapes read-only.

VHS copy protection was mostly some flavour of Macrovision (at least in Canada).

magnio• 1 year ago

Funnily enough, the article spent a paragraph explaining the initialism and acronym, only to refer to VCD as an acronym later.

OneFriend2575• 1 year ago

Loved this, such a good reminder that for a lot of us in SE Asia, VCDs weren’t just a format, they were basically the bridge between VHS bootlegs and early DVDs. Karaoke, bootlegs, family movies… it was all mixed in.

What’s interesting is how much the timing of official releases shaped all this. If you had to wait months for a cinema run or home video, the “street version” was too tempting to pass up.

justsomehnguy2• 1 year ago

the bridge between VHS bootlegs and early DVDs

What about DivX/XviD?

reaperducer2• 1 year ago

What about DivX/XviD?

VCDs had broad hardware support, and were more mainstream.

I used to travel around Southeast Asia a bit, and whenever I was in Hong Kong, I'd load up on VCD movies at mainstream stores like HMV.

I still have VCD copies of The Incredibles and On Her Majesty's Secret Service I bought at HMV.

2muchcoffeeman• 1 year ago

You can buy a vhs cleaner that accepts some alcohol and then fast forwards and rewinds through the tape. The alcohol would soak into a sponge bit and wipe the tape.

At least this is my recollection.

mlinhares• 1 year ago

Memory unlocked, incredible. I just clearly remembered doing this to re-record some stuff.

dylan6046• 1 year ago

At the VHS dub house I worked, each of the recorders would be taken down once a month to have all of the rollers, head drum, and other parts of the tape path that made contact with the tape cleaned by hand by the engineering department. In the head end where the masters were played, we'd do the same thing on the master playback equipment at the beginning of each shift and possibly more frequently if the masters were of less quality or really old. The 1" machines were easy to clean, but the cassette formats were more difficult in having to pull the units out of the racks, remove the cover, blah blah.

At least this is my recollection. <shivers/> the really bad ol' days

ssl-32• 1 year ago

Memory partially valid.

An important part of using a head cleaning tape was to use play mode, not FF or RW. Only play (or record) modes would have the tape wrapped around the head while FF/RW would disengage the tape completely from the head. This is done to save head wear, and to help prevent magnetizing the head.

(Except on examples like this weird, late-model Sony deck I have: On it, the tape is always engaged with the head from the time it is inserted to the time it is ejected. And the head itself is "self-cleaning.")

Brian_K_White2• 1 year ago

They are talking about a winder that cleans a tape, not a tape that cleans a player.

esafak2• 1 year ago

It's interesting that LaserDiscs were popular. They were quite niche in the West so I imagine they must have been expensive to produce. Who even made the machines?

CharlesW• 1 year ago

Pioneer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc_player

esafak2• 1 year ago

Did they make writers?

dylan6046• 1 year ago

Criterion Collection. nuff said

Scoundreller3• 1 year ago

It’s wild to me to think people can simply move overseas and interstate now and watch the same intertube programming, but that’s a different post.

This is still not easy without piracy, at least for liveTV.

dylan6046• 1 year ago

Not easy, but not hard either. Same for the physical media. It just takes different ways/methods of skirting the same rules.

xxr• 1 year ago

I’m a little surprised that one of the supposed advantages of Laserdisc over tape is resistance to humidity. Wasn’t delamination/corrosion (LaserRot) a not-uncommon problem for LD? I’m guessing humidity issues (particularly mold) were much more pronounced with tape.

acuozzo• 1 year ago

Wasn’t delamination/corrosion (LaserRot) a not-uncommon problem for LD?

It comes down to the glue (and distribution of said glue) used to bond the sides at the pressing plant.

maxglute• 1 year ago

One of my neatest Beijing finds was an usually eloquent huckster (i.e. not a country bumpkin) leading me through maze of alleys and hallways to a VCD shop that repackaged discs into really nice matching spines and covers. Kind of like criterion collection / Nintendo switch games. Like analogue custom plex art - they had service where you can colorize your collection.

prmoustache2• 1 year ago

I remember burning SVCD (Super Video CD) which were encoded in mpeg2 for shows and movies I was recording with my Pinnacle aquisition card. That was a bit before DivX then Xvid codec became popular enough for any DVD player to support it.

SVCD provided a near indistinguishable quality difference with DVDs when using most CRT TVs and had the advantage of being supported by any DVD player dinxe the same video and audio formats were used. You could burn the movie into 2 CDR if you wanted to maximize the quality, 2CDR were still cheaper than 1 DVDR.

tshaddox• 1 year ago

SVCD provided a near indistinguishable quality difference with DVDs when using most CRT TVs

From what I remember, SVCD uses roughly the same MPEG-2 video compression as DVD-Video, but with a much lower maximum bit rate. Even with a movie split onto two CDs, the bitrate was still less than half the bitrate of a professionally mastered DVD. I always found the quality of SVCDs to be noticeably poor.

prmoustache2• 1 year ago

On an high end LCD monitor the diffrence was very visible but on an average CRT TV in didn't make a huge difference.

naravara• 1 year ago

It’s a shame the evolution to DVD and later Blu-ray went with the VCD/CD size rather than Laserdisc sized discs. It was the right call for the time, that makes them much easier to transport and store and allowed the players to double as CD players and let game consoles double as blu-ray/HDDVD players. All huge perks to encourage adoption.

But now that we are entering a world where physical media is largely an enthusiast past-time I think something laserdisc sized is much better suited for appealing to geeky collectors as a “trophy” or collectible item. It’s more pleasing to flip through them, the size of the sleeve ends up functioning as a display poster. Commentary about “warmth” aside, it’s the same reason music nerds have revived vinyl, with even half the vinyl market consisting of people who don’t even own turntables and just listen to the music off the included digital download codes that come with the records. Plus, the sheer size would mean you can encode a LOT onto this hypothetical next-gen laserdisc before having to resort to compression and exotic layering tricks to increase data density like they do with these 8k Atmos releases now.

aspenmayer• 1 year ago

I have a possibly mass produced bootleg SVCD of Star Wars in a folding jewel case, but it has some nice printed paper finishes and a retail box, so I guess it could be legit. I can't remember offhand if it's the whole trilogy or just the first movie. I think it's from the same era as the VHS and Laserdisc THX editions, pre-CGI re-release. It's from Malaysia iirc. It turned up at the computer repair shop I used to work at, and no one remembered from where, and no one wanted it, so I claimed it the same way I got my new-in-box new old stock Slackware 6.1/2 I think it was.

VHS, VCDs, and Laserdiscs in Southeast Asia

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