Tech Tangents is one of the best retro channels on youtube but by retro I dont mean glorified nostalgia either. Shelby puts a lot of work into his videos and likes to showcase what awesome engineering went into some of the early tech that was practically magic. Love the channel and glad to see it on HN.
In this video, Tech Tangents reviews the Andonstar AD246S-P digital microscope and uses it to achieve a "world's first" by capturing clear images of video data and text directly from the surface of LaserDiscs and CEDs (Capacitance Electronic Discs).
Microscope Overview and Setup
Purpose: The creator purchased the microscope specifically to document the microscopic structures of obsolete media like CEDs for the public domain [00:14].
Features: It features a 1080p sensor, HDMI output, and a flip-down display [02:41]. He notes the importance of the included remote control to prevent camera shake at high magnification [04:10].
Build Quality: He highlights thoughtful design choices, such as captive plastic inserts in the screws to prevent them from biting directly into the metal support tubes [05:51].
Initial Testing and Performance
Coins and Wafers: The microscope provides impressive clarity when viewing historical coins and silicon wafers, where individual dies and traces are easily visible [11:30].
Magnification Concerns: He expresses skepticism regarding the "ridiculous magnification claims" often found on these products, finding that the high-magnification lens can sometimes be hazy [13:07].
Visualizing Video Data on Physical Media
The core of the video focuses on using light refraction (diffraction grading) to see the physical encoding of video signals.
LaserDisc (CAV): Using a "The Mind's Eye" LaserDisc, he successfully identifies horizontal blanking pulses and color bursts in the disc's pits and lands [16:27].
Reading Text on a LaserDisc: In a major breakthrough, he discovers that by positioning a flashlight at a specific angle, he can actually read the end-credit text (e.g., the word "Keyboard") directly off the disc surface [22:54].
CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc): He examines a damaged CED of the movie True Grit. He manages to capture a remarkably clear image of the film's credits etched into the disc's microscopic grooves [25:57].
Additional Observations
Optical Media Tracks: The microscope is used to visualize the distinct data sessions and track separators on a CD and a CDRW [27:00].
Smartphone Sub-pixels: A close-up of a Samsung S24 Ultra display reveals the sub-pixel arrangement of its OLED screen [28:37].
Conclusion: The creator concludes that the Andonstar AD246S-P is highly effective for technical documentation and hobbyist use, especially given its ability to resolve the fine details of analog video media [28:57].
It's likely based on just the transcript, even if it describes visual things, it likely guesses those things from the transcript text only.
Maybe it's better now, but that was how it did it recently. To be convinced that it "watches" the video, I would need to see evidence of it referring to facts that are strictly only possible to know from the video, but not guessable from the audio.
I'm not that familiar with CED but the fact that we can see the images with microscopes is because these are analog discs? And that was because computing power back then was non-existent so they didn't use any kind of compression?
The key point is that there has to be a slow vertical panning happening as actual content. If that happens, then the on-disk representation of a color channel can end up physically below/above what happens before/after in the movie, drawing out the "actual content". This is why end credits were the most likely visible artifacts.
One other important aspect is that by changing the angle of lighting, he could basically filter out data at a relevant wavelength.
There wasn't any computing involved. The video was recorded as a sampled analogue signal, with pits of varying length setting the "output voltage".
If you look at a Constant Angular Velocity disc you can actually see "spokes" radiating out from the centre, with two broad ones 180° apart. The narrow spokes are the horizontal sync pulses occuring every 0.576° - the disc rotates at 25 revs per second and each concentric track is one complete frame. The broader spokes are of course the vertical sync pulses and colour burst occurring every 1/50th of a second.
If you're in the US or Japan, these numbers are 30 revs per second, 0.686° and 1/60th of a second, because of the lower resolution video standard, but it doesn't look like Laserdisc was much of a "thing" in those countries.
Here in the UK, in the 1980s all the schools took part in a thing called "The Domesday Project" [1] - the name is a reference to The Domesday Book, a survey of England and Wales carried out in the 11th century by William the Conqueror.
The Domesday Discs were CAV Laserdiscs that were played in a special player with a SCSI interface, attached to a BBC Micro computer. Because each concentric track was a complete frame it was possible to get perfect still frame video by just keeping the head still, so you could look at photos of places all around the UK and read a bit of information about them genlocked over the top.
Your CED or laserdisc player needs to be smart enough to be able to decode whatever you put on it, which- in the era that they were relevant- pretty severely limited what you could do.
In ways that ensure that they are not visually recognizable on the physical medium afterwards, because the visual layout represents a whole lot of redundancy, and the job of compression is to remove redundancy. If the end result has any recognizable patterns, the compression is not doing its job well.
Here's a screen capture of the end credits visible on the disc the videos worth it but I do think sometimes you need to start with the money shot
https://ibb.co/v4KK88fF
Yes, but the end credits mentioned by the parent and the link to the image is the CED. That and the title of this post make it seem like this level of image clarity is from a LaserDisc which its not. I think it's worth being clear.
The live stream of this had more interesting things as well, such as looking at the ink on mimeographs compared to inkjet printing. Long and rambly as live streams tend to be, but it is there if anyone cares.
I wrote a simple tool, when I was a kid, that dumped binaries into VGA mode 0x13 and allowed me to vary the width. Mode 0x13 is one byte per pixel so it was just a simple REP MOVSB to put data into the buffer (no worrying about bitplanes). It was so useful in reverse engineering software. Besides raster data, regular data structures often jump out.
Interesting to see how optical technology has evolved. In lighting design we also deal a lot with how light interacts with surfaces, lenses and reflectors.
Even small changes in optics can drastically change how light spreads or how uniform illumination appears in a space.
So CAV (constant angular velocity) is an encoding format for laser disks. When something is written with CAV, it is basically analogue data and therefore repeating patterns can be recognized on the disk.
No, CAV has nothing to do with encoding, and both analog and digital formats have used both CAV and CLV and hybrids of the two.
The legible text seen in the microscope images happens because of the combination of LaserDisc recording a raw and uncompressed encoding of the analog video signal, the way that LaserDisc used CAV to store an integer number of frames per track so that the image data for corresponding on-screen locations of subsequent frames would be aligned at the same radial position on the disc, and the credits scrolling vertically at constant speed.
If LaserDisc had used a digital encoding (especially a compressed encoding), the data on disc may still have had discernible patterns but the text would not necessarily have been legible. If it had used CAV but not stored a whole number of frames per track, then temporal and spatial locality on screen would not have corresponded so well to spatial locality on disc. And the vertically-scrolling credits are pretty much the only kind of content that can produce the recognizable and legible images on the disc surface.
I think the fact that the aspect ratio of the text came out approximately right probably is a consequence of the scrolling speed of the credits being chosen to suit the vertical resolution of the video. If the text had appeared squished in the microscope, it would probably have been moving too fast on screen to be clearly legible.
No; it's strictly a reference to constant RPM or variable RPM.
CAV discs contained one frame per rotation. While this meant you could only fit half an hour on one side of a disc, it did give you perfect slow-motion and freeze-frames.
I worked in a video store and loved LaserDiscs. The Duran Duran video album was CAV, and the Pioneer LD-700 had such a fast transport mechanism and remote control that I could to DJ-style "scratching" with it.
The data being written to the disk is the same in CAV or CLV disks, but the player just needs to know how to spin the disk at the right speed so that the laser can read the pits/lands correctly. It is purely a detail about the speed that the disk is spun at so they can cram more data on it with CLV disks.
What CAV LaserDiscs allow for, though, is to make it extremely obvious where scanlines and blanking intervals are in the video signal.
Actually amazing being able to read the text like that, and on two different types of discs. Great video, was much better than I was expecting it to be from the title!
Fun fact about laser discs. They are analogue not digital. CD’s store digital information with the presence or absence of pits. Fairly ancient but still fundamentally feels like a very old version of a thumb drive.
Laser discs are not digital. They encode the analogue video signal’s value as the length of the pit. It is digitized in the time domain - sampled at some frequency, but the “vertical” signal value is stored entirely analogue. In terms of encoding it’s more similar to a VHS tape than a CD. Kinda crazy.
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.
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.
Thoughts on that: (1) you'd need a way to visualize the magnetic fields, (2) the data is frequency modulated, (3) due to helical scan, the video field lines do not line up evenly one over the next as they did so nicely in the Laserdisc / CED (there'd be a skew).
So I don't want to say it's impossible, but I think it would require a lot more creativity.
58 comments:
Tech Tangents is one of the best retro channels on youtube but by retro I dont mean glorified nostalgia either. Shelby puts a lot of work into his videos and likes to showcase what awesome engineering went into some of the early tech that was practically magic. Love the channel and glad to see it on HN.
Is there a version that doesn't require watching a video please? This would be 10x faster and easier as a text blob
yes, you must save it to a laserdisc, and then observe it though a highly magnified digital microscope looking for a specific frame.
It took me like 2 minutes to find the relevant part:
https://youtu.be/qZuR-772cks?si=rYM4EjvV7VeTEzx8&t=1570
https://wiki.techtangents.net/wiki/Seeing_Media
writeup from the author linked in the video description
this should be the main link
No!
Gemini can watch youtube videos.
In this video, Tech Tangents reviews the Andonstar AD246S-P digital microscope and uses it to achieve a "world's first" by capturing clear images of video data and text directly from the surface of LaserDiscs and CEDs (Capacitance Electronic Discs).
Microscope Overview and Setup Purpose: The creator purchased the microscope specifically to document the microscopic structures of obsolete media like CEDs for the public domain [00:14].
Features: It features a 1080p sensor, HDMI output, and a flip-down display [02:41]. He notes the importance of the included remote control to prevent camera shake at high magnification [04:10].
Build Quality: He highlights thoughtful design choices, such as captive plastic inserts in the screws to prevent them from biting directly into the metal support tubes [05:51].
Initial Testing and Performance Coins and Wafers: The microscope provides impressive clarity when viewing historical coins and silicon wafers, where individual dies and traces are easily visible [11:30].
Magnification Concerns: He expresses skepticism regarding the "ridiculous magnification claims" often found on these products, finding that the high-magnification lens can sometimes be hazy [13:07].
Visualizing Video Data on Physical Media The core of the video focuses on using light refraction (diffraction grading) to see the physical encoding of video signals.
LaserDisc (CAV): Using a "The Mind's Eye" LaserDisc, he successfully identifies horizontal blanking pulses and color bursts in the disc's pits and lands [16:27].
Reading Text on a LaserDisc: In a major breakthrough, he discovers that by positioning a flashlight at a specific angle, he can actually read the end-credit text (e.g., the word "Keyboard") directly off the disc surface [22:54].
CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc): He examines a damaged CED of the movie True Grit. He manages to capture a remarkably clear image of the film's credits etched into the disc's microscopic grooves [25:57].
Additional Observations Optical Media Tracks: The microscope is used to visualize the distinct data sessions and track separators on a CD and a CDRW [27:00].
Smartphone Sub-pixels: A close-up of a Samsung S24 Ultra display reveals the sub-pixel arrangement of its OLED screen [28:37].
Conclusion: The creator concludes that the Andonstar AD246S-P is highly effective for technical documentation and hobbyist use, especially given its ability to resolve the fine details of analog video media [28:57].
It's likely based on just the transcript, even if it describes visual things, it likely guesses those things from the transcript text only.
Maybe it's better now, but that was how it did it recently. To be convinced that it "watches" the video, I would need to see evidence of it referring to facts that are strictly only possible to know from the video, but not guessable from the audio.
use gemini and ask it to summarize a youtube link
You can ask your human to watch the video and write the text blob for you.
I'm not that familiar with CED but the fact that we can see the images with microscopes is because these are analog discs? And that was because computing power back then was non-existent so they didn't use any kind of compression?
The key point is that there has to be a slow vertical panning happening as actual content. If that happens, then the on-disk representation of a color channel can end up physically below/above what happens before/after in the movie, drawing out the "actual content". This is why end credits were the most likely visible artifacts.
One other important aspect is that by changing the angle of lighting, he could basically filter out data at a relevant wavelength.
--
At least that's what I got from the video.
There wasn't any computing involved. The video was recorded as a sampled analogue signal, with pits of varying length setting the "output voltage".
If you look at a Constant Angular Velocity disc you can actually see "spokes" radiating out from the centre, with two broad ones 180° apart. The narrow spokes are the horizontal sync pulses occuring every 0.576° - the disc rotates at 25 revs per second and each concentric track is one complete frame. The broader spokes are of course the vertical sync pulses and colour burst occurring every 1/50th of a second.
If you're in the US or Japan, these numbers are 30 revs per second, 0.686° and 1/60th of a second, because of the lower resolution video standard, but it doesn't look like Laserdisc was much of a "thing" in those countries.
Here in the UK, in the 1980s all the schools took part in a thing called "The Domesday Project" [1] - the name is a reference to The Domesday Book, a survey of England and Wales carried out in the 11th century by William the Conqueror.
The Domesday Discs were CAV Laserdiscs that were played in a special player with a SCSI interface, attached to a BBC Micro computer. Because each concentric track was a complete frame it was possible to get perfect still frame video by just keeping the head still, so you could look at photos of places all around the UK and read a bit of information about them genlocked over the top.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
Uncompressed digital encoding might still result in recognizable structures, but probably not as nicely as here.
Only the CD had uncompressed data.
CED, not CD. And LDs most definitely also have uncompressed data, resulting in visible text at 22:30 in the video.
This is a distinction without meaning: all digital anything is analogue if you look closely enough
> And that was because computing power back then was non-existent so they didn't use any kind of compression?
Compression is not a medium-level detail. You can easily store compressed data on a laserdisc.
Your CED or laserdisc player needs to be smart enough to be able to decode whatever you put on it, which- in the era that they were relevant- pretty severely limited what you could do.
No, with digital, you need encoding. How can you even compare binary with embedded images.
> How can you even compare binary with embedded images.
How are the images encoded?
In ways that ensure that they are not visually recognizable on the physical medium afterwards, because the visual layout represents a whole lot of redundancy, and the job of compression is to remove redundancy. If the end result has any recognizable patterns, the compression is not doing its job well.
Here's a screen capture of the end credits visible on the disc the videos worth it but I do think sometimes you need to start with the money shot https://ibb.co/v4KK88fF
This is from a CED not a laserdisc.
If you watch the video, he looked at both.
Yes, but the end credits mentioned by the parent and the link to the image is the CED. That and the title of this post make it seem like this level of image clarity is from a LaserDisc which its not. I think it's worth being clear.
The live stream of this had more interesting things as well, such as looking at the ink on mimeographs compared to inkjet printing. Long and rambly as live streams tend to be, but it is there if anyone cares.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zIsCswtkozI (mimeograph around 3:36:00 mark)
Not nearly as cool, but I was able to show a colleague the letters in a raster image section of a pdf using xxd by varying the output width
I wrote a simple tool, when I was a kid, that dumped binaries into VGA mode 0x13 and allowed me to vary the width. Mode 0x13 is one byte per pixel so it was just a simple REP MOVSB to put data into the buffer (no worrying about bitplanes). It was so useful in reverse engineering software. Besides raster data, regular data structures often jump out.
Fun fact, if you load a file with extension ".data" into GIMP there's a UI where you can set the pixel format and adjust the width/height with sliders
Photoshop does the same with the .raw extension.
I did the same thing to evaluate random number generators by drawing pixels with the count value. You see a pattern, line or clusters? Bad generator.
Interesting to see how optical technology has evolved. In lighting design we also deal a lot with how light interacts with surfaces, lenses and reflectors.
Even small changes in optics can drastically change how light spreads or how uniform illumination appears in a space.
So CAV (constant angular velocity) is an encoding format for laser disks. When something is written with CAV, it is basically analogue data and therefore repeating patterns can be recognized on the disk.
No, CAV has nothing to do with encoding, and both analog and digital formats have used both CAV and CLV and hybrids of the two.
The legible text seen in the microscope images happens because of the combination of LaserDisc recording a raw and uncompressed encoding of the analog video signal, the way that LaserDisc used CAV to store an integer number of frames per track so that the image data for corresponding on-screen locations of subsequent frames would be aligned at the same radial position on the disc, and the credits scrolling vertically at constant speed.
If LaserDisc had used a digital encoding (especially a compressed encoding), the data on disc may still have had discernible patterns but the text would not necessarily have been legible. If it had used CAV but not stored a whole number of frames per track, then temporal and spatial locality on screen would not have corresponded so well to spatial locality on disc. And the vertically-scrolling credits are pretty much the only kind of content that can produce the recognizable and legible images on the disc surface.
I think the fact that the aspect ratio of the text came out approximately right probably is a consequence of the scrolling speed of the credits being chosen to suit the vertical resolution of the video. If the text had appeared squished in the microscope, it would probably have been moving too fast on screen to be clearly legible.
Is the image seen via microscope basically a readout of the image on a spectroscope?
Those can have near-legible images, but most of the time they are not.
No; it's strictly a reference to constant RPM or variable RPM.
CAV discs contained one frame per rotation. While this meant you could only fit half an hour on one side of a disc, it did give you perfect slow-motion and freeze-frames.
I worked in a video store and loved LaserDiscs. The Duran Duran video album was CAV, and the Pioneer LD-700 had such a fast transport mechanism and remote control that I could to DJ-style "scratching" with it.
Not simply repeating patterns, readable text from the credits as shown in the video.
Here's where the text comes into focus, pretty cool:
https://youtu.be/qZuR-772cks?t=1540
Sorta?
The data being written to the disk is the same in CAV or CLV disks, but the player just needs to know how to spin the disk at the right speed so that the laser can read the pits/lands correctly. It is purely a detail about the speed that the disk is spun at so they can cram more data on it with CLV disks.
What CAV LaserDiscs allow for, though, is to make it extremely obvious where scanlines and blanking intervals are in the video signal.
Actually amazing being able to read the text like that, and on two different types of discs. Great video, was much better than I was expecting it to be from the title!
But the opto mechanical parts of a laserdisc reader are way more interesting than a microscope.
Fun fact about laser discs. They are analogue not digital. CD’s store digital information with the presence or absence of pits. Fairly ancient but still fundamentally feels like a very old version of a thumb drive.
Laser discs are not digital. They encode the analogue video signal’s value as the length of the pit. It is digitized in the time domain - sampled at some frequency, but the “vertical” signal value is stored entirely analogue. In terms of encoding it’s more similar to a VHS tape than a CD. Kinda crazy.
> Laser discs are not digital... It is digitized in the time domain
Laser disks are 100% digital (as you said, they store digits in the time domain).
They don't encode their data using binary like a CD does.
"Binary" and "digital" are two separate and unrelated concepts.
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.
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.
I just learned this in my 40s and am surprised. Very cool.
So how does writes work? Does an analog signal translate into pit-lengths with absolute precision?
Everything is analog when it gets to real world
The title should have an asterisk.
Now I wonder if something similar is possible with the magnetic fields on VHS tape
Thoughts on that: (1) you'd need a way to visualize the magnetic fields, (2) the data is frequency modulated, (3) due to helical scan, the video field lines do not line up evenly one over the next as they did so nicely in the Laserdisc / CED (there'd be a skew).
So I don't want to say it's impossible, but I think it would require a lot more creativity.
Very cool but, I was hoping he was going to spin it and align with the camera’s refresh rate.
That would be cool with a variable motor and a 3d printed mount maybe.
That’s not a LaserDisc, it’s a CED video disk. Totally different technology.
A LaserDisc was featured in the video alongside the CED video disk.