Yeah, sometimes I get Laserdiscs just for the art. The film is just a bonus half the time! :p

For those not in the know, Laserdisc was a movie format that competed with VHS throughout the 80s, 90s, and very early 2000s. They were these massive discs the size of vinyl records that played analogue video, and were basically DVD quality.

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I recently got myself a Laserdisc player and a few films on the format, and I love it! With some discs (CAV encoded ones to be exact), you can even play about with play speeds both forward and backwards, and going to specific frames of the disc!

Above all, they're just so cool to look at and handle! Not to mention the awesome art work on the covers!

Has anyone ever had experience with this format?

I was thinking that a category for movies and TV in general, and one for tech would be good?

I got Recurring Dream. (The BBCode doesn't seem to work)

I fear that as long as social media continues on the way it is, that won't happen.
I think either the internet as a whole needs to stray away from social media, or social media platforms need to change drastically to stop keeping their members addicted to them.

I just stumbled across this video that explains how social media negatively effects people who make "content" as well. Definitely worth a watch, though I think he's a bit naive about his predictions near the end.

I stumbled across this game that people here might be interested in.

American Hero was a game originally developed for the Atari Jaguar CD, and was supposed to give FMV games a new breath of life, and play like a choose-your-own-adventure book, rather than try to mimic a more fast paced game. The Jaguar CD was discontinued before the game could be finished, but it was restored and remastered in 2021, and released on GOG as well as consoles.

I personally love this game! I'm a huge fan of cheesy 90s FMV, and gaming history, so this was right up my alley! There are loads of different paths and different things to discover. Only issue is the cutscenes are unskippable...

If you've ever played Bandersnatch, it's a lot like that, but more primitive. I think if the game came out when it was supposed it, it would perhaps seen as a stepping stone towards that kind of game. Though would most definitely be forgotten because who on earth owned a Jaguar CD?

It's obviously not going to be for everyone, but if you enjoy cheesy FMV games, you'll love this!

Anyway, here's the trailer:

So I decided to watch the VHS tapes I had that are widescreen, an the films I have (The Fifth Element and The Matrix) were both letterboxed. So I figured that I'd watch them both on my TV zoomed in so they would fit the screen just to see how it would look. I guess I overestimated how much the quality was reduced. Sure, it does take a hit, but it's still pretty watchable.

After watching those, it started feeling wrong watching any of the 4:3 pan and scan tapes I had. They made sense at the time they were made, but nowadays when everyone has access to a widescreen HDTV, it's hard to justify it.

So I've been on the lookout for widescreen tapes more, and actually happened to find Austin Powers: The Spy who Shagged Me in widescreen when I was out yesterday, so I decided to watch that, and it turns out that it's not letterboxed (any more than DVDs and Blu-Rays today are, anyway), you're supposed to stretch the screen to 16:9 to view it properly. It looks fine, honestly.

So that suggests to me that the reason VHS tapes were usually letterboxed for widescreen was simply for compatibility reasons, like wanting it to look alright on any TV, including 4:3 ones. Would make sense given widescreen TVs were hardly common in the 80s or most of the 90s.

The inspiration definitely shows! I had a lot of fun exploring the site when I first found it; it does harken back to that "multimedia CD" design in a lot of ways. The way it felt to me is that user is expected to explore without guidance, and not necessarily know where each click is going to take them. You don't really have a destination in mind, you're just kind of wandering and stopping to look closer when something piques your interest. I think it's a lot of fun! There's a feeling of excitement and suspense with each click, and it's easy to spend a bunch of time going from page to page wondering what's behind the next door.

Yeah, I really miss that sense of mystery and exploration. I'm glad the Yesterweb and similar movements have been able to recreate internet side of it!

Would be difficult to recreate it on the desktop/software side of things, given how the internet, and the developers in question, just give away everything there is to know in advance. I remember when Mario Kart 8 was first coming out, Nintendo and IGN just showed you every single character there was to unlock, before we had a chance to find out for ourselves... :|

Though in the rare occasion when a company of any medium doesn't give everything away and deliberately muddies the waters, it's fantastic. Like when Sony kept denying who was or wasn't in Spiderman: No Way Home, and people found out for themselves.

Man, same! A friend had it and we could never make any headway legitimately, but we definitely cheated our way through once or twice and man, it has some really cool showpieces. One of the developers of the game is on YouTube, and he makes videos about the kinds of coding wizardry they did to pull it all off. Fascinating stuff!

Yeah, I watch his videos regularly, it's very interesting how they did what they did!

The first game I ever remember playing was Sonic the Hedgehog on the Mega Drive. Have some good memories with that!

I also remember playing the other Sonic games as well as Aladdin and Toy Story. Toy Story was my favourite because it blew my mind how they did the 3D effect!

I used to feel exactly as you do, but in my opinion, "curating your feed" is also part of the problem. When we continue using the platform, we become pawns in the polarization + atrocities that these corporations cause. (Ranging from Twitter profiting off of pundits arguing about M&M mascots despite actual problems in the world, to Facebook turning a blind eye to the Rohingya crisis)

You know, I could imagine seeing having something curated to me back in the day as a good thing, taking out the bits I don't like, and only being shown stuff I like.

But I guess we need the uninteresting things in life to make the things we really enjoy worth more. Despite having only things that interested me shown on social media, I was never really happy using it. I was bored.

That's cool that you did a pan and scan of your own! I'm just curious, what kind of mixtape project was it a part of?

It's a compilation of my favourite GMod videos.

I have a lot of fun watching the ones forgotten_vcr puts together, so if there's others out there, I'd love to know about them.

I've heard of them, and love what they do, but they stream at like 3am where I live. Not very European friendly at all.

But yeah, not to stray too far off the original topic: I was thinking back to when widescreen started becoming available in the home, with big chonky widescreen projection TVs and stuff, and how they had a button to pillarbox the display if you were watching stuff in 4:3. Which was cool that you could switch back and forth, but you had to buy the movie in the aspect ratio you wanted-- which was really frustrating when you were, like, getting gifts or something. There was regular 4:3, there was 16:9 letterboxed (for 4:3 displays), and then 16:9 anamorphic (for widescreen displays). And the packaging always made it really confusing which one you were getting, too; you usually had to find something that said "enhanced for widescreen televisions" or similar; if you bought regular widescreen and played it on a widescreen display, you'd end up with black borders around the top AND sides. Ack!! That whole transitional period was a mess. It only got resolved when dual-sided DVDs came out with a different aspect ratio on each side, and nowadays everything's standardized, thank goodness.

But I think the most offensive practice of all as far as ruining a movie's integrity? People that watched 4:3 stretched.



I used to hang out with people that insisted on watching movies this way, and aaaaargh, I couldn't stand it! Pan and scan is, like, totally tame compared to this abomination of a viewing experience.

I was guilty of this. When we got our first widescreen TV, I was so eagar to use it that I would stretch 4:3 images just to pretend to watch something in widescreen.

In retrospect, I was a bit of an idiot... ^^"

That is amazing! I can definitely appreciate the effort and time they spent on that!

So far I've only converted Heavy is Dead into Pan and Scan for a VHS mixtape. Figured I might as well upload it online as well.

I'd probably want to east healthier foods so I can be in better health and live longer.

I had a recent debate on the Yesterweb Discord about this that inspired me to make this topic.

For those who were around back in the VHS days, I'm sure you'll be aware of the concept of Pan and Scan, where the image is zoomed in and it pans to show you the relevant parts of the shot. I've seen very polarising opinions on this, and I find the conversation fascinating.

I've seen videos of people being very vocal about their hatred of their practice, and honest, I never saw the big deal. VHS video quality was terrible as it was, I don't want a third of the lines being wasted on black bars for a letterboxed film. If I wanted a closer experience to the cinema back in the day, I'd have invested in Laserdisc .

I actually find the practice fascinating, and I think about how a modern film or online video could be Pan and Scanned a lot now.

Though watching some of the last VHS releases, it was clear they were (understandably) getting lazier with it, and seeing characters cut off often.

There's also the thing with tilt and scan (or open matte), which I see a lot on Blu-Ray releases of older films, and I see nobody cry about, despite most of the points against Pan and Scan can also be applied to that. :omg:k:

Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Were you fine with Pan and Scan or go out of your way to get a widescreen version? Why?