Karaoke Forums

Hi knightshow,
Yeah, the first time I tried to convert, I made a bunch of coasters. When I finally got one to play on my computer, it wouldn't play on my pioneer 888. Then I realized I may have burned it too fast. I've already acknowledged the fact that I'm not that computer literate, so...trial and error is "normal" for me in most of these cases. BUT, it sure is fun once you get the hang of it. "New stuff", computer-wise, is always a challenge for us old "analog" types. I've been thinking of getting a Western Digital 750 external hard-drive, just for my audio and video "collection". Are you or anybody familiar with this brand or recommend one better suited to my needs. Didn't mean to "steal" the post, but I haven't "seen" the original poster.

                Donny "B"  

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It's a wonderful life!!

Are you upset because I corrected the bogus info you posted?

I never claimed you can programmatically convert laser disk to CDG -- in fact I said the opposite. I did say you could make your own CDG from the backing track, when someone -- you -- seemed to be unsure and hold out hope that automatic conversion was possible.

mckyj57,
No  :no:, I'm not upset. Why would I be? Evidently, you are though. That being the case, let me try to answer your "questions", and respond to your "statements" from the post.
1) Upset...no...already said that.
2) Bogus info: Well from what I posted, it was right on. You cannot transfer a karaoke laser disc, in it's entirety, to a cdg. VCD and DVD ok.
3) Hold out hope for automatic conversion: Nope, wrong again. I already knew it wasn't possible. YOU, on the other hand, muddied the waters by offering the option of splitting the audio and video tracks, transferring the audio to cdg, knowing that one would have to manually enter all the lyrics. Why go through all that?
Evidently, the poster WANTED the videos. He hasn't come back to say he did or didn't. Some people don't even understand WHY anyone would want to transfer them. That's not the question that was posted. So...at face value..I offered information that is correct. Anything else?

                         Donny "B"  8)

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It's a wonderful life!!

Western Digital is a great brand! no probs there!

HOWEVER you do it, I'd recommend highly that you have a 2nd backup that sits on a shelf. hard drives DO fail... I've not lost THAT many, but enough where I believe in double backups!

I will have to differ. You said *only* to VCD and DVD. That is clearly wrong -- no disk need be involved at all. I corrected that, not even slamming your wrong info. I just pointed out that you can convert the video to AVI or MPG.

You also expressed uncertainty about whether CDG conversion was possible. You said you hadn't heard of it, but that you may be mistaken. I stated what was possible, and what was not possible, to clarify what you said. Again, I didn't belittle you -- I just stated authoritatively that there is no automatic transfer.

So after that, you insulted me. What am I to think?


Because that is what is possible, and I *know* that it is possible. I am not guessing, I haven't just maybe heard of it. I know. You gave guesses, and I was trying to nail them down to help. That's all I did. And then you insult me.

mckyj57,
You're a computer programmer, right? Based on that, I'm sure that what you're telling me is factual. We could, but we won't, keep going back and forth on this. So, all I'm going to say on this subject, for the last time, is: I took the face value, not all the intricacies that you offered in your responses, of what the poster asked. Why would Lonman, and Jian agree with my response?? Jian DID agree with one of your posting on the subject as being an option. I'm sure he, and you, both know a lot more about the "intricacies" than I do. I've already admitted that on previous posts. It's no secret. What would be helpful to clear up some of this , would be if the original poster would clarify the subject. He said cdg...I responded to cdg. You saw computer, and responded with all those "intricacies". In that respect, we were both, probably you more than I, right. As far as the insults go...you'd have to point that part out.  So..do me a favor...let's both just let this go .

                               Donny "B"  8)

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It's a wonderful life!!

I think the OP question has been answered. Please do not continue with the above argument.

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I can neither confirm nor deny ever having or knowing anything about nothing.... mrscott

To answer the original post.

It can be done to play on a laptop.  You will have to "baby sit" the transfer.  It will be a real time amount of time.  Hour played /per hour digitized.  And then you will spend considerable more time marking, cutting and naming the files.  So is there a short cut?   Not that i know of.   Pioneer made some DVDs from the lasers.  So if you can find those you will save about half the time required.   It's worth it if done correctly.  :wave:    No they won't be CD+Gs.  They will be video files.  Like MPG.

[quote="Donny B @ Mon Feb 11, 2008 9:10 am"]:wave:
Hey Terryoke, one more thing I forgot to mention. To hook up your Laser Disc Player to your lap top, try looking into "Dazzle". I'm pretty sure they may have the "connection" you're looking for, along with either Studio 9 or Nero for capturing software. Just a thought, but the link I gave in the previous post should take you to the answers to ALL your questions.  :handshake:

I also Have all the pioneer discs, we put them onto 5" dvd discs (made it easier for carrying etc). The problem Is getting a multi-region DVD recorder Player to put them onto a DVD, this you may have problems with, once this is done you can then put these onto PC.  I used Nero and imported them into my PC  I choose to keep them in their full mpg format and each disc uses almost 8 GB of space that is side A & B, now you can convert Mpg to VCD format with the correct software, but I must recommend you not to do this because it does effect it's quality on picture and sound as you may come across some Pubs who have large screens and the play back will be grainy, as regards to converting to CD+g this is impossible because of the Format, I did put this question to Powerkaraoke, they supply all of the software for cd+g etc etc and they confirmed this. I have put mine onto external hard-drives and they are brilliant and I use Swift elite 4 to play them alongside my cd+g collection. You can also use karafun, winamp etc. Hope this helps                   

I converted my collection of about 50 LDs to DVDs using DVD burner unit. It's a Pioneer DVR-520H model. It has a built in Hard Disk Drive. I burned the LDs using the analog connection to the HDD then from there I marked each chapter and burned it to DVD. It works fine. Recording part was easy. I just put it on play on the LD player, hit record on the DVD recorder and leave it until done. Then I had to edit before burning the DVD. that was the hardest part, marking the chapters for each song.  

As for the argument for burning directly from LD to CD+G. That is an impossible task. First of all, CD+G is nothing more than a CD format with a interlaced graphic data. The graphic data is no more than a few Kilobytes. It's limited. Audio CDs are about 800 Megabytes total. A DVD is a 4.7 Gigabyte. You can't squeeze in 4.7 GB in to fraction of 800 MB. It's just physically impossible. It's like trying to squeeze a car through a hole the size of a walnut, impossible.

The only way that may be possible is you separate the audio portion of the LD separate from the video portion, which can be done. Then import that in to a software that lets you add the lyric via CD+G sub code, likes from companies like PowerKaraoke or MTU. However, that would take a lot of time and effort. I mean the nice thing about the LD was that it was a video format and it showed nice visual effect. If you are going to discard the video and just take the audio format and take hours to covert them, it would make sense just to buy the CD+G disc. It would be much easier.

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Seize the day and SING!!!

eben,

Thanks for your suggestion.  Just need some further clarification on how you did this.

Did you run the output of your laserdisc player to the analog (RCA) input of your DVD burner or your pc?  Is this an internal (in your pc) or external burner?  

I'm assuming you have some form of software that captures (records) the analog output of the laserdisc player as a file on your pc (or DVD burner's) harddrive.  Is this correct?  Which software are you using for this?  What is the format of the captured video file?

Not sure what you meant by making "chapters for each song"?  How did you do this?  What software did you use?  How did you organize the files on your finished DVD so that they were playable?

Just wondering if you can do this same process by connecting laserdisc player to a pc with a video card and rca inputs or svideo input?  Then using some type of capture software to convert to a digial file (mp4, avi, etc.) which you would then burn to a DVD.  Is this possible using the same process you followed?

Thanks.

Starman. Actually, the unit is a standalone DVD recorder with a HDD built in. You can see the CNet review on the unit here.

I hooked up the output of LD player through the RCA cable to the input of the DVD burner and recorded it to the HDD. The editing was done on the TV screen with the unit attached to it. I didn't need the software because the unit is standalone. What I did was use MTU Hoster to rip the DVDs to my computer used for hosting. Unfortunately, the search function on the Hoster does not search the DVDs ripped so I have to manually search them. So, if I can't find them on my CD+G database, I look at the folder containing the DVD rips.

If I were to rip it directly to PC, I would have to get some kind of editing software so that you can do "chapters". This is required because using the analog input, the entire side of the LD is ripped in to a single file. Each song now has to be "chaptered" so that you can skip to any song you want. Since I did that on DVD already, the computer ripped each song as an individual song.

You can definitely rip them to a PC then burn a DVD from it. It may take more than a couple of steps and different software to do it.

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Seize the day and SING!!!

Thank you all for your input -  I had not expected the spirited exchange in the middle of this thread .

I will let you know how I progress.  I expect it will take a month. should be interesting. to try and stay awake.

If you find someone who has done this conversion please PM me, I wil be in debt to you forever

Cheers

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Terryoke
Krazy Kanuck Karaokeist

Karaoke is the only social disease that you can get in public and not get arrested.

One way I found out how to do this was to set the laserdisc player to play continuously
and then capture the entire side of the Pioneer laserdisc to your hard drive. I used the Plextor external USB capture box.

Then using a program called VideoReDo and a small add on program written by one of it's users,
you can quickly and easily mark the beginning and endings of each track so it can batch cut
the big file into smaller files and save each to a different filename.

I made the filenames correspond to the discId and trackId in KJPro.
So now you have mpg files named somthing like PI0001A-01.mpg,
which should correspond to KJPro listing for
PI0001A-01 - Halley, Bill - Rock Around The Clock.

Now the problem is how to name each file so that you can use them in
your karaoke hosting problem.

To name the tracks I used a renamer program I found on usenet called CDGAutoname since it works with your KJPro database.
But CDGAutoname only works with zip files.
So I needed another work around.

If you temporarily rename all your *.mpg tracks to *.zip , you can use
CGDAutoname and your KJPro database to rename
PI0001A-01.zip to PI0001A-01 - Halley, Bill - Rock Around The Clock.zip

You then rename your zip files back to an mpg files
PI0001A-01 - Halley, Bill - Rock Around The Clock.zip
goes back to
PI0001A-01 - Halley, Bill - Rock Around The Clock.mpg

Now if your karaoke hosting program handles mpg files,
it should now work perfectly.

Sounds pretty simple, Right?

DD.