Piyo-Piyo Productions presents:
A Domesday Duplicator clip featuring To-Y
3/19/19
https://www.otakubell.com/

Source: Laserdisc
Everything PPP-Raw releases is from laserdisc source. At the time of ripping, no DVD or Bluray souce is known to exist.

Project notes:
This is a clip of a direct RF image of the laserdisc for To-Y as captured by my new toy – A Domesday Duplicator.

You can read all about the Domeday Duplicator project at https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=978, but here is the relevant bit:

“The Domesday Duplicator captures the raw RF signal from a laserdisc player’s laser. The player provides the mechanical tracking, focus and movement of the laser over the disc’s surface and the duplicator records the signal. This effectively turns the laserdisc player into a highly accurate optical scanner. The resulting sample is the spiral of analogue data represented by the continuous track on the disc. The aim is to ensure that the sample resolution is higher than the resolution by which the disc was originally recorded. This way you could (in theory) produce another disc from the copy – and that ‘round-trip’ preservation loop means you capture everything on the disc, even if you can’t decode it yet (or if there is data you didn’t know about).”

Why just a clip? Because the full RF image is massive – 165.5GB massive. I can cut that in half by compressing the RF image as a FLAC file, but that’s still too massive for a general public release. So I am just releasing a clip. Its a tech demo. Its a promotion of a new technology, because maybe some of you out there can help with the software. Its a general announcement of things to come. So, like, if there are any companies out there that want to acquire the rights to something where the original masters have been lost, but laserdiscs exist? Let’s talk.

Why not just decrypt the entire file and release it as a standard video? Oh I will, eventually. Right now, however, the Domesday software is still very much a work in progress (v4 is out at the time of this writing). For example, CX noise reduction is not supported yet, so the decoded audio might seem overly loud. The 3D comb filter is still glitchy. I might revisit this after v5 comes out, or v6.

This particular clip starts with the section with the most stubborn rainbowing I have ever seen, the rooftop fencing, an issue I have yet to be able to correct to my satisfaction. Somehow the To-Y Restoration Committee corrected it 100% back in the day, a feat I cannot yet replicate. It then goes into one of my favorite scenes, the festival sequence, featuring my favorite piece of music from Japan, Silent Song by Psy-S.

Decoding Domesday RF Images:
Now, this file is NOT directly playable on your computer (well, it kinda is, but it’ll just play a long freaky audio file). You’ll need to process the image file using ld-decode, WIP software available at https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode/wiki, see below for more detailed instructions.

I have converted this particular image into a FLAC file per https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode/wiki/File-formats, and at the time of this writing it will need to be converted back into a raw RF file using dddconv, as the current versions of ld-decode can’t handle FLAC RF directly.

NOTE: These instructions were written when v4 was the most recent version of the ld-decode software, and may need to change for later revisions.

1. Download and build the ld-decode software suite per the instructions at https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode/wiki/Installation (additional instructions for MacOS and Arch Linux are currently in the bug tracker, the latter having been written by myself)
2. Extract the image from FLAC to raw, using the following command:
   ffmpeg -i ldsample_out.raw.oga -f s16le -c:a pcm_s16le - | dddconv -p -o To-Y.lds
3. Generate the TBC and PCM files with the following command:
   python3 ld-decode.py To-Y.lds To-Y --NTSCJ
4. Run dropout correction as follows:
   ld-dropout-correct To-Y.tbc To-Y-doc.tbc
5. Run comb filtering as follows:
   ld-comb-ntsc To-Y-doc.tbc To-Y.rgb -3
   OR
   ld-comb-ntsc To-Y-doc.tbc To-Y.rgb
   The first command runs 3D comb filtering, which is theoretically better, but is buggy as of v4. The default, without the ”-3” flag, is 2D comb filtering.
6. Convert the .rgb and .pcm files into an actual video file:
   ffmpeg -f s16le -ar 48k -ac 2 -i To-Y.pcm -f rawvideo -r 30000/1001 -pix_fmt rgb48 -s 754x486 -i To-Y.rgb -aspect 4:3 -vcodec ffv1 -acodec flac -pix_fmt yuv422p -flags +ilme+ildct output.mkv
   NOTE: You may want to alter this to some other codec(s), this is just an example using yuv422p colorspace, and lossless FFV1 and FLAC.