Laserdisc to DVD

[Mothman]

What type of connection would you require to run the data from a laserdisc into a DVD player?

[Brian Shannon]

Originally posted by Mothman
What type of connection would you require to run the data from a laserdisc into a DVD player?

:hscratch:
Do you mean DVD recorder? Is that what you are trying to do?

[BigT]

(Assuming you're going into a recorder) Depends. You'll probably have the best luck with the composite connection, but if your player is good enough, the s-video might be the ticket. Try both. For audio, unfortunately, you're stuck with analog in.

[Patman]

You'll need a video capture device/card (either composite video input, or S-video input, depending on LD player video output), or a A/D converter (like a Datavideo DAC-100 or a Canopus ADVC-100) which is connected to your PC via Firewire, and a small utility called "winDV" that can be googled and downloaded.

If you go the DV capture route, you'll need plenty of disk space as well because 2 hours of LD audio/video takes around 27GB of disk space.

Once you get the uncompressed video capture in AVI format, you'll need to strip the audio into the WAVE format, and use something like BeSweet and FFMPEG to create smaller AC-3 soundtrack(s). You'll also have to crunch the AVI video portion into a MPEG-2 (m2v format), the most affordable is TMPGEnc.

Once you get the AC3 sound file, and m2v file, you will need to author/multiplex the audio and video file into a DVD-readable format. DVDLab is a decent DVD authoring product, as is TMPGEnc DVD Author. If you don't care about menus, then IfoEdit is free and pretty usable once you figure out its quirks.

You might also look into video capture cards that can provide hardware MPEG-2 encoding on the fly to create the content in MPEG-2 format which could be authored/burned to a blank recordable DVD.

I recommend combing through DVDRHelp (http://www.dvdrhelp.com/author.htm#6) for more information.

[TheKobra]

I would not even do it. I put Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi on DVD from LD. It has DD sound but you can really tell the difference between DVD and LD. I just can't stand to watch the movies due to the quality. Don't get me wrong it still has 425 lines of resolution but LD was analog and DVD is digital.

[BigT]

Well, yes, of course, you can tell the difference between LD and DVD. But if the best or only source is LD, what are you going to do? I've recorded many LDs to DVD-R with great success. Unless you're using a very large screen, the DVD-R will look and sound just as good/nearly as good as the LD it was made from, except you can't copy the AC-3 (DD) track, if present, if you're using a standalone recorder, as I do (Panasonic E80).