Ever watch a movie on laserdisc?

Not on laserdisc, but do you remember in the 1980s when movies were briefly put on the discs that looked like regular vinyl records? The format was simply called videodisc, and I did see a couple of movies on it. The picture quality was superior to VHS, but the problem was the disc would skip constantly. It was a real annoyance and for that reason it failed and VHS reigned supreme.

Yeah, it's something I never bothered with as it never seemed to be all that known to my knowledge.

like Beta vs VHS, to DVD, to HDDVD vs Bluray are all I remember although I would have been quite young with the Beta stuff as it seemed VHS was more legitimate that I remembered which you might as well say was all of the 1990's as I thought I remember reading something online a while ago that DVD overtook VHS rentals in about 2003. I might be mistaken but off the top of my head I want to say I somewhat remember a advertisement for DVD format back around 1997-1998 and it was something like $700 at the time for the player(but I might be mistaken on this as I can't say this for sure). but looking on Wikipedia it shows March 1997 for DVD release but it's probably in the ball park I suspect because from memory DVD players did not become more reasonably priced (say more affordable for the common person) til sometime in the early 2000's, probably more like around 2002. but that's probably pretty close estimate given that DVD overtaking VHS in rentals in 2003 thing I thought I read a while ago now.

hell, looking laserdisc up online it had been in existence longer than I would have guessed as I would have guess that was roughly a 1990's thing even though it seems to be mainly a 1990's thing(?). but it appears it's high cost (according to Wikipedia it says roughly $100 per disc which puts it a rich people only thing) pretty much kept it to a very limited group of people. so it's not all that surprising people generally ignored it. but looking at the disc size comparison on Wikipedia I am surprised those discs are as large as they are as I just assumed they where roughly DVD size or thereabouts.

p.s. although I did use SVCD back around 2003 (like a typical movie fit onto 2-3 CD-R's and played back on a DVD player that supported the SVCD format) for a while because that's when it became easy for me to play 'downloaded' stuff on a TV but I did not hang with that for long before switching to XviD on a original XBox running XBox Media Center which I used for years (I think it was roughly late 2004 through at least the late 2000's) etc.

I only learned about the format a few years ago on the Internet. I don't even recall ever seeing one for sale.

Never used one in my entire lifetime.

No. I would love one but Im not willing to spend much. Oddly enough I have Dick Tracy and New Nightmare on Laserdisc though.

There was a local rental store that specialized in Hong Kong films; a movie was only available there in that format on occasion, so I had to rent both the disc and the player.

I thought I had seen a laserdisc, but after reading your post, they might've been videodiscs. I rented a player and two movies. One was A Bridge Too Far. Had the same problem you described with the skipping forward. I never rented any others.

I've been around laserdisc for a long time. Our school must have gotten a grant or someone donated some money to the district for new A/V equipment back in the mid '80s. I went to a fairly lower middle class school and most of our equipment were 8 or 16mm projectors and those old school filmstrip projectors with the cassette tape for audio. Then all of a sudden we had a laserdisc player for math and science lessons. It was bizarre because we didn't even have VHS yet in the school.

Later on, my future father in law, who used to be an early adopter for all sorts of audio and visual equipment gave me his laserdisc player and a ton of laserdiscs that he had bought in the mid '80s to early '90s before he picked up a DVD player. I guess that was around 2003 or 2004 when I got that. It was of course, outmoded by DVD, but there were quite a few titles at the time (and still are) where the laserdisc copy is still the best home version in existence. One of these films is Colonel Redl, which has never had a Region 1 release on DVD. I believe Michael Mann's The Keep is another. Another one is of course the Definitive Collection of the unedited Star Wars trilogy (I realize they were released on DVD as special features but maintain their laserdisc resolution). There are others, but you get the idea.