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Answerman - Why Do Older DVDs Look So Bad?

varmintx wrote:

Try watching a non-anamorphic DVD of a movie these days. The Abyss just looks so awesome, especially after you zoom-in so it's not pillar-boxed. Yep, really happy with it still not being available on blu-ray after a goddamn decade.

Interesting... this topic made me think of how my once good looking DVD of the Abyss looks like garbage in my HD set up. That just made it look like a bad VHS tape somehow. Maybe I have a different transfer of it? I know I have other T*H*X master DVDs that do work well in HD, things like Halloween and Tenchi Muyo, but the T*H*X Abyss only a thankless effort. For me at least.

Well DVD did change over the years, DVD 9 has a lot more memory than DVD 5 for example and requires less data compression.

It'd be so nice if there was a resource as to what anime DVDs have been remastered in more recent releases. I will almost always buy Blu-ray if it exists, but 1. I would have no problem double-dipping for some of my older DVDs (Justin's answer implies that newer releases of Fruits Basket look better than the older ones?) and 2. I could avoid buying ones that haven't been. I got the Anime classics release of Haibane Renmei for Xmas and the video quality is so atrocious I wouldn't have been any worse off streaming it.

The best looking DVDs I've got are 576p, though. Not 480p.

I have a fair number of older anime DVDs (including the Media Blasters Utena release that Justin mentioned) that I haven't tested out since I upgraded my home entertainment system last year, and now I'm suddenly nervous that a big chunk of my collection might be obsolete.

The only pre-2006 anime DVDs that I've watched since I got my new TV is my old Noir set, and that's looked fine so far (halfway through)

I had to track down the 2001 Pioneer DVD release of the Tenchi Muyo! Mihoshi Special, since FUNi skipped it on their Blu-ray. My god, that disc looks awful. It's incredibly blurry, and filled with nightmarish aliasing, mosquito noise, and macroblocking. Too bad, because it's my favorite episode. I would love to see how the Japanese Blu-ray looks.

eh idk how people can stand watching anime on dvd anyway.

what with those horrible cancer causing yellow subtitles.

The only pre-2006 anime DVDs that I've watched since I got my new TV is my old Noir set, and that's looked fine so far (halfway through), but now I'm wondering about the rest of my older DVD sets.

I had to track down the 2001 Pioneer DVD release of the Tenchi Muyo! Mihoshi Special, since FUNi skipped it on their Blu-ray. My god, that disc looks awful. It's incredibly blurry, and filled with nightmarish aliasing, mosquito noise, and macroblocking.

Tylerr wrote:

eh idk how people can stand watching anime on dvd anyway. what with those horrible cancer causing yellow subtitles.

Honestly, given all the legitimate complaints people can make about the DVD standard, and even its subtitle format specifically, I just don't get why the complaint so many people make is "the subtitles are yellow". To me it's like complaining about an old wooden table because it's brown when it's got a wonky leg and is rotting a little at one end. I just don't see the problem with the colour, and even if there is a good reason you don't like the colour, it's hardly the biggest problem.

Admittedly, most of the reasons yellow (with black outline) was chosen as a standard subtitle colour to begin with no longer hold true - ie hardly anyone is watching stuff on a standard definition CRT anymore, so contrasting that clearly against everything possible isn't such a priority. But just because it's possible to have subtitles any colour in the rainbow, that doesn't A) mean you should (the early days of digital fansubs were lousy with font/colour choices that made subs nearly unreadable even on a good computer monitor), or B) make yellow actually bad.

Oyyyy... I remember--back during those same days before we really knew what DVD's were "for", when Multi-Angle was seen as the big thing that DVD could do that VHS couldn't--everyone tried to find some neat showoff angle for it.
The usual was branching the JP vs. US openings depending on whether you chose Japanese or English audio as the default option, which was already using up too much valuable space on a cheap DVD-5 that only had room for 3-4 episodes to begin with.

Looking at companies currently floundering trying to sell the public on why they "want" Digital-Ownership or 4K UHD disk, it makes you appreciate how a new format has to earn its way by demonstrating how it can solve the problems of the viewer, not show off the technology.

To be honest, I completely forgot about Multi-Angle until now. I remember seeing the button on the remote and wondering what it was for, as most of my DVDs didn't have such a thing.
I suppose to hardcore film and TV geeks, they might find appeal in its supposed intended purpose, which is to watch live action from a different camera's perspective, but even then, it'd be nothing but a novelty. But said hardcore film and TV geeks are probably the people who were designing DVD players during that time, and maybe they were really into it and thought everyone else would be too.

I'm assuming they're movies, or if anime, fairly recent. Film->PAL has always been better than film->NTSC but NTSC->PAL conversions back in the day were pretty horrible.