Wow.. That's a lot. Well, I have DVD writer failures too... the odd thing is they failed even when I rarely use them! One of them is my Apple MacBook Pro's DVD writer. I think we used it less than 5 times in its lifetime... and it's dead.
VCDs are not very much available in the USA/Europe. In Australia I remembered they still have VCR formats, and that was when I visited there in 2002. Hmm, I recalled there are half-sized LPs. Maybe they are what you have mentioned. We still have these smaller LPs hanging around. And they have kiddy songs on it??
Wait... there was these LaserDiscs and Projection TV. Many years back when I was in the Estados Unidos, my cousins used to have those. The TV was really huge and they have big amplifiers. Even the LaserDiscs were there. There was the GUI (Graphics-User Interface) in the LaserDisc menu and you can use the remote as a mouse. And of course, it was real damn loud. And the house wasn't some terraced one, the neighbours won't hear it. We watched the "True Lies" and "Speed" over there when we have to escape from that cold when we first arrived there! Yes - you can laugh all you want, we were in Los Angeles on late November. Anyway, we don't have these - they are dead expensive in Malaysia, and the only luxury I dreamed of that time was the Pentium 233 w/ MMX technology.
I skipped both Laser Discs and Projection TVs, but my brother had a Laser Disc player. Man, that was the ultimate in those days, but the disc was so large! And you had to flip them over mid-way.
One of our relatives have the LaserDiscs. They kept a few of these LaserDiscs. Too expensive for that time!
It is not really that expensive, compare with Bluray today. It's just that you are used to boot-legged movies.
Well, the player was really pricey, and the discs rather large too. Although it's much better than VCD, the ease and lower-cost of playing VCDs in computers and standalone players was why most of us stuck with VideoCDs. That and the proliferation of bootleg copies...
My relative had that LaserDisc and that small library of these large discs. The collection grew very slowly - it's expensive. But sometimes, friends come over with their own LaserDisc and watch it there together... so it's kinda like a social gathering in the late 90s. I wonder how to even hold that big floppy LaserDisc. It looks like it's gonna snap into half everytime I hold it at the sides. And don't get me started with VCDs... there's bad blood between me and these things. They stutter real often even in original ones! And the disc-changing, frustration at its best. The better ones have disc-changer, but in 1998, we didn't have a heck load of money... The image was quite choppy and pixelated too. Thank God there's the CRT those times to mask these unsightly boxes.
