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Answerman - Why Do Older DVDs Look So Bad?


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yuna49



Joined: 27 Aug 2008
Posts: 3804
PostPosted: Wed Mar 15, 2017 7:31 pm Reply with quote
EricJ2 wrote:
Unfortunately, studios are still stuck in 2008 mode of thinking that TOO, and starved Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime out of all their 20th-century movies.

Well, if had my choice, I'd prefer to have my movie carried on Amazon non-Prime so I'd get part of the $5 fee. All-you-can-eat services like Prime or Netflix have uninspiring content in part because they pay less in rights fees.

I'll be curious to see if Turner's new FilmStruck service prospers. Now that Criterion has moved there, I'm dropping my Hulu subscription.
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Sakagami Tomoyo



Joined: 06 Dec 2008
Posts: 940
Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia
PostPosted: Wed Mar 15, 2017 8:35 pm Reply with quote
yuna49 wrote:
Actually I suspect streaming services like Netflix, On-Demand, etc., have a lot more to do with rhe slow adoption of Blu-ray. Why invest in a player and rental media when I can just watch a stream.

Rental is one thing, but if there's any chance I want to watch a show again later I'll buy physical media of it, because I cannot count on it still being available to stream.

Zalis116 wrote:
Setting aside the fact that many DVDs use white and some Blu-Rays use yellow... At this point, I'm fairly sure the "yellow = ugly" meme is primarily a cudgel-like talking point for the anti-industry crowd. It seems to be based on one or two premises: "Yellow is an old color; new and better colors have been discovered in the last 15 years," or "The human eye has gone through such rapid evolution that a color that was once perfectly acceptable is now 'cancerous'."

Pretty much. I see a similar tendency in the anti-Linux crowd to latch on to "the file select dialog can't thumbnail images" as a go-to "Linux is useless" argument. It itself is nowhere near as big a deal as they make it out to be, it's just an easy criticism to make of something they've already decided to hate.
Zalis116 wrote:
Many digital fansubs in the early 00s actually did use yellow subs; it wasn't until the advent of BitTorrent and greater competitiveness in the scene in 2003-04 that the rainbow of subtitle colors became commonplace.

Yellow subtitles with more-or-less sensible font choices were very common in the earliest days of digital subtitling. IIRC, yellow was the default colour in Sub Station Alpha. More imaginative but less useful colour/font choices were definitely common before the advent of BitTorrent though, but it did get much worse after.

Zin5ki wrote:
If I may enquire, are you suggesting that burnable DVD+/-R media has a notably short life expectancy when compared to other media? My backups (of assorted content that I cannot actually remember) would be imperilled if so!

Yep. There are a number of factors at play, such as how cheap the discs were, burn speed used, storage conditions etc, but the short version is that burned DVDs aren't nearly as long-lived as pressed ones. A few years ago, I went through my disc backups to get things back onto hard drive when I built my RAID; several discs had errors on some files, one or two wouldn't read at all. If it's data you absolutely must keep for a long time, don't rely on burned DVDs.
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MrBonk



Joined: 23 Jan 2015
Posts: 192
PostPosted: Fri Mar 17, 2017 4:50 am Reply with quote
Quote:
it's an interesting quirk of digital imagery that if you start at a higher resolution and down-convert, the final image is far clearer and more detailed than if you started at the same image size you end up with.


Yes, it's called oversampling. It counteracts artifacts and errors caused by low sampling rates(Undersampling) and get you closer to how the signal is truly supposed to look.

This manifests in many areas.

In Audio, it's the sample rate trying to faithfully reproduce an audible frequency range. (44.1khz = 22.05Khz audible. Not that the majority of the population can even hear above 16khz well at all. Benefits from higher rates just maintain a higher quality final signal.)

It's also the bit-depth which affects the dynamic range possible before hitting a noise floor.

In addition in audio, aliasing manifests as audible undersampling artifacts. (Easy way to see this, is take a HQ lossless audio file. Downsample it to 22.05Khz and then Upsample it back to 44.1Khz with Point/Nearest sampling ; aka no sampling; and you'll hear it.
Final Fantasy IX's PC/Mobile port has a fatal flaw somehow no one noticed in that the final audio engine output is broken. Audio, despite most of it being decent quality 44.1khz OGG is point sampled to system output. Resulting in massive audio aliasing
Audio clip http://www.mediafire.com/file/tfupd6aa0cilfxy/Place_i%27ll_return_to_OST_vs_Steam_A-B_Test.wav Due to how the music was made originally on the PSX hardware, there is very minor aliasing present as well. Due to hardware limitations. The aliasing introduced by the bug above is totally different however. Square Enix never fixed this;shocker; luckily there was a fan fix for a while )

In real time 3D rendered graphics, it's Anti Aliasing. Video game graphics are massively undersampled, which results in artifacts. Visual aliasing. Oversampling gets the image closer to the ground truth of what it actually represents.
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/202977
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/201632

In bitmap graphics, it is also again visual aliasing but also things like Moire.


So in terms of DVD sourced from high res materials. The same principle applies, if it was scanned in digitally at 720x480 with non square pixels, you bet there will be several forms of undersampling present which make the signal not only look mediocre but not at all be representing in any form what the signal is supposed to be.
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NJ_



Joined: 31 Oct 2009
Posts: 3009
Location: Wallington, NJ
PostPosted: Sat Mar 18, 2017 12:55 am Reply with quote
dragonrider_cody wrote:
I remember that a few of the ADR studios briefly launched DVD authoring services, with very mixed results. I've heard that Ocean's studio was quite bad, and Bang Zoom could be very hit or miss.


I've never owned them but I remember the complaints over issues on Ocean's My-Hime & Gundam Seed Destiny DVDs, it's why Bandai went with SpeeDVD for My-Otome and again for My-Hime's Anime Legends release (which I own) and that set was an improvement over the singles.

As for Bang Zoom, which releases did they do themselves? I only know about Star Driver since there was a photo posted elsewhere at the time of it's release of a Blu-ray test disc with Bang Zoom's name on it.

Quote:
And I think many of us can still remember that constant problems with a number of Bandai discs, in which some wouldn't even work on most DVD players.


Oh yes...

http://www.fanboyreview.net/2008/08/14/bandai-dvds-dont-work-remix/

I believe there were others like Lucky Star but the most notable at the time were Code Geass (how ironic, that show is forever cursed here) and Gurren Lagann and it was what led to Bandai working with Technicolor for replication of their later releases.
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