setting up my laserdisc playback system. It's working so far.

SPECTREMAN! SPECTREMAN!
Hear the flash
Like a flame
Faster Than a plane
A mystery
With the name
Spectreman!

I'm not going to capture the laserdiscs by pointing a phone at a PVM, though. that'd be mean and terrible.
I'm going to use a Domeday Duplicator!
This is a fancy box that captures the raw RF signal off the laserdisc player's pick-up head.

more info on that here: https://www.domesday86.com/ 

then ld-decode can be used to turn those high-quality raw RF dumps into a video file. Since this is done offline using modern algorithms and not 1980s-hardware, it can get much higher quality than a traditional video capture would result in. https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode

The reason it's done like this rather than just "ripping" the digital data on the disc is that... there isn't digital data on the disc.
Laserdisc is an analog format. The encoded signal on the disc is an analog RF stream, not a digital video stream.

this isn't always true, though: Later laserdiscs had digital data on them, in the form of a digital Dolby AC-3 soundtrack.

But using a domesday duplicator lets you bypass the image processing hardware in the player (which is trying to convert the laserdisc video to a composite video signal) and run more accurate decoding in software, later.

so this is the best way to preserve laserdiscs.

And as for Spectreman... it's a Japanese series that aired on Fuji TV from 1971-1972.
63 episodes, about a SUPER CYBORG ALIEN who fights a mad ape-man who wants to conquer Earth before humans make it uninhabitable with pollution.

in 1978, it was dubbed into english by Mel Welles. Apparently the script is pretty faithful to the original, although they changed the themesong and added some jokes, along with cutting out some violence.

The english-dubbed version of Spectreman has apparently never been released on DVD or Blu-ray, only Laserdisc and VHS.

Which means this is probably the highest quality version ever released.

but yeah the story is basically Captain Planet vs. The Planet of the Apes. With Kaiju.

I put in the dbase laserdisc and HOLY SHIT IT'S GENTRY LEE!
He co-wrote the Rama sequels and Carl Sagan's Cosmos. He also was an engineer or director on the Galileo space probe, the Viking probs, Deep Impact, Star Dust, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and Spirit/Opportunity.

I don't know why they picked Gentry Lee to tell me how to use dBase but I approve

if you're wondering why I'm talking about weird laserdiscs today, it's this thread from yesterday: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1391119824202440704