Forum - View topicAnswerman - How Much Anime Can REALLY Fit On A Blu-ray?
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invalidname
 Contributor Posts: 2441 Location: Grand Rapids, MI |
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I think it would be interesting to compare this to the bitrate of streaming anime, which while technically "HD", is nowhere near the 15 Mbps grey-zone cited in the article. After all, the legendary Tech Note TN2224, Apple's somewhat-dated "best practices" document for encoding HTTP Live Streaming for iOS devices, tops out at 8 Mbps. And I suspect many fans are probably seeing Crunchyroll and Funimation streams at lower bitrates than that.
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jsevakis
Former ANN Editor in Chief
 Posts: 1684 Location: Los Angeles, CA |
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While that might be interesting, I don't think it would actually tell us that much -- even though they're both using h.264, the compression standards for streaming and BD are very different. Among other things, Blu-ray video has to be split into 4 "slices" so that they can be decompressed by 4 simultaneous processor threads (this is due to early players using dual Pentium 4s), which cuts into your efficiency quite a bit. At the same time, with Blu-ray, even if your average bitrate is fairly low you can still peak at up to 40 Mbps for high action sequences -- and that's something that bandwidth limitations of streaming video could NEVER hope to accommodate. |
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EmperorBrandon
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 2209 Location: Springfield, MO |
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The picture for the article is Maoyuu, but for what it's worth, that's 12 episodes. I'm not sure Sentai has actually done 13 episodes on one disc. They usually do two BDs even on their sub-only releases at that runtime.
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Lemonchest
Posts: 1771 |
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I can rarely see a meaningful difference between SD & HD when it comes to anime, so I'm not surprised that you can fit an entire cour's worth of episodes on a single disc & not suffer significant quality loss. I don't think many buyers actually think they sell these things in multiple, separate volumes because of image quality concerns.
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NJ_
 Posts: 3006 Location: Wallington, NJ |
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It's a very old release but their one attempt at doing this was with Tears to Tiara which had all 26 episodes on 2 BD50s and that included an English dub. Speaking of companies cramming too much, Kaze's Code Geass releases in the UK had very few discs there as well with 2 for each season IIRC and that had the English dub, sub AND extras. |
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Themaster20000
 Posts: 863 |
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Their recent release of Shirobako collection 1 was a one disc release. |
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Angel M Cazares
 Posts: 5420 Location: Iscandar |
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I have several of those subbed only, 12 episodes on a single BD Sentai releases, and the quality seems fine to me. But judging by their last few sub only BD releases with 12 episodes, Sentai is again using 2 discs instead of 1.
I am pretty sure EmperorBrandon is referring to Sentai using 2 BD's on 13 episodes releases. The first BD volume of Shirobako has 12 episodes that come in 1 disc. And while their second BD volume of Shirobako also has 12 episodes, it actually comes in 2 discs. I suspect that fans criticism of the first BD volume of Shirobako was a big part of why Sentai is apparently dropping their sub only, 12 episodes in a single BD practice. |
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Shiflan
 Posts: 418 |
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I have only recently started buying anime on BD so I don't have much experience in that regard. But I can tell you that as an avid anime buyer when DVDs first came out I was very conscious of this. The comment Justin made about the film grain and certain kinds of shading not playing nicely with digital compression was certainly true. A lot of earlier shows from the 80's looked downright horrible when released on DVD for this reason. And I've even seen it in some current shows via streaming. I have yet to see what I would consider a "bad BD", but I would be worried if I saw a long-running show crammed on a single disc. Perhaps it's just paranoia from seeing some bad DVDs years ago, but the concern is there. I still keep my old Laserdisc player & LDs around because for some programs it's still the best video quality available despite the age of the format. Some things just don't compress well, or require more effort/disc space than importers are willing to throw at a modern re-release. |
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Kougeru
 Posts: 5526 |
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To be fair with Shirobako, there isn't a lot of fast-paced action scenes going on or anything crazy.
You can't say this. This would require having 100% of your customers give you feedback. They do not. The majority of people have "bad" eye sight to begin with, and watch anime from a good distance a way. The minority that do complain are the ones that really pay attention and tend to watch anime at close proximity (generally PCs). This arugment is like saying 99.9% of people can't tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and a 1000kbps FLAC. Most don't even know if they can or not for a variety of reasons such as not actually checking, or using lower end hardware (usually crappy headphones). But doing ABX comparisons and getting an 80+% accuracy rating, It's fairly obvious to me that I can hear the difference in (most) well produced FLAC. The same is true with anime bluray. It's completely ignorant for any company to ignore and write off complaints from a handful of people because you simply think "some people are just unreasonably angry about everything.". That's definitely true, but reading reviews on bad anime bluray, you can clearly see most of the complaints about visual quality are well written and thought out. Many have even provided lossless screenshots to "inferior" sources that look nearly the same or better than the US bluray release. Some companies just seem to rush crap out and label it as a "Remaster" or what not, at a higher price, knowing that most people are not in optimal viewing conditions (or care enough) to notice. |
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Naiera
 Posts: 42 Location: Denmark |
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While obviously better than a DVD, this isn't exactly what one can reasonably expect from an anime Blu-ray release. Bitrate averages dipping into single digits just is not good enough. |
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Kougeru
Posts: 5526 |
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Never say never. Technology has already improved insanely in the last decade since Bluray has come out. It will definitely be awhile (especially in the US where many places are too cheap/lazy to improve their cables and such) to even support that kind of speed, saying "never" is pretty silly. It's entirely feasible that in the future we'll be able to get bluray-quality streaming video. I'd be foolish and ignorant to say it's 100% probable, but I'm not afraid to say it's 99.9% likely to happen within the next 10-20 years. |
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Barbobot
 Posts: 460 |
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I have the Tears to Tiara Complete Collection blu-ray from Sentai and that's only 2 discs with 13 episodes on each disc (1-13 & 14-26) WITH a dub. |
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doctordoom85
 Posts: 2092 |
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I do think FUNimation and Sentai's HD quality is fine.....but I'd be lying if I didn't say I'd be willing to spend more on certain series of theirs if they kept their episodes to 5 per disc and made them as exceptional-looking as Aniplex's releases are. I understand why it's not cost-effective for them but just wishful thinking on my part.
Although I guess it just depends on who's doing the work. The Adventure Time BDs look incredible, better than anyhing FUNimation or Sentai have done that I've seen, but they're also putting about 310 minutes on a single disc. |
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5311 |
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I've never seen 13 episodes cramd onto 1 disc before, the most was 11 episodes and 1 OVA(Un-Go) but that was a one off, everything else has been on average 6 to 7 or sometimes 9 episodes.
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jsevakis
Former ANN Editor in Chief
Posts: 1684 Location: Los Angeles, CA |
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It's funny, because the only double-blind studies I've ever seen about audio compression completely fly in the face of this claim, but regardless...
See, if they had screenshots or had reasoned arguments, those are not the people I'm talking about. If they can actually make reasoned arguments and have actual evidence they can point to of something that is not up to standards, and can clearly point out what is wrong, then I need to listen to them. That's absolutely the kind of fan I want to interact with. Doing so over the years has made me far, far better at my job. Those sorts of fans have taught me a lot. The publishers are definitely not infallible -- in fact, I've spent a great deal of time both as a pro and as a fan dissecting substandard US releases and trying to fix them. I would not suggest otherwise. The sort of complaints we usually get are the same sort of complaints we get from non-Japanese speakers about "bad" translations: borderline incoherent, filled with rage, and usually betraying their own complete lack of knowledge. THOSE we ignore, and THOSE comprise the vast majority of complaints. Chasing down every little stupid comment like that is a monumental waste of time, especially for small companies with limited manpower that are already trying to do too much. But if you interact with fans enough you can usually tell who actually knows things by how they conduct themselves. The ones with actual valuable information to share usually don't feel the need to throw it in your face. |
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