#the other discs are CD; DVD; minidisc and UMD

[tetranymous]

I had a dream last night about mounting every type of optical disc that I could find shiny side out into an illuminated frame and the funny part is that I'm only missing one type of disc to pull this off IRL.

[intercity80x]

WAS writing it out in the tags of that last post i RBd but I’m going to put it here. im working on getting or atleast sourcing a copy of 2001 on every video format it’s been released on. i physically have three at the moment, and they were fairly obvious to source: a dvd, a blu ray, and a vhs tape. all were sealed! ive watched the dvd and bluray ofc but im keeping the tape sealed, just because i think that’s really cool. 

but anyway sourcing a Beta tape for 2001 has been… difficult to say the least. i can’t buy from the US only the UK due to import taxes even if I had the money to buy this stuff. ive seen one or two of them around but generally quite expensive for what it is - oddly enough I’ve found beta tapes of 2010 for much cheaper, even though presumably even less would’ve been made.

ive found SEVERAL CEDs for 2001. same with laserdiscs (ive seen CAV iirc, not sure about CLV) which makes a lot of sense given that laserdisc and CED were always marketed to film weirdos - home video wasn’t really a thing when those were envisioned, and people don’t have players for them

beta has been difficult to find. im guessing this is probably because beta didn’t have much of a market infiltration in the uk so they’re not floating around here? friend with huge VHS collection has 0 beta tapes, i don’t think ive ever seen them around when i go charity shopping hunting either. it’s been far easier to find them in other countries

the only VCD/CD video ive found was from mid Europe, cost way too much to justify buying (+postage) for a frankly Just Bad format but i also totally want it. so hey.

i do not own a 4K UHD version. i know one exists, but it’s probably the least of my problems given that the rest of these are going to be much harder to get ahold of. really I could just walk into HMV and get one any time i wanted, hence the others are of more interest to me

i have seen HD-DVD releases around. this is again probably one of my lesser worries in sourcing this collection, seeing as hddvd was a ‘fairly recent’ format. they’re on eBay, you can get them, it’s cool. not really a worry

now onto the weird bits; things it hasn’t been released on:

NO UMD release!!!!! you can get 28 days later, american psycho, A FUCKING CLOCKWORK ORANGE, on UMD, but not 2001. it really feels like they dropped a ball with this, and it pisses me off. if I HAD to guess why this happened, it would be because of the sheer runtime (2h22min off the top of my head, I don’t have my dvd with me to check rn) 

obviously no videonow, GBAvideo, minidvd etc due to size and probably also demographic. also, very likely no flexplay, but who cares anyway. I don’t really count that as it’s own format, it was kinda just a new kind of DRM. same for DIVX, which is just a DVD with fancy DRM. i want to be able to reasonably play all of this media if I had the players.

no VMD release from what I can tell either, but hell, only like 10 movies were released on that anyway. given VMDs purported 50+gb of storage (by NME anyway) you’d think they’d want to put it on there to impress people, but apparently not.

there’s a lot that im not able to find info on. there was a lot of weird video stuff in the 80s and 90s that never saw the light of day outside of some limited releases, and a lot of that hasn’t been catalogued on the internet because nobody but some random guy wants to know whether a specific film was released on them. a lot of these experimental or weird kinds were from japan, who obviously had issues w tapes because of the humid climate (hence their big focus on discs - minidisc, laserdisc, you name it), and it’s hard to say and probably unlikely whether they could’ve gotten the licensing rights to put 2001 on them for a limited run and not a recent Japanese film.

we (me and a friend) think burning to videonow would be possible if we can track down the software used. it would be very close to VCD in terms of quality, BUT it would be very funny to do so and would likely involve compressing the DVD edition to fit on a CD, which would then be placed in a Slightly modded videonow. we’d need another videonow to do this, OR we would have to experiment by cutting up CDs seeing as data is recorded on these linearly. this may also be possible with UMD, but I don’t know enough about UMD to know whether it could be jury-rigged burnt to with a DVD burner. either way, it would be incredibly compressed and awful to watch, but just fucking delightful for the memes. 

side note: ive always thought it would be genuinely fucking hilarious to have 2001 on bluray and 2010, the worse movie, on hddvd, the losing format, BUT i haven’t been able to find rewritable hddvds to do this with. unfortunately, I think they’ve all just been swallowed up, which is sad for my dreams, but it’s possible I may find some… some day <3

side note two: would love vinyl and CD (though probably couldn’t find cassette) of the soundtrack. this probably wouldn’t be hard to find though. bonus points if I could find Alex north’s original 2001 score on CD and Vinyl; I BELIEVE there was a CD release but im unsure about vinyl tbh

so those are my musings on 2001 on as many different video formats as i could find.  i will do it one day. when i have a job.