HD-VMD - The conclusion

I did a quick peek at the video comments, and I'm getting heartburn from all of the 'did you try to play the .VMD files in VLC?' 🤢 ugh

I do wonder if the discs were indeed 3 layers, but only at the DVD density of 4.7GB per layer (the 12GB total seems to almost hint to that) Getting an OEM to softmod a PC drive to read the layers seems far less of a challenge than the optimistic target of higher densities.

there might be few who care about it, but a few do... i was left wondering after the first video, and now i am no longer. thanks for the follow up. :-D

Great follow up! Thank you for all ya do! 😁👍

Regarding the "3L" mark on the disc: There's a production company called "3L Home Video", which is — if you into old movies — famous (at least in Germany) for releasing refurbished versions of old films. I've got some BluRays here, which also have this "3L" mark on the ring of the disc. So there might be a small chance, this marking does not refer to the number of disc layers, but to the production/release company.

Great video. I had lots of questions but you perfectly answered all of them! As others said too, I've never heard of the movie either and will need to watch. Incidentally, the movie is 1h 50m in the US at 24fps. I assume your shorter run time might be the movie being presented in 25fps with the sped up audio?

I’d never heard of Lucky Number Slevin, but when I saw it in print I seem to remember that they marketed a version of the original Mini as “Austin Se7en,” which had to drive folks like me half mad. The Klingon subtitles comment did make me stop and wonder if you really said what I thought you said. Well done.

I had to watch Lucky Slevin. A good film. Blank tape? Just video the reel too reel with the sound off once the music starts. People have videos of their washing machine.

So true about the soundtrack, could almost bring a tear to the eye. 'IwlIj jachjaj my friend!

Good Grief, Mat, I'm going to start calling you Sherlock! All totally logical from step to step. I can imagine a few of the original developers sitting at home watching this, head in hands, thinking "He's right - he's a clever b*gger to work that out!" :-) What a great rabbit hole that was! I'm in awe. S.

I have a little bit of late information, specifically about the VMD promo kit, that I’ve been working on that I’ve been meaning to write up in more detail. This video has prompted me to quickly write it up in case it’s useful. Apologies if this has already been found, I’ve not had a chance to catch up with the comments. Thanks to your previous dumps of the promo VMDs I started writing a custom MPEG2 PS decoder to try to extract the video. While most of the actual MPEG2 codec is normal, the most obvious issue is the absence of i-frames. I assume they’re buried somewhere else on the disk either in a differently tagged Pack block, encrypted or obfuscated. My next job was to do some data analysis to see if I can recover them. With some little manipulation, I was able to play the B and P frames to get some very janky video playing. I can share via Youtube if it's interesting to anyone. Anyway, the most interesting part of my analysis is my suspicion that the promo VMD and its player is actually based on China’s Enhanced Versatile Disc or China Blue High-Definition platform (I assumed the former as the contents is MPEG2 codec albeit in HD resolution). The disc data seems to have a number of non-standard MPEG2 blocks, which, like MPEG 2 have ASCII names. The one that stood out in the data was “AVOH”. A Google search yields the Chinese EVD patent! https://patents.google.com/patent/CN1381838A/en These packs, along with others, are used to create navigation menus. To add further weight to my suspicion, the EVD spec includes a specific karaoke mode, which would explain why your promo drive had karaoke controls. Perhaps the EVD tech was used just to get something to market for demonstration purposes, or perhaps it was swapped in as the basis for the production models? Was the obfuscated i-frames part of the EVD design or an actual VMD DRM implementation? As you've now been able to open a production disc on your Mac, perhaps you could take a hex editor (iHex for example) to the VMD files to look for these telltale markers. If you don't fancy muking with hex editors, from the command line run `strings *.VMD|grep -ic avoh`. If you get a positive number back, then it's likely the same technology. Another side to this is you may have accidentally picked us another obscure medium for your collection without realising it! Perhaps you can do a EVD video, or at least try getting your hands on an EVD disk to test with your VMD players.

Bravo. Rabbit hole journey thoroughly enjoyed; it really was a lost cause. + film recommendation added to list.

I'm sure this was the film where Ben Kingsley got his full 'Sir' moniker in the credits, which struck me as a bit poncy.

Was that a Star Trek 6 reference at the end?

Super 35... I remember when the Abyss Special Edition was released on LD James Cameron insisted there were two purchase options, a 2.35:1 letterbox as well as 4:3 "pan and scan." With 4:3 you did get more information on the top and bottom, but considering the proclivities of the LD buyers I imagine the widescreen edition outsold P&S by a substantial margin (even if the panning was kept at a minimum..?). As for low bitrates, the Slevin disc approximates most of my BD-R recordings off of Japanese satellite. If anything my recordings are worse, because standard HD broadcasts here use MPEG-2 for video (VBR AAC for audio, up to 5.1 channels) and are 1080@60i. My BD-R recorder does have one DVR-oriented function I have grown to love - it allows 1.3x playback option with audio. I started using this for disc supplements and audio commentaries, and found I liked it so much I tracked down a Pioneer BDP-3140 which improves upon it for 1.5x speed. Paired with Bluetooth headphones, it means I can do household chores and enjoy the more verbose supplements in a podcast-like fashion.

The picture quality of the HD-VMD version of Lucky Number Slevin looks like a screener that was ripped and then seeded on The Pirate Bay. Or so I've been led to believe.

I really enjoyed this followup. I love how deep you dug into this. The details were great. But also, I just finished Lucky Number Slevin and it was incredible. I never got around to seeing it and I very much appreciate the recommendation. It streamed in the same aspect ratio as the blu-ray.

So not a complete scam, but they could never get the tech to work properly and the market niche they expected never really materialized. Tale as old as time I guess.

Ah, I like the new orange thumbnail background.

Since you were able to open the disc in the Mac, perhaps try some video ripping / video info / video playback utility to identify what format the video is in to confirm what it is.

Honestly, I hoped they never got the tech to work because it's way more tragic that they did. Even if it's in this super limited form, I wonder if there's a world where they developed the technology 3-4 years earlier and managed to actually get somewhere, but alas.

I'd never heard of the movie, Lucky Number Slevin before and since Mat recommended it I watched it today--you can stream it free with ads on IMdB--and I found it an enjoyable story.

Did you try to play the .vmd files in vlc?

Hey, new intro is back! Great update. When discussing any quantifiers of bytes, you may want to include a bit about the difference between decimal gigabytes (a misunderstanding/marketing gimmick) which are 1000³, and binary gigabytes — 1024³ — also known as gibibytes. NME likely used the decimal notation when marketing their "15 gigabyte" discs. Your macOS file listing of 11.11 GBs would be gibibytes, equalling 11.929 decimal gigabytes. Not a huge difference, but the true capacity of those VMD15s is 13.97 GiB. Which is likely to be pointed out by pedants. 🤓 Am I one? 😳

Scanbox is still around. I´m not sure, but think it is a danish company. When DVD came out they always made the most terrible DVD´s with no extra material and with bad picture quality. Always bought from the US or UK to get the extra material. Great Video Mat. Thanks.

Hi Mat, great update! At around 5:54 you mentioned that HEVC is H.264-based, that should be H.265, i guess? :)

Well personally Mat, I really enjoyed going down this rabbit hole and wandering around the warren! Terrific research and detective work. Top video!

Hi Mat, great to see some HD-VMD in existence, so not entirely vapourware. Regarding not using all the capacity of the 3 layer, I wonder if it is possible they quote total sizes using the unformatted or raw capacity. Given the number of layers it is quite likely they have a lot of error correction added to whatever is written reducing the useable capacity. Credit to them though, the encoding whilst not sharp due to the low bit-rate, and detail can be seen disappearing on something moving to then reappear when static, they didn’t throw loads of sharpening at it in order to try and compensate, so it appears very film like still without noticeable artefacts.

That is a terrific explanation of that tech and some others (bitrate/layers)...I wonder if the transfer was actually a DVD one upscaled to save money. I think some early DVDs releases were simply copied from LD. The scene selection screen looks like many I have seen on DVD. (on BD it seems to have a completely different interface) You would need the DVD version to compare.

Having just purchased a new 4K Panasonic TV which I am bitterly disappointed with. I am now watching videos on my 5K Retina iMac. Things I watch on it are extremely good. I will have to wait and find out more about 4K TVs before I buy another. A great Video though Mat.

Kudos on a well researched and well presented piece. As an amateur (semi-pro?) you do a much better job than so many other you tube channels and waaaaaay better than so many PowerPoint presentations I have sat through. Yes, I would watch your documentary on blank tape. I would for two reasons: 1) It would probably be funny as all hell, 2) I would learn things.

Absolutely loved this!

I could do a two hour documentary about blank tapes, and I'm not even an expert ;-)

With regard to the missing extras, I live in Finland and around that time it was quite common for disks released in the Nordic market not to have the same extras as the UK versions. Commentary tracks especially would be missing (perhaps the distributors saw limited merit unless they included a subtitle translation of the commentaries). So I would not immediately assume the two missing commentary tracks are due to space - they would just be two stereo audio tracks which don't take up a huge amount of space.

Interesting video. Keep in mind that sizes of discs and harddrives are based on 1000 bytes per kilobytes while operating systems count with 1024 bytes per kilobytes. So a 8,5 GB DVD can only fit 7.95 GB. A Blu-ray BD25 only fits 23,3GB. So a VMD15 could probably fit about 14GB. The reason it's only 11 GB in size is probably because of too careful encoding so they didn't have to do a second encode if it got too big. I've seen this on Blu-rays many times. Also VC1 is better than AVC on low bitrates. AVC is better on high bitrates.

Great video Mat. Well done for your investigation work on the disc layers and file bitrate. It's quite possible the file could be reduced resolution in much the same way as many UK digital TV channels are reduced resolution to provide a slightly softer picture at lower bit rate without blocking. For example I think BBC One HD is 1440x1080i. The multi-layer idea behind the VMD format reminds me in some ways of the Sony Double-Density Compact Disc 1.3GB CDR format which was cool at the time. Now it just means I have some data I backed up from an old Windows 98 machine I can't read. If anyone wants to look up DDCD, the only drive I know produced was the Sony CRX200E (at least that's what I had).

Now with your face in the thumbnail 😀 did you do an experiment to see what happens? or is it random? Nice video as always !!

Good show! You sound like you're feeling better, unless you filmed this prior. I suppose we're all for the better that HD-VMD never had a chance to compete with the other formats. And dammit, I just noticed, why are your Klingon subtitles missing from YouTube? 😅 Edit: Another off-topic question I keep forgetting to ask: why are Sony Boodo Khan DD-100 Walkmans priced so high on eBay? Is there something different or special about them?

While this is a video about an obscure bit of video tech, I still learned a little bit about optical disk recording and found it worthwhile--for me at least although Mat has had to put considerable time and effort it seems into producing it for us. One thing I learned from this was that when you watch a Techmoan video, they are all shown in "open Mat format"!!!

I loved this, really interesting stuff. I'm curious whether the VMD file could be played on a computer with VLC or whatever. Did you attempt to copy the file off the disc and try this?

"notice the hiss has a slight pop at 45 minutes. I traced this down to an issue with the wiring..."

Is it possible the actual video file on the disc is something like 900p and not the full 1080p?

This whole thing is beginning to sound like one of those paranoid 1970s thrillers like The China Syndrome or All The President's Men. "Intrepid tech presenter blunders into a mysterious international video disc conspiracy and ends up on the run for his life, armed only with his knowledge of video compression. "

I was 100% in the "they never got it to work, they just put HD video on a DVD and probably compressed it to crap" camp. This video gives some fantastic closure and redeems the HD-VMD engineers! Being able to literally see the separate layers was a fantastic, irrefutable, visualization (even having to plug in the specific HD-VMD drive could be waved off by "oh it's a firmware DRM thing")

Are you using 60fps for the regular videos nowadays?

A two hour documentary about a blank tape?! That's high art, indeed.