Aside from dumping, I'd also be glad to record video off my higher-end LD player if there's any interest in that. The LA is, sadly, renowned for having pretty crappy LD video - I believe I heard it does an internal separation from composite (off the disc) to luma/chroma for combination with the PACs, then back to composite for output.
Thanks for the offer. Anyone can have a go a the video ripping if they want, but there are going to be two main obsticles to doing it yourself:
1. Capture hardware. Cheap capture cards just aren't going to cut it. If you have a better player, but a worse capture card, chances are the result is going to be worse. You need a card that gives stable sync with the video, and can capture without compression/deinterlacing.
2. Synchronization. You need to know, for sure, which precise video frame in your ripped video stream matches up with which sector number on the disk when the game issues a seek command, which is a little difficult, since you have to worry about pre-seeking and such. I have a plan on how I'm going to do this, but it's quite a fiddly, manual process, and I'm not sure it's something that could easily be automated. This is still something I need to run a few tests to be sure about.
I don't have any other LaserDisk players to test on, but I'm fairly sure the video degredation you're talking about on the LaserActive only occurs when the digital buffer is enabled, which it needs to be in order to combine the analog video signal with the Mega Drive graphics. The video signal is noticably affected when the digital buffer is enabled. I'll be ripping the video tracks with the digital buffer turned off however, so I'm hoping this is comparable to any other LaserDisk player. Even if it isn't, I might not have a choice, since I may need to do the ripping on the LaserActive in order to solve the synchronization issue. I'm not certain on that point yet though.