I guess so, did not find a video with that in the title by him doing a quick search. He might have mentioned the format somewhere in passing but has not done a full video on it.
When I was a kid in the 80s my grandfather still had one of these. Picture quality was totally fine, maybe like VHS. But back then the discs weren't worn out, the capacitors weren't worn out and the thing ran of clean 50 Hz sinusoidal power from the mains and not some crude inverter and the picture was shown on an actual PAL color CRT without conversion. Greetings from Berlin. Btw: Flora Soft is still commonly available.
OK, das hätte mich wirklich gewundert, wenn das die Original-Bildqualität gewesen wäre. ^^ Ich habe leider noch keinen solchen Spieler in echt gesehen. Flora Soft kenn ich aber gar nicht ;-)
Holy crap, somebody is finally actually covering this thing. The only channel I’ve ever seen cover this thing in any detail is Oddity Archive, and he isn’t even a tech channel.
@@niino4329 Yeah, it would be wise to try decoupling it, and maybe compare it on a scope with a 'good' video output to see if there's any weird peaking or DC shift going on
@@CM-mo7mv Ziss Video is fullfilled mit special electronische Equippement. Fingagräbbing und pressing ze Knoeppkes nur für die Ekspertz! So all die Lefthänders stay away und do not stören die Brainstörming von den hier working Intelligencies. Udderwise you will be out thrown und kicked anderswo! Also: please keep still und only glotzen erstaunished die Blinkenlights!
There's a lot of ringing in the picture caused by impedance mismatch, should be fixed by putting a 75 ohm resistor acro the video lead. Signal to ground. Interesting system indeed
I absolutely love the CED & Laserdisc formats, and I am happy to collect and watch them. TED fascinates me, but it seems nothing more than a novelty in terms of collecting today. Great video though! One thing I would have done though is show how CED uses a caddy to protect the disc from any damage.
The red and blue picture is typical if you try to view a PAL Signal on a SECAM TV. It's known as SECAM-fire and also appears on black&white broadcasts. That's one of the biggest flaws of SECAM. They switched of the colour carrier during black&white movies to prevent this. Try switching the TV to PAL if it is on automatic. The player needs to be overhauled, the picture was much better when they were new.
synchronous motors are the real pain in appliances of that aera... noisy and quite ineffective... you find them in record players, typewriters, even computer printers from centronics (not "with centronics interface, but real centronics make) an off course early 8 inch floppy discs as hub motor.
@@rarbiart Disagree. The ' aussenlaufer' motor as shown here, as well as the motors in german record players, are pretty quiet and very reliable. The most common problem is dried up grease after 30...60 years of use. You also find lots of them in tape recorders. I dislike Philips 1950s syncronous motors because they're harder to service, but later ones very often run perfect after a few drops of light machine oil. They don't have high torque, but they're much more reliable than the tiny DC brushed motors of the 80s/90s.
the capacitor issues with synchronous motors can be off course easily repaired, but the humming 50/60Hz resonnances are prettymuch everywhere in such machines. maybe tolerable for office equiment but for audio that's not pretty.
@@rarbiart If you have problems with that, than your equipment is defective. Aside from cheapo record players with idler wheels, the motor vibration is not audible, unless there's a problem like bad rubber mountings. There are some mediocre quality products with noisy motors, but it is simply not true that synchronous motors categorically make more sound or vibration than other types. Especially record player motors are very quiet, and synchronous motors are still used in even the most high end players there are.
Wow! this is by far one of your finest videos. Databits the only channel covering a forgotten video disc format from Germany. Keep up with this content who shows who was the pioneer on a tech channel on RU-vid.
I still remember when this unit was demonstrated in the Kaufhof department store in Hagen, Germany, located south of Dortmund, in 1972. A childrens movie was played. It kept on skipping frames or occaisonally got stuck on one frame. Picture and sound quality were satisfactory as the medium was fresh.
Re. the ghosting, it's likely thanks to bleed through of the previous + next grooves - in other words the grooves before & after the one currently being played are adding a slight bit of signal too. Some cheaply pressed LP's exhibit this effect, where it's possible to faintly hear what's ahead or behind in adjacent grooves. Very cool tech, thx for reviewing it!
Try putting a 75 Ohm resistor on that composite video line, I've seen other videos of this format and none of them showed that ghosting effect, even on worn discs, the quality was much better. There may another issue though, as the inverter is most likely modified wave, the motor movement may not be as smooth and that issue may reflect in the image.
Seconding this. The motor is an AC-motor, which relies on having a correct 50hz frequency and a undistorted sine wave to run smoothly. Often, they don't run at all on inverters.
Picture quality reminds me how analogue TV broadcasts looked like in suburb area in 90s, with weak signal, far from TV tower. Same noisy and doubled image with sometimes disappearing color.
Incredible! I never thought I’d see one of these in action! It’s even crazier that you shipped yours all the way from Germany, and made it work with your weird American power supplies. It looks awful thought, the picture I mean. That can’t be working right, your machine must be practically dead.
The machine probably is well OK, but at 12:33 you can see that the disc is damaged, the little horizontal lines are marks of the disc loading mechanism (from bad machines); also discs beeing stored lying flat and being put weight on will damage the grooves over time. Even little damages will result in very bad picture quality. If a disc is in good shape, the picture is way better (but of course not "good" to modern standards)
I don't think that this is even remotely the original video playback quality. The discs are surely very worn, the device is out of aligment/bad capacitors/has other issues. Even the power supply may be inadequate, specially with a cheap inverter, that doesn't give true sine wave power. (BTW, as you said, it's "football" for all the world but the U.S.A., and that "funky" power plug is/was the standard for the biggest part of the world, including Europe, South America and Asia). Cheers!
absolutely! i have a perfect working machine with perfect discs.. well.. of course, its not as „good“ as VHS, but i can confirm, that the quality is WAY better, than shown in this video! anyway thumbs up for the video.. finally somebody did a video about this beautiful machine 😊 👍🏻
If you have a PAL machine you have to convert the signal of course to NTSC. You can not expect to have a good picture by ignoring different TV standards!
Mike MacEachern If this is the case something with your setup must be wrong nevertheless or your machine is simply broken. The picture quality is equal with VHS really...
10 minutes per disc. So, on a "Lord of the Rings Directors Cut" movie night, you basically have to run a full marathon from the sofa to the player just for disc swapping? I wonder why the format never took off?
Perhaps the ghosting of the video is caused by the stepped waveform output of your inverter into that synchronous motor? I didn’t catch if it was true sine wave or not.
If you have a PAL machine you have to convert the signal of course to NTSC. You can not expect to have a good picture by ignoring different TV standards!
the vertical blanking line on the CED is also the DAXI or digital auxiliary information. it contains the time stamp and other information :) also i would like to add; i cant believe you got an actual ted machine, that functions. i thought thats something you'd hope to see in a book or a museum if you were lucky ( besides seeing it on the internet )
They were way ahead of there time with a "digital disc format" but I'm glad that eventually others improved the quality of the true digital media that said this video was interesting and informative and I really enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to more videos from databits keep up the excellent work and keep the videos coming and rock on 🎸
Richard Hudson If you have a PAL machine you have to convert the signal of course to NTSC. You can not expect to have a good picture by ignoring different TV standards!
As an italian, the last video I expected to see here was a music video from Coro SAT 😂 The SAT Choir is the best and most popular "a cappella" choir for traditional italian mountain songs, and I think they still exist today. They're really, really good, if you like this particular folk music, of course. Thanks for this video, I had no idea the TeD existed... it's incredibly fascinating.
Great Video! Thank you very much! The picture quality is for sure not the best, but it can be much better than your device plays ;) You can see some videos from a fully recapped device, also with never used styluses, in my channel. The Colargol intro is captured from a sealed disk, played for the first time. Unfortunately both of my players broke again and I have no time to fix them... :(
I've donated my TED player to the International Radio and Phono Museum in Dormagen, together with a some discs. I hope it will be there some day in an exhibition. :) Very interesting those TV ads during the soccer match on the discs. It seems those discs were for free and the commercials were there to sponsor it. Now those are rare examples of 1970s TV commercials in Germany. :)
I've never seen one of these things in action before. I read about them on a website called Total Rewind: The Virtual Museum of Vintage VCRs... When I saw the thing about the loading mech, I think I probably laughed for a full two minutes...
Please please please recap the machine and show us the high quality video!!!! I really want to see how the video is being stored in such a floppy kind of disk!
I used to see those sitting in my neighbors garage back in the 90's when helping her clean it out. She told me that it was the first Betamax of it's time. She had me out it in her attic then seven years later before she moved had me out it in the goodwill box because she had no need for it
Interesting format. I may have a look out for one. The thing with the wear grooves seen on the CED is that they (and VHDs) have a finite number of plays (some sources say as few as 500) before wear becomes noticeable. With kids' videos or anything else where a selection is played repeatedly or continuously (training, karaoke, demo reels, etc), that number comes quickly and ultimately the disc wears beyond usability. Plus the cartridges were only good for about 1000 hours themselves.
I can help simplify your power conversion setup. You can get a 120v US AC adapter to 12v car DC which supports up to 5A. Look for "Coleman AC adapter" on eBay. You can plug your 12V to 230V inverter into that. The car inverter won't give you true sinusoidal output though, which may cause problems as others have noted.
I glad to find this video because I’d read about this format many years ago but could no longer remember the name of it and was beginning to think I had imagined it. I recalled it being German-only product that used some sort of disc format for storing short pieces of video but couldn’t find any mention such a format online. Then today I ran across its Wikipedia article by Chance when looking up something else and went OMG that’s the format I was trying to remember the name of. I knew it was related to VHD and CED but too little info exist on compared to those other formats so it really stumped me for a while.
Thanks for covering this fantastic piece of machinery! I own one myself and I just love the fact that you can actually see what's going on inside. Picture quality's not great, I agree, but this here doesn't do it justice. There must be something wrong with your setup... The mark on the disc shown at 4:20 was caused by the locking mechanism crashing down on the disc while it wasn't properly placed on the turntable and thus ruining it. The system wasn't foolproof! TeD disappeared from the market quickly, afaik as soon as 1977. I guess you could ask 100 random German people at age 50-90 and you wouldn't find one who has ever heard about TeD let alone owned one. I wonder what made Telefunken believe that people would accept a format that cost around 1500 Marks (600 $ US back then) and was limited to 10 minutes per disc.
oh staticool it is like classic analog tv even a lil staticy too im in love with this oh id love to have one someday i loooove the first disc so much liek sweet rabbit ears tv thank you for posting this i hope someone posts actual video from these on here too
Thats awesome im german and thats thats cool history. Record all disks u have pls and upload them id like to watch them!!!! At the same time ur contributing to save german history.
If you want something built right, ask a German to do it. Master engineers. This is very impressive for being purely mechanical. It's even more impressive that it still functions albeit poorly after all of these years.
that power inverter is making something that is not sinusoidal, but reminds of square wave... perhaps some picture problems would disappear with proper voltage, perhaps not
I've got one of these TED machines. Brand new. The box fell apart, but the styrofoam is there. Plus the manual and two included discs. Not going to plug it in. This machine is just a few months younger than I am...
When I imported an NTSC RCA CED player into Australia, I made sure to get a model with a quartz timed motor so I could plug it into a step down transformer that passed through the 50hz, to avoid the frequency issues you are going through. Luckily. I got a bargain deal on an SJT-300 with liquefied belts which is quartz timed. I can imagine with the limited release and time period of this format that they only made player models with mains timed motors.
We gotta admit though, the seeking is flawless! Instant and really good picture quality (well, the same as during normal playback). Speaking of quality, are there any specs as for the number of lines and so on?
😂 He's singing "Guten Morgen, gute Nacht". ("Good morning, good night.") It's an old folky lullaby... But I guess it would be much better if Morgan Freeman was singing! ;-)
Very interesting format. I believe that most of the video quality issues are caused by bad capacitors, pay attention that as the player works more time, the "ghost" becomes severe, the lines on the right are bad capacitors in the sync circuit. I have a German tv (Blaupunkt) from 1982, and ALL the capacitors in it were crappy (they were branded FRAKO) and all of them to the last one were boiling up, so I believe this player suffers the same problem. Bulk recapping my improve picture quality, but don't expect VHS quality.
I like the idea , lost Teck , At least you can replace the stylus with this , unlike CD & DVD players . A better stylus on this will improve the picture
Pretty cool, and a format I'd never heard of. The mechanism to move the stylus is almost identical to that used in Technics linear tracking turntables of the 80s too, probably not that surprising as this appears to be a liner tracking format itself. I am surprised at the hoops you had to jump through with the voltage and to get any video displayed. Step down transformers to allow us in the UK to power US and Japanese electronics are quite easily available, including on Amazon here as are various NTSC to PAL converters, although they generally aren't needed as pretty much any half decent TV sold here in the last 10/15 years is multistandard and will accept an NTSC signal direct, assuming it has analogue inputs.
Yeah, the jumping through hoops with the inverter and car battery was because the TeD player requires 50hz mains, and the US is 60hz mains. Most modern electronics is okay with both 50hz and 60hz power. And is only really older devices that have main synchronous motors in them, like some record players and tape recorders.
I'm going to guess that line on the side was something the manufactures never bothered to remove or "fix" because it was hidden by the overscan in older televisions and they figured no one would see it anyway. It might have even contained some data that more "deluxe" players could read in order to display closed captions, let the player know what chunk of the video is what, or who knows what else. Assuming the format lasted long enough for such players to even be released in the first place. As others have said the discs are probably worn with age and there's no telling what else the condition of the player is doing to the video and sound quality either. Hope there was nothing released exclusively on this format, I doubt anyone with these would be really into recording the contents and uploading them online for preservation's sake.
This makes sense and actually was the first thing I thought of when seeing that. I've seen something similar in rips of old japanese anime Laserdiscs from the 80s, only at the bottom of the screen instead. Though the size of it seems a bit large for an overscan and does seem to intrude one the picture it's self, so I'm going to guess that though we probably aren't wrong, there is probably other issues going on.
9:05 That's not a "german" plug, that's the generic two prong european plug, the "german" plug is the Schuko plug, the "round" plug that should be fitted in the receptacle on your power supply ;-D
It’s my understanding that VHD saw some success in Japan starting around 1983 until the cost of Laserdisc came down in price enough to obsolete the format around 1987. It was supposed to come out in the UK and US but a consumer release never saw the light of day though The UK saw some niche use of VHD for the educational market. VHD discs were still being manufactured for a few years after the players were no longer sold so I think around 1990 was when the last discs were sold in Japan. As such wouldn’t call VHD a failed format, at least in Japan, even if VHS and even Laserdisc stuck around longer and sold in larger numbers at the hight in Japan.
I live in Finland and we use those same power plugs here, and our plugs are indeed funky. It's not a great design, they are objectively worse than at least the US and the UK standards (Less convenient, less safe, less durable etc.)
Bob I agree that the UK plug design is superior to EU plugs, but compared to US plugs, the EU design is way better! US plugs are such flimsy things. When it comes to safety and durability, the ranking is 1st UK, 2nd EU, 3rd US.
