Forum - View topicSentai Filmworks to Phase Out DVDs by 2019
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Kalessin
 Posts: 931 |
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I guess that this sucks for the folks who haven't upgraded to Blu-ray, but I honestly don't understand how anyone can stand the poor video quality that DVDs have. I honestly find it painful to watch many of my older DVD releases because of how terrible they look, and if you compare the DVD video and the Blu-ray video from a combo pack, the difference is very striking. DVD video just looks like trash in comparison. If that's all you can get, then at least you have the show, but Blu-ray makes a huge quality difference. In spite of that though, I have a number of friends and relatives who don't seem to care, which I simply don't understand.
But with how things are shifting with streaming and whatnot, I expect that increasingly, the folks who are buying physical releases are collectors, and they're more likely to care about video quality. So, it's likely to make less and less sense for studios to be releasing DVDs in addition to Blu-rays. If anything, my fear has generally been that the home video releases would die off in favor of streaming (which I'm not interested in), but fortunately, home video sales still seem to be doing well enough that that shows no sign of happening anytime soon. But with this, we're now finally starting to see DVDs phased out. Personally, I find the combo packs annoying, because they just take up more room on my shelf for no benefit, and if a show is DVD-only, I'm a lot less likely to buy it. It has to be that much more appealing for me to put up with the poor video quality. So, I've been grateful that Sentai has generally been selling their Blu-rays and DVDs separately (whereas Funimation loves combo packs), and having studios moving towards ditching DVD entirely is just all around appealing to me. And I'd much rather have an upscale which removes the interlacing and which was done with professional equipment than end up with a 480i DVD (though sadly, that's not always done anywhere near as well as it could be or should be). So, if they really went Blu-ray-only, that would be awesome, but it sounds like we're going to continue to have to deal with DVDs for the SD releases. Fortunately, pretty much everything is done in HD now, and the Japanese studios aren't usually forcing the US studios to wait as long to release Blu-rays, so it's mostly old stuff which is likely to end up with DVD releases, and I probably own it already if it's something that I'm interested in. So, it wouldn't surprise me if I never again buy any DVDs from Sentai. I don't even know when the last time was that I did. As it is, the only DVD-only anime releases that I still buy that I can think of are One Piece, because that's the only way that Funimation releases them. Fortunately, while it would look better in HD, One Piece really doesn't look all that great to begin with, so it doesn't hurt anywhere near as much as it would with many shows.
Yeah, this is why I've imported the Japanese Blu-rays in a number of cases. Funimation and Sentai have frequently had serious banding problems on their releases. Given how expensive the Japanese releases are, I can't afford to buy them for every show, but particularly for the shows I really like, I try to pick up the Japanese release. Then when I rip the Blu-rays, I can mux the Japanese video with the English audio and get something more like what the North American studio should have done in the first place. Fortunately, some of Sentai's recent releases seem to be doing much better with their video quality, so they may finally be fixing their quality issues, making purchasing the Japanese releases unnecessary, but Funimation still definitely needs to get its act together on this. That's actually one area where Aniplex USA's releases are well worth it - they actually have good video quality. Honestly, I find it surprising how willing studios can put out releases with video quality problems, but I guess that just few enough folks notice that they don't care (or at least, few enough choose not to buy shows because of it that they don't care). They'd almost certainly do better if they'd just put fewer episodes on a disc and upped their encoding settings accordingly, but it's perfectly possible to have good quality with the number of episodes per disc that they do. They just don't put in the effort to do it - which is why I own as many Japanese Blu-rays as I do, much as it hurts my bank account. |
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marshmallowpie
 Posts: 300 Location: Nova Scotia, Canada |
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I still buy DVDs when available. I pretty much just bought my BD player for the extras on the occasional Japanese Blu-ray, for the shows I really love and want to support. But for the average anime, I'd rather save the $5, $10, whatever, more with the exchange rate, and just get a DVD, because the only quality difference I can see is on a menu. Honestly.
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luffypirate
 Posts: 3186 |
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This is great. I remember my first anime on Blu-ray. I was literally blown away.
Lately I've been all about 4K UHD but unfortunately the list of anime titles is pretty small (and sometimes not as fancy) |
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Just Passing Through
Posts: 276 |
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This is evolution, and inevitable, although I don't see the major studios ditching DVD until the whole concept of mass market physical media is killed off by online streaming. Even today, I see people ignoring Blu-ray and buying DVDs in supermarkets, even though everyone has HD TVs. But when it comes to the collector (and those buying anime on physical media are definitely collectors) staying ahead of the curve is essential.
But I love DVD. It's convenient and robust. They got the bugs in the technology ironed out pretty quick, so that out of all of the discs I have, I have compatibiity problems with just a handful (most of those Funimation's multiangle credit discs). But, it's a case of turn on TV, place disc in player, press play, sorted for an evening's viewing. The biggest lie that we're told is that SD isn't good enough to watch. Although, that's only a partial fallacy. The truth is that SD isn't good enough to watch when scaled up to HD. Quality, modern DVDs scale up well, but SD broadcast channels and older DVDs don't. Thankfully I've kept hold of a SD widescreen CRT set, so that when it comes to a hundred odd anime series that I have on DVD, most of them only available in that format, and some of them as NTSC-PAL conversions that look horrible when scaled up, I can watch them at their best. It's not just anime, a lot of eighties and nineties US and UK broadcast TV can only really be enjoyed that way, shows like LA Law, Due South, Babylon 5, DS9, so that I actually dread the day that CRT TV will die. The best I can hope for is to buy a small HD panel of similar screen size, and hope that it won't make the interlacing so obvious. There's a market now for vintage formats, with vinyl making a comeback. All of my purchased music is on CD and tape even now, and once people start digging their collections out, the demand for playback hardware rises again. When it comes to TV, Star Trek TNG has proven that unless a series is mega popular, and light on visual effects, it is cost prohibitive to upgrade NTSC and PAL broadcast masters to HD by going to the original source material. I'm not going to see a Due South Blu-ray. But some bright spark is going to realise that some people might want to watch SD material at its best. I can see a specialist collector's market for OLED SD screens optimised for interlaced material eventually rising. Having said all that... I adore HD. Since I went HD, I've only bought DVD where there was no option (except for Life on Mars, where the DVD's native PAL format was authentic, and the BDs slowed everything down to 24fps). The high definition image is gorgeous, and I love lossless audio, and smooth, progressive playback is divine. I hate Blu-ray though. It was the natural winner, as it had more capacity and better data throughput than HD-DVD. But the players suck when it comes to lifespan. My Sony DVD deck is 14 years old and still works as if it's brand new. I've been HD capable for six and half years, and my second Blu-ray player's laser is dying. I have well over 5000 DVDs, and I've watched most of them at least twice on that player, some up to six times. I have something like 2000 Blu-rays. I have never watched any of them twice on a single player. The player dies first. The technology's been around 10 years, but it still suffers from incompatible discs. A not insignificant fraction of my collection have post-its attached to remind me to offset the audio delay to sync it up during playback. They screwed up the spec with constantly updated copy-protection and region coding and geo-locking. Anime discs are the simplest coded Blu-rays out there, but even they take 10 seconds from insert to menu screen on my player. Forget some of that java coded crap. I bought the Skynet Edition of T2 on BD, and it was such a nightmare that I went and got the original barebones disc second hand to watch instead. You can't even rewind-play a disc. FF, yes, but REW no. Then there's DVD-ROM which was plug and play, software all over the place. Watch any DVD on your computer, no problem. But BD-ROM, you have to buy a software player... no rent a software player, as every 12 months BD encryption changes, and you need to update the software to read new discs that your hardware player will read anyway. Either that or use VLC, hope someone posts the decryption keys online, or rent decryption software (I do the latter). Blu-ray should have been DVD with HD picture and HD sound, long-lasting hardware, and instant play discs. As for anime, that's a problem that can only be solved by throwing money at it. Finding the original film elements for cel-animated shows and getting proper HD transfers. That 1999-2007 period when digipaint shows were all in SD, needs shows to get sympathetic upscales that deliver the SD experience but with zero compression and lossless audio instead of DNR, Q-Tec, and edge enhancement to create faux HD that looks like ass. Until then I'll have the quandary of shows like FLCL, and Gankutsuou, which look godawful on Blu-ray, but sound divine, yet look good on DVD, but sound tinny in comparison. |
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anifani
Posts: 91 |
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I did! Sentai's sale is great! Now I have a free Bluray player, and on top of that, picked up on the many series that I've been holding off on. This may sound crazy, but I haven't purchased a Bluray player, because I haven't found a need for it. The DVD's look great to me. Now that I have one, however, I'll check out the difference. (I'm one of those who likes to pay my charge cards off immediately... and double dipping on series I already own just seems wasteful.) |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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I remember the early-adopter days of '08 Blu, when nobody literally knew what it was, and still didn't quite get the explanation of Why It Wasn't DVD, even when you broke it down into layman's terms. So--fortunately having disks of The Untouchables and Iron Man handy--I'd always show them Paramount's new Blu-ray logo, where a dingy SD DVD Paramount mountain is wiped "Claritin free" into HD Blu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty34beVlzpw That usually resolved any arguments. 
(Yes, it was good to know that Paramount weren't "HDDVD Traitors" after all, and had only taken Toshiba's silver to finish their Star Trek: TOS restoration.) |
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Set1229
 Posts: 146 Location: Pittsburgh |
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Might as well.
My eyes don't see the differences between DVD and Blu-ray that well, thus all this means is I have to spend a few extra dollars with Sentai shows. The same goes for video game remasters of 6th generation games. They look almost exactly the same. If I can handle graphics in games and anime from before I was even born, that should tell you that fancy visuals are like a cherry on a milkshake. Completely optional for satisfying me. |
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Stampeed Valkyrie
 Posts: 826 Location: PA |
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There is a blanket assumption here that ALL Blu-Rays look better then their DVD counterparts... they don't! at least not yet.
There are titles where there is no notable increase in picture quality from DVD to Blu-ray.. and some that are just direct DVD rips put onto Blu-ray. Most titles from pre-2007 don't really benefit in anyway from upscale.. and any animation flaws become more apparent. Then on the flip side of the coin, there are titles released in HD from the start that look great on Blu-ray because they were designed in 720p or higher. Long story short... DVD isn't dead.. and probably will still be around for quite abit. If you can buy Blu-ray then do it.. but don't let people snow you that Blu-ray is always better.. GITS Stand Alone Complex... I have the Bandai release.. Manga put it out on blu-ray and..... no thanks. |
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Furuzaki
 Posts: 105 |
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So for people importing the DVD's it's game over... Since a region free blu-ray player doesn't exist in my country ~
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supersqueak
Posts: 194 |
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Not that I really buy anything from Sentai but I hope more companies are not going to totally phase out dvd. I still think DVD is more convenient and cost-effective for a lot of people. I mean I do have a blu-ray player they are not expensive but a lot of the time I just want to sit on my bed and watch my dvds off of my laptop.
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relyat08
 Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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I haven't seen anyone say that at all. Just that the technical limitations of BD are significantly better.
I really dislike the argument in your last sentence because to me, it's like saying, if you just take off your glasses, you won't be able to tell that that VHS you're watching is a blurry low resolution mess. Problem solved! It's the equivalent of that old saying, "ignorance is bliss". I don't want to handicap myself so that I don't notice the flaws in something. Furthermore, for me, literally just the enhanced line art and picture clarity that you get with a higher resolution, by itself, is enough to make BD a vastly better experience. With a DVD I can see pixels regularly and you get lots of jagged edges on line art, not to mention the subtitles, of course. As others have noted, BD also has significantly better audio capabilities. Regardless of there being any extra detail in an SD digipaint show, it still looks vastly better with a greater resolution. |
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luffypirate
Posts: 3186 |
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Can you get access to a Seiki U-VISION BD Player? Completely region free for both DVD and BD. I think it's model number SR4KP1. 4K UHD upconversion too! I found mine for $55 USD. |
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6867 Location: Kazune City |
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Well, this was bound to happen someday, and it's a generally reasonable decision. It's good that they're still willing to go back and release DVDs for older shows where BD isn't an option. While others have covered the "competent DVD vs. bad BD upscale" dilemma, there are a few other areas of "situational relevance" for DVDs.
Travel -- Some of us travel to isolated rural areas where Internet access isn't consistent enough for streaming. Laptops with BD drives (or optical drives in general, these days) aren't common, and portable BD players are not nearly as cheap as standard ones. So DVDs are a better option there, though if they'd rather I used downloaded files instead, I certainly can... Compression -- Is 12 episodes on a Blu-Ray really going to be guaranteed better quality with fewer artifacts than 6 episodes on a DVD? Licensing hangups -- Anyone remember dub-only Blu-Rays for Kurokami and Persona 4? Or how Sentai couldn't even release DVDs for Hidamari Sketch Honeycomb for 3 years after the series aired, and BDs took another 2 years on top of that? Is the satisfaction of declaring "DVD is dead" and seeing other fans not have the DVD option really worth the extra wait time and limitations? Programming -- okay, this is more an issue with Funimation than Sentai. But with a lot of Funi BDs, after watching a trailer or a textless OP/ED, the menu backgrounds come back without any menu text or options displayed, forcing me to press Stop, restart the disc, and navigate back to where I was. I was not about to do that for 12 textless EDs for Heaven's Lost Property S1, so I popped in the DVD, and the menus worked perfectly fine -- thank goodness for combos! With S2, watching one of the textless OP/ED kicked me over to the Audio selection instead of the Extras menu afterward; at least that's "improvement" to the point where I didn't have to resort to the DVD. And combo packs take up too much space, really? For 1-cour sets, there's no shelf space difference whatsoever between combos and single-format releases.
Last edited by Zalis116 on Wed Sep 20, 2017 10:14 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13553 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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VHS started to go on on sale in late 1976 in Japan and it started its USA sales in early 1977.
Heck, until they stopped making the equipment in 7/2016, Japanese electronics company Funai was the last known company to continue making VHS equipment. DVDS had their press launch in 1/1995 and still maintain a level of popularity. I think it is mainly because they are often cheaper than BD. So, I think we might have a few more decades before a Funai-equivalent for DVDs occurs. |
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Furuzaki
Posts: 105 |
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First of all, those for the advice. *high five* But most blu-ray players (including the one you recommended) are altered to be region-free by a third party, either by code or chip. The Seiku U-Vision seems to be the hidden code alternative. In my country that is no different from buying illegal copies, since they were not region-free by default and needs "adjustments". PS: Region free DVD players are easy to buy since every electronics store have them here. So for those that say that DVD's are not needed, they obviously don't know my pain... |
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