A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

I've heard rumors that some move archival enthusiasts have developed Laserdisc capture hardware which samples RF directly off the laser pickup, for theoretically-ideal capture quality. Anyone know if there's any truth to that, and how to get in touch with such a person if so?

That seems unlikely to yield noticeably better results than just playing the disk on a high-quality player and capturing the composite video output. (Unlike video tape "color under", Laserdisc directly records composite video. No benefit to s-video output.)

It's not a matter of results being *visibly* better. It's that if a player has a good/no-good signal from the pickup for any given sample read off the disc, the data can be *provably good*, and a known-to-be-perfect dump can be merged from reads off multiple discs.

By way of analogy: Your argument is that a dump of a bit-rotted graphics ROM IC from an arcade board is just as good as a non-bit-rotted dump, if the affected bits don't visibly affect the graphics shown in-game. I won't sugar-coat it, that's not preservation, that's half-assing.

Not only that, capturing the visible video with a capture card doesn't capture the data contained in the vertical blanking region, where many LD arcade titles store data used by the games. Even worse, the digital data stored in some audio tracks can get mangled.

The LD players used in the games don't allow any application data to be stored in the blanking interval. The blanking interval is used internally for player control, and is not externally accessible even on the OEM players.