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Comment by a-dub | Hacker News Reader

yeah i remember learning this as a kid and being surprised. i originally thought laserdiscs were modern high tech, but then they turned out to actually be from the late 70s/early 80s with the primitive analog video encoding where red book audio cds of the mid to late 80s were actually digital.

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BUT... Pioneer put AC-3 (Dolby Digital) surround on LaserDiscs before DVDs came out. So LaserDiscs were the first video medium to offer digital sound at home.

And at that point, most players sold were combo players that could also play CDs.

And there was one more disc format: CD Video. It was a CD-sized digital single that also had a LaserDisc section for the (analog) music video. I have a couple; one is Bon Jovi.

Was CD video compressed? I thought it existed at the same time as DVD but cheaper.

That's Video CD. It existed before DVD but survived alongside it (mainly in Asia) as a cheaper alternative.

no, apparently there was both. i was familiar with video cd which was mpeg-1 on a cd-rom (with some weird partitioning scheme). cd video is apparently a very obscure hybrid format with an analog video section and a digital audio section. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Video

No; it was analog LaserDisc video. I think "Video CD" was a flavor of CD-I, which was very popular in China and was used way, way beyond the introduction of DVD. Well into the 2000s, I think.

I just learned this in my 40s and am surprised. Very cool.

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