Forum - View topicDiscotek Runs Poll for Possible Standard Definition BD Releases
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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Until there are reliable, affordable and cross-platform methods of overcoming Blu-ray regional restrictions, my preference for SD content will always lie with the DVD format.
(At present, multi-zone blu-ray players are notably steep, and as a Linux user, I am understandably unenthused by current software solutions.) |
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Parsifal24
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I voted for DVD if only because I don't own and can't afford to buy a Blu-Ray player and ultimately Discotek is going to do what is best for Discotek. Between this and Sentai's choice to phase out DVDs. It is slowly feeling like in a few years time other than short 12 or 13 episode Anime series and films I won't be able to physically own copies of series I enjoy.
Along with the fears of a predatory speculator market or a rise in those who would be willing to buy bootleg versions of a property that person enjoys, irrespective of whether it actually supports the industry and creators of the media. Of course these problems have existed in the past but with the seeming phasing out of DVDs for Blu-Rays in home video releases. I can see an "uptick" in this kind of thing. So while the bottom line may be better for Discotek with the switch to Blu-Ray from DVD for those of us who cannot make or afford the upgrade to Blu-Ray we are simply being left behind. If it means I'll never own another physical copy of a long running TV Series I enjoy. I'm OK with that because ultimately it's not about me. It's about what is best or perceived to be in the best interests of the company and the industry as a whole still it all feels a little sad if it is all all the same. Not to get into the questions of Blu-Ray upscale problems or other more technical aspects of the transfer of predominately older series to Blu-Ray. |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4426 |
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Agreed. I can see why they are considering it since DVD is fading out, and if the picture quality is going to be the same, it doesn't make any meaningful difference to me. However, down the line, I could easily see people, including myself if I'm not paying attention, assuming that blu-ray equals better version (compared to DVD) without realizing there are two blu-ray versions. It might pop up as one of those "customers who were interested in this item were also interested in this other one" suggestions, but I wouldn't count on it. At least if it is on DVD, it is obvious that it will be in SD. |
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9841 Location: Virginia |
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The answer to the complaint of confusion is simple, packaging. Put the SD on Bluray in a DVD case and label it well enough that it won't be mistaken for a DVD. Put a removable strip under the plastic wrap. That would take care of Brick and mortar stores. Online it would be the responsibility for the seller to differentiate the offerings.
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5317 |
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SDBD? I would rather own it on DVD if that's the case, after all, Blu-Ray players can play DVDs, so it's not like you can't play them.
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Triltaison
 Posts: 724 |
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I just wanted to chime in and say that if you can afford to put away $5 every once in a while for a few months, you can probably afford a Blu-Ray player too. I finally was able to upgrade to one in 2016, and it only set me back $40. A Sony one, not even some unknown brand. My problem was upgrading from a CRT TV, but there are a lot of inexpensive options now in the ballpark of $100. Just putting a few dollars aside here and there with careful budgeting can net you something you might really enjoy. I can watch shows on VHS or even VCD without image quality phasing me, but I'm not gonna lie... It's hard to deny how gorgeous something like Arcadia of My Youth on BD is. If you love classic anime, they've never looked better. For me, it was absolutely worth it to put aside a few bucks when I could and save up for that year and a half or so. Don't think of it as an impossible pipe dream - you can do it. 
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NJ_
 Posts: 3009 Location: Wallington, NJ |
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The SD & HD Blu-ray options would be fine but they have to be acknowledged as such on the HD releases so as to avoid confusion, especially with those buying in stores unaware of there being two versions.
In addition to different cover art (if possible), perhaps a modified version of the SD Blu-ray banner could work for them?
In the case of Fist of the North Star, it's Toei so you would also be saving yourself from buying a crap upscale whenever they get around to doing it. I have that DVD case myself and the only advantage is that it's smaller than the 4 previous DVD sets put together (which I used to have) but it does suck, especially when it has some of the discs on top of each other like the old STACKpaks that Sentai & Media Blasters used to use. |
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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This was my line of thinking as well. You can find a large number of Bluray players for the price of a single season of anime. Even if you don’t have an HDTV, those can be found affordably as well (the cost of two or three releases.) Choosing to spend your money elsewhere doesn’t mean you can’t afford something. It means you chose to not spend your money on it. If you chose to spend your money on anime DVDs in lower quality instead of upgrading to a better experience, that’s fine. But the price of one anime release will get you a Bluray player, so it’s not a lack of cash. You just have different priorities. Corporations can’t appeal to every set of consumer priorities and still stay in business. It seems the majority of the boutique home video companies are moving exclusively to Bluray. It isn’t just something that is happening in home video. The horror and sci-fi collectors markets are following the same trajectory. The major studios, and distributors that Viz and Funi use, aren’t really affected by added cost of DVD production, so continuing DVD production for them is not a big deal. Though that could change if large retailers continue to cut back the amount of space they dedicate to home video releases. But DVDs are not the future, and some smaller print run titles can no longer make a profit on the format. Getting upset about DVD being phased out really doesn’t make much more sense than getting upset over DVD replacing VHS it CD’s replacing cassette tapes. |
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doomydoomdoom
 Posts: 278 Location: Michigan, USA |
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My point of view on this is simple. If it leads to lower prices for us (it has -- I bought the Fist of the North Star complete series boxset 3 years ago in 2014 for about $100, which it still costs; the SD-BDs are $55...........) and increased dollars saved for Discotek who can then put that money towards licensing more great classic anime, marketing, and other important aspects of this business, then HELL YA!
As much as I'm not into buying TV series on Blu Ray (I don't want a TV show in movie theater quality and framerate), in particular older series, this is really a pioneering thing that Discotek is doing and I'll throw my hat in the ring for it. The only other SD-BD of note I've heard of outside of them is Queen's Live at the Rainbow 1974 TV special. Also, to echo some other comments here, you can get a Blu Ray player for about $50 now from a decent brand. I know a lot of people who have skipped out on Blu Ray but to be honest, you don't really need to anymore. It's not a crazy new experiment that cost a month and a half of minimum wage paychecks like it was back in 2006 (source: https://www.dealnews.com/features/The-First-Blu-ray-Player-Cost-1-000-Crazy-Price-Milestones-in-Our-16-Years/687319.html). |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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To avoid confusion, I think of it as Viz's DVD vs. Blu-rays of Sailor Moon-- The HD uptweaks looked so bad, it worked better just to buy the originals on DVD, but that's 30 disks for the entire run of the series. Me, I just want the series, if there's no way to fix up the original masters to look better. It's not some personal issue that "No, no, whatever's on Blu-ray MUST be worthy of it!" |
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6867 Location: Kazune City |
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Doing SD-BD instead of DVD doesn't seem like a bad idea, although it somewhat defeats the purpose if they're still going to encode with DVD codecs:
I guess SD-BD still provides shelf space savings, but if they're going to move to Blu-Rays, why not put the technology to fuller use? Though if they actually used h.264 instead of mpeg2, I wouldn't mind seeing SD-BD for shorter TV series and OVAs as well, given the amount episodes they've been cramming onto DVDs. For example, CPM's old Photon release was on 2 discs, but Discotek's puts all 6 episodes on one disc. While the packaging says the runtime is 180 minutes, the actual content is 195 minutes -- the equivalent of a little more than 8 typical 24-minute episodes, which is squarely in bootleg DVD episode-count territory. (It's like it's 2005 and I'm watching fX's Fushigi Yuugi DVDs all over again!) Even typical contemporary DVD releases with 6-7 eps can introduce a fair amount of compression artifacts, which only stand out more when upscaling to an HDTV, so getting 12-24 eps on a single SD-BD would be an improvement. Anyway, like others, I don't see much point in the "downscaled SD-BD for new/HD content" release format, either. Who's the intended audience supposed to be? I can't imagine the population that fulfills these conditions is all that large: A) Have a Blu-Ray player B) Have an HDTV to connect it to C) Want to watch in SD
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9841 Location: Virginia |
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Zalis116 wrote:
I also don't see where this would save the company enough to warrant the lower price to buyers. Especially in light of the need to carry two different versions of the same title. Getting away from that is supposedly the rationale behind Funimations combo sets. |
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Marc Nix
Posts: 18 |
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The Fist of the North Star: The TV Series Complete Collection is said to use the AVC variant of MP4 (MPEG-4 AVC, 11.20 Mbps; Dolby Digital Audio) according to Blu-Ray.com. So it's a new encode of the video sources. Previous SDBDs do different things -- Wonderful Wizard of Oz is said to use the old MPEG-2 files; Samurai Pizza Cats lists ("MPEG-4 AVC, Resolution: 480i",) but that seems worth verifying given what is said that BD doesn't do? In any case, sounds like going forward the Discotek format for SDBD would probably be MP4 AVC video (unless I guess what they're given as a licencor is the original MPEG-2 VOBs, in which case it's not worth recompressing.) http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Fist-of-the-North-Star-Blu-ray/184222/ http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/The-Wonderful-Wizard-of-Oz-The-Complete-English-Language-TV-Series-Collection-Blu-ray/179252/ http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Samurai-Pizza-Cats-Blu-ray/129440/ That said, what improvements they get out of using the more modern MP4 for SD content might be questionable. Ashura (who I assume is a Discotek employee) broke down the FotNS disc production approach and said that, "I don't imagine the video for FOTNS looks a hell of a lot different than the DVDs other than the slightly higher bitrate." SD on BD at first glance seems to offer improvements to disc producers even on SD material, but in practice the Blu Ray Association jacketed up the format so hard that there are things a Blu-Ray disc can't do that your Blu-Ray player could easily do if the video file were instead on a USB Stick, and SD is apparently one of those pain points. SDBD is kind of a kludge of the format (which is one of the things I dislike about the concept, particularly being an owner of a player that doesn't play well with the method, even though buying another BD player is no longer expensive,) and though it works on a lot of players, PS3&PS4 both had problems with FotNS. Discotek's media encoding process is well-reasoned as a means of preserving the original SD content given the limitations imposed on BD content, but not every player will be as friendly with these trickster methods as others. |
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Marc Nix
Posts: 18 |
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Yes, I don't get it. Are there really people out there who want to be part of the audience still purchasing physical media of material that can potentially be found streaming for free or as part of a subscription, but then they don't want the product they buy to be full quality? The advantage of having fewer disc flips and a bit of a pricepoint break doesn't seem like enough to split the format to my mind, though if we're talking a massive price break then maybe that's another story. (Wonderful Wizard of Oz is $39/59 MSRP for DVD/SDBD respectively for a 52-episode show, so maybe it could be significant given the disc pressing costs of BD ; on the flipside side though, they're essentially giving the DVDs away for free with the BD/DVD combo boxes, and the Rayearth 1080p BD originally had a $20 higher MSRP than the DVD -- how would they price a 1-disc SDBD against a 6-disc BD in HD and a 10-disc DVD?) Discotek doesn’t even have a lot of HD shows yet, and few modern shows run longer than 12-24 episodes. (If they do, the producers now tend to break the series up into seasons or production arcs anyway, and the discs would probably come out in season packs.) It’s worth Discotek asking in a future sense, I suppose, but I’m not even sure what kind of shows they’d be talking about here? A DVD at least makes sense as a consumer product. Some people never bothered with BD, or have other reasons of sticking with the previous format. (Myself, I just have cartoon-hate for a lot of Blu-Ray’s badness in the face of great promise; how botched BD is as a format and how inconveniencing it can be. I can never trust whether a disc will keep memory of where I last left off or will just cycle back to the beginning, and the pop-up menus can be so futzy and unintuitive unless the author is real careful of annoyances. Loading has improved but is still lame, SD content on an HD disc has caused me all kinds of problems, cool innovations BD offers largely go unused and probably will forever be too difficult in authoring, and region-coding is not easy to circumnavigate. Personally, I also have an issue that I generally watch anime while on a commute or on the road, and AFAIK there has never been a portable BD player worth buying. That said, of course I own my fair share of BDs, and if SDBD is the preferred format for collectors then so be it.) I get the people buying DVDs despite the availability of BDs, but offering the option of a bad BD and a proper BD package seems like a no-brainer, especially given how few people are actually buying discs these days.
Well, Blu-Ray isn’t exactly “the future” either... I commiserate with the print-run cost of small manufacturers, but if a company is in the business of selling physical media in today’s market, it needs to cater to the remaining purchasing audience. There is still a buying audience that buys DVDs, for one reason or another. For myself, I feel there should be compelling reasons to not sell SD content on the consumer SD disc format that is DVD. Pricepoint and shelf space/disc-swap convenience seem to be the major factors so far for SDBD (plus subtitle quality and potentially video/audio quality in the right conditions,) but my circumstances leave me in that 17% that prefer DVD over SDBD if given the choice and the factors so far. |
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MrBonk
Posts: 192 |
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What would happen if they encoded an SD BD straight to 480p progressive without IVTC? Would a BDP simply not know what to do with a straight 480p encoded video and freak out? Has anyone ever tested this for sure? The PS4 for example cannot handle IVTC properly and results in ugly deinterlacing artifacts. We really really need to be past this old interlaced crap that doesn't need to exist anymore. I can't remember if Fist of The North Star used MPEG2 or AVC on SD BD. I do remember the bit rates were lower than I hoped. Which was my main want from a SD BD, a much better encode. A better than DVD encode. I don't own the FOTNS DVDs so I can't actually compare. And I can't find any comparisons on the internet. It would be nice to see if someone could do that. Compare the same frame from the FOTNS SDBD to the DVD |
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