Crappy Upscaled DVDs, which ones to avoid.
DoctorArch
CurmudgeonRegistered User regular
CurmudgeonRegistered User regular
I recently made the jump to High Def with a 1080p LCD, and I picked up a PS3 for blu-ray capability to round out the experience. I'm sure I'm not alone in slowly building up my high-def video collection, so I still use my standard DVD's on either the 360 or the PS3 until I get their blu-ray counterpart. Some DVD's look gorgeous, even when I play them on the non-upscaling 360. Monsters, Inc., Cars (Pixar does some fine DVD's), Love Actually, those all look great, even when I tried playing them with Xvid compression through my network.
But all is not great in high def world, as I learned when I popped in Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix into my player. Wow, talk about shitty. Youtube looks better. I tried it on both systems, and it looked the same, upscaling be damned. To head off any questions, they are both hooked up with 1.3 HDMI, so upscaling should occur.
I haven't had the chance to test out my other DVD's, but does anybody else have their experiences with crappy DVD's to add to the pile so I know which ones to avoid/immediately upgrade to Blu-Ray?
Current List:
Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix.
But all is not great in high def world, as I learned when I popped in Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix into my player. Wow, talk about shitty. Youtube looks better. I tried it on both systems, and it looked the same, upscaling be damned. To head off any questions, they are both hooked up with 1.3 HDMI, so upscaling should occur.
I haven't had the chance to test out my other DVD's, but does anybody else have their experiences with crappy DVD's to add to the pile so I know which ones to avoid/immediately upgrade to Blu-Ray?
Current List:
Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix.
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In general, the first batch of back-catalog DVDs, before the studios started releasing remasters and "collector's editions" tend to be pretty shitty.
There's also those widescreen movies that were released in 4:3 letterbox on DVD. For instance, I have the movie "Rushmore", which I can't get to display using the full width of my 16:9 TV, because my TV won't Zoom from a Component source, and my DVD player just displays it as-is. The Star Wars Trilogy re-releases which include the original version also suffer from this on the original version discs. I just ripped those and re-encoded to 16:9, cropping some of the black bars. Doesn't do much good for the picture quality, but at least I can watch those full-screen on my 16:9 TV (well, with thin black bars at the top and bottom, but that's normal.)
In general, be wary of single-disc releases of movies that were somewhat popular, but never really became classics, when they're really cheap or in the bargain bin: either the encoding quality will be crap, or there will be letterboxing issues.
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might be that the visuals just lend themselves to the format or that the guys encoding the movie just had a great day... but it looked pretty amazing
or maybe I'm misunderstanding
yes, shit movie, but I sat there the whole time wondering why the hell it looked like HD
However, even though there's an HD version available, Lost looks amazing on standard DVD. Across the Universe really impressed me as well.
Limed for so much truth.
I have the first dvd release of Blade Runner and the quality is abysmal, the transfer is awful. While still (slightly) better than VHS there are numerous things that stand out.
For example they have encoded black lines onto the left and right, which i'm guessing are where the actual film is when they scanned/recording it to digital. So you have two black bits about 50 pixels in width on the left and right of the picture.
The MPEG2 encoding quality isn't that great, if I remember correctly the film is just that.. no extras, nothing. It's also on a single layer dvd, so they haven't exactly gone out of their way to give it a decent bitrate. (single layer dvd maxes out at 4.3GB of actual storage capacity)
I got the final cut as a christmas present and it blows the original shitty quality releases out of the water.
If anyone wants I can post screencaps from the two showing the quality differences? (will have to wait until I get home though)
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
I recommend going to www.dvdbeaver.com and used in conjunction with www.dvdcompare.net figuring out if you have the best releases of a given dvd.
In fact I just spent the last 12 hours straight doing that.
I went pretty in depth though like marking out all the Blu-ray titles that use MPEG-2 and that I should avoid until they reissue them in MPEG-4 or VC1
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the 360's dvd quality is pretty shitty no matter what.
I've saved them as PNG's to avoid any introduction of extra artifacts from JPEG compression.
Note, I quickly grabbed images from the first few minutes.. so, I didn't really go through the entire film picking out the cool bits.. like where it views that cool circular police building bit.
The first blade runner (directors cut) release to dvd:
Final cut release of blade runner dvd:
I think they're roughly the same frame, a few things to point out.. notice how the early release is very brown and the big black borders. Also, compression macro blocking is quite noticeable on the first release.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.