Editing LaserDisc (section)

=== Advantages ===
LaserDisc players could provide a greater degree of control over the playback process. Unlike many DVD players, the transport mechanism always obeyed commands from the user: pause, fast-forward, and fast-reverse commands were always accepted (barring malfunctions). There were no "User Prohibited Options" where content protection code instructed the player to refuse commands to skip a specific part (such as fast forwarding through [[copyright]] warnings). (Some DVD players, particularly higher-end units, do have the ability to ignore the blocking code and play the video without restrictions, but this feature is not common in the usual consumer market.)

With CAV LaserDiscs, the user could jump directly to any individual frame of a video simply by entering the frame number on the remote keypad, a feature not common among DVD players. Some DVD players have a cache feature, which stores a certain amount of the video in RAM, which allows the player to index a DVD as quickly as an LD, even down to the frame in some players.

Damaged spots on a LaserDisc could be played through or skipped over, while a DVD will often become unplayable past the damage. Some newer DVD players feature a repair+skip algorithm, which alleviates this problem by continuing to play the disc, filling in unreadable areas of the picture with blank space or a frozen frame of the last readable image and sound. The success of this feature depends upon the amount of damage. LaserDisc players, when working in full analog, recover from such errors faster than DVD players.

Similar to the [[Compact disc|CD]] versus [[LP record|LP]] sound quality debates common in the [[audiophile]] community, some videophiles argue that LaserDisc maintains a "smoother", more "film-like", natural image while DVD still looks slightly more artificial. Early DVD demo discs often had compression or encoding problems, lending additional support to such claims at the time. The video [[signal-to-noise ratio]] and bandwidth of LaserDisc are substantially less than those of DVDs, making DVDs appear sharper and clearer to most viewers.

Another advantage, at least to some consumers, was the fact that any sort of [[Copy protection#Anti-piracy|anti-piracy]] technology was purely optional. It was claimed that [[TiVo Corporation|Macrovision]]'s [[Copyguard]] [[Copy protection|protection]] could not be applied to LaserDisc, due to the format's design. The [[vertical blanking interval]], where the Macrovision signal would be implemented, was used for timecode and frame coding as well as player control codes on LaserDisc players. Due to its relatively small market share, there was never a push to redesign the format despite the obvious potential for piracy. The industry simply decided to engineer it into the [[DVD]] specification.

LaserDisc's support for multiple audio tracks allowed for vast supplemental materials to be included on-disc and made it the first available format for "Special Edition" releases; the 1984 [[Criterion Collection]] edition of ''[[Citizen Kane]]'' is generally credited as being the first "Special Edition" release to home video (''[[King Kong (1933 film)|King Kong]]'' being the first release to have an [[audio commentary]] track included),<ref>{{Cite magazine|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=sQ0EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA46|title=Quality is the Trademark of Criterion Collection DVDs|last=Neopolitan|first=Matt|date=May 17, 2003|magazine=Billboard|page=46|language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.denverpost.com/2005/08/24/if-dvd-killed-the-film-star-criterion-honors-the-ghost/|title=If DVD killed the film star, Criterion honors the ghost|date=August 24, 2005|website=The Denver Post|language=en-US|access-date=November 11, 2019}}</ref> and for setting the standard by which future "Special Edition" discs were measured. The disc provided interviews, commentary tracks, documentaries, still photographs, and other features for historians and collectors.