Tag Archives: Laserdisc

Fight Club Compared: Blu-rays vs iTunes HD vs D-VHS vs DVD vs Laserdisc

Caustic, nihilistic and controversial, Fight Club successfully adapted Chuck Palahniuk’s transgressive fiction novel, it’s a credit to screenwriter Jim Uhl’s excellent adaptation that the voice of the original novel is heard so clearly, and at the same time the film proved to be an enormous success. Though much credit is also due to the excellent sound and editing: so much in this film depends on hitting exactly the right tone.

Based on a reader suggestion, I decided to take a look at the various home video versions of Fight Club that are available.

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An advertising shot of the Pioneer LD-V4300D. Not exactly hi-fi.

Pioneer LD-V4300D Laserdisc Player Review

The Pioneer LD-V4300D is a single-sided industrial PAL/NTSC Laserdisc player. Given the mediocre results of my testing the CLD-925D I wanted a better PAL player. I’d heard good things about both the CLD-2950 and LD-V4300D, but the CLD-2950 is getting a bit long in the tooth.

Since the LD-V4300D is an industrial model, and was made until very late in the Laserdisc lifecycle, I thought it might be a better bet, longevity wise.

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Closed Captions In SCC Format Python

SCC format subtitles

SCC format subtitles, basically a raw closed caption bitstreams.

After building the first version of the closed-caption decoder, I realized that SCC format would be a more useful format to output in. There are many tools to convert SCC format subtitles into other formats. Additionally SCC captures more of the presentation details of closed captions.

Enjoy.

ccDecode

25 May 2014 Update: An improved version is available see here.