Domesday Duplicator
From Just Solve the File Format Problem
Domesday Duplicator captures raw Laserdisc data using a custom FPGA board attached to the player.
It allow high-quality back-ups of the analogue information contained on the laserdiscs by bypassing most of the 30-year-old electronics in the players. Direct RF sampling also allows all information on the LaserDiscs to be stored (unlike conventional RGB sampling of the video output). Since AIV LaserDiscs are a combination of video, pictures, sound and data (as well as numerous VBI streams), direct RF sampling is the preferred method of preservation.
- .lds (Laser Disc Sample) - '10-bit packed unsigned data', smallest possible file size for captures.
- .raw - '16-bit signed scaled data', uses more disk space but is directly compatible with sample editors such as Audacity and is therefore useful when setting up, testing a capture system or analysing results from a capture.
- .ldf - an .lds that's been FLAC compressed with ld-compress
.ldf represents raw LaserDisc RF captured at 40 Million Samples Per Second (MSPS) with each sample being 10-bits.
Lower sample rates and other bit-depths such as 8-bit & 16-bit are possible