Season 2 DVD quality whine

Hi group,

I hate for my first post to be negative, but has anyone else noticed that the image quality of the season two DVD doesn't seem to be as high as the season one DVDs ?

In particular there's some noticeable corruption at the top of the screen on most of the episodes, but is particularly bad in 'The problem with Popplers' episode, where you can see 'notches' in the top of the screen (which I believe are used for timing in video equipment - but these should be off the screen).

Also there's seems to be more aliasing artifacts when there's motion on the screen, including some quite bad pixelation on the black outlines of the characters whenever they move or talk, as well as the picture not being as crisp as season one.

I guess I'm noticing these more because I'm watching the DVD on a computer screen from about a foot away instead of on a TV, but it's slightly dissapointing anyway.

cheers dan

TV screens generally have more overscan than a PC monitor so those artifacts at the top edge *would* be hidden.

For me the Season 1 DVDs always looked better on a TV than on my computer, same is true with the Simpsons DVDs. I didn't like the (relatively) long black screen pauses on the Season 2 set whenever there would have been an ad break in the episode, they weren't nearly as noticable on the Season 1 set.

"Danack" wrote in message news:3df0af06$0$716$[email]...

on

Popplers'

the

the

Bit of a late reply, but I only just bought the S2 DVD's.

I can't say I've noticed any problems so far.

Also, maybe it's just my lousy memory, but there seem to be odd lines of dialogue I don't remember from Sky One.

In alt.tv.futurama on Wed, 1 Jan 2003 at 07:50:39, Paul Hyett wrote :

On further perusing, most of the missing lines seem to contain the word 'bastard', which for some reason British censors seem incredibly anal about.

Paul Hyett came to alt.tv.futurama with a simple dream, a dream of killing all humans:

That's because they're a bunch of bastards... :-)

Must be some sort of class-war thing.

"Paul Hyett" wrote in message news:[email]...

I'm going to see if I get some frame grabs, but I've just noticed that the DVD is at 20 frames per second whereas the first season was 25fps. Which is odd.

cheers dan

is

Is that even possible? I think PAL is always 25 fps because PAL TVs display at 50 Hz.

Geert Jan came to alt.tv.futurama with a simple dream, a dream of killing all humans:

Yes it is possible, just like you can play 10 fps videos back on your monitor running at 60/75/90/100Hz - it just means some frames get repeated. NTSC movie DVD's usually are usually at 24 frames per second.

Well I'm not sure how it works on a computer monitor, but it's not the same as TV.

I thought that the standard was that NTSC is 30 fps played at 60 Hz and PAL 25 fps played at 50 Hz. So when a NTSC DVD is 24 fps the video is converted to 30 fps using 3:2 pulldown.

"Geert Jan" wrote in message news:DNKR9.2462$[email]...

PAL

converted

Most (all?) real DVD players have a framebuffer instead of just drawing directly to the screen ie DVD player decompresses movie to it's buffer at whatever framerate the DVD was recorded at and then the buffer gets displayed at 25/30fps depending on whether the DVD is set to NTSC or PAL output. Or if the DVD can do progressive scan it will display it at 50/60fps.

This allows the dvd to do things like slow play/freeze framing zoom/subtitles etc which all get done in the framebuffer before being sent to the TV.

AFAIK there's is no blending/converting of frames, as that would require too much processing power.

dan

Ah yes that makes sense. Ofcourse DVD players can (often) also play MPG files of any framerate.

But still, I have never heard of a DVD with 20 fps video. AFAIK all DVD's are either 24, 25 or 30 fps, which is the decided standard.

--------

too

"Geert Jan" wrote in message news:_vWR9.4274$[email]...

at

sent

Will the Region 1 be sorted? Nathan

"Nathan Marsh" wrote:

is

Dunno guv.

I suspect they'll have to remaster the DVD for region 1, as playing video at 20fps on NTSC would probably be odd looking, but then I would have thought that playing a 20fps DVD on PAL would be noticeably less fluid than usual, so what do I know ?

btw if you want to see what I've been whining about, I've done some screen grabs and put an analysis of them up on me website:

http://www.basereality.com/Divx.php#Futurama2 http://www.basereality.com/BenderFighting.php http://www.basereality.com/ZoidbergMovie.php

cheers dan

ps go easy on my website, this is it's first public airing.

Hm strange... that 20 fps thing... Well anyway, it's obviously not a very good transfer. Oh well, it still beats downloaded episodes.

On Tue, 7 Jan 2003 03:37:05 -0000, "Danack" wrote:

Thanks for the explanation. I really noticed it in "Put Your Head on My Shoulders". When the camera pans across Elzar's, everything is blurred out -- you can hardly see what's wrong with Zapp's date!

"Alan Hamilton" wrote in message news:avgh2d$fak58$[email]...

Arff ! I missed that one entirely.

http://www.basereality.com/Images/Clips/ZappsDate.jpg

dan

"Danack" wrote in message news:3e1da85f$0$225$[email]...

Don't stare at the top picture too long!