Most poorly authored DVD's you've seen

[natedawg]

Hey everyone,
I've just gotten into the DVD recorder realm and have already had my share of some really awful discs.

1. The Usual Suspects: Is it just me or is something wrong if you can fit a two hour movie in a mere 3.2 gigs? The video quality is simply terrible. I don't understand considering they have an extra 1.5 gigs of free space on the disc, seems like a no brainer to use it all up.

2. Mulholland Drive: Who was the moron that didn't put any chapters in this thing?! I want to go find some authoring software and do it myself. The movie is one 2 hour long chapter! I stopped half way through watching and had to fast forward through half of it to get back to where I was. The best part is that if you try to go to the next chapter you get taken to the special features menu. I wanna strangle the boob that let this one get to the consumers like this.

How about you guys? What are some awful discs you've seen and why?

[gooki]

Thunderbolt (funny release).

Realy good picture quality except the black borders were encoded at approx R40,G40,B40 so they appeared grey instead of black, even on a TV set. Very frustrating to watch. So i just divx'd it and cropped off the borders.

[Slogra]

- Dune R2: PAL 4:3, Dolby Surround, MANY compression artifacts

- Braindead Red Edition R0 PAL: Widescreen 1.66:1, German DD 5.1, English stereo MPEG2 (which sounds like mono)!, very poor picture quality (not due to compression)

- Get A Life R1 NTSC: Well, the source was probably not that good

[ProfDrMorph]

Dune (RC2, Germany): both the normal version (16:9) and the Collector's Edition (4:3) are poorly authored. The DVDs have no names ( they're called "UNTITLED" on PCs ), the main audio stream is only LPCM and the others don't exist at all but they aren't removed but only deactivated ( this causes e.g. FlaskMPEG to crash if you select anything but the first audio stream. FlaskMPEG? How long has it been since I used that crappy software anyway? ;) ).

The thread should be called "poorly authored AND/OR POORLY ENCODED DVDs" since you're also speaking about video/audio quality which is no part of authoring itself but one step before it: encoding.

[Apu]

2. Mulholland Drive:
The bad video quality was much more disturbing than the missing chapters IMHO. I don't know if it was the fault of my standalone, but I had many green blocks blinking around in nearly any dark scene...

[auenf]

due to the fact that i work in the budget DVD area, i see lots of badly encoded/authored discs, where do i start?

www.payless.com.au <-- VHS tapes recorded onto DVD, enough said.

bit late, if i think of anymore tommorrow, ill add them...

Enf...


oh yea, remembered Avenue One is pretty bad too;

http://michaeldvd.com.au/Halls/Halls.asp?hall=Shame

[smiller667]

Originally posted by natedawg
2. Mulholland Drive: Who was the moron that didn't put any chapters in this thing?!LOL. That was David Lynch himself ... he thinks a movie should be appreciated in its entirety - that's why no chapters were authored onto the disc.

[natedawg]

haha, seen in its entirety? That break to take a piss for a minute must be the reason why I still have absolutley no clue what the hell that movie was about...not sure if it was just insanley good or insanley bad...gotta watch it again i guess.
I did notice some odd lines and artifacts on certain scenes of mulholland drive as well but thought i was just sitting to close to the screen....
I just watched the usual suspects a little closer and now i see a nice greenish stripe on the left side of the screen. wonderful job whoever let that slip by.

You guys seen the momento special edition dvd? I gotta admit the menu system they made was creative but a tad bit confusing.

[grug2k]

Wings of Honneamise R1. (incorrectly set as progressive instead of interlaced, in addition to the worst interlacing artifacts ever.)

Evangelion (All regions :p)

Anything which removes the burnt-in location names and replaces it with uglyass subtitle streams.

[cult]

the bodyguard-r2 pal,greece,I thought i was watching poor encoded divx.Artifacts everywhere,washed out colors.

[ppera2]

This is all nothing in compare to Chinese DVD's.
I saw 'Original Sin' DVD which had only 1 hour from movie, and it was 1 GB total. And I could give many other examples, but so much is enough.
From European DVD's I recently saw 'Robin Hood Prince of Thieves', German edition - very bad picture, borders even left right (~20 pixel at least), noisy, unsharp. Looks like VHS transfer.

[theReal]

LOL. That was David Lynch himself ... he thinks a movie should be appreciated in its entirety - that's why no chapters were authored onto the disc.
Double-LOL - before I read your post, I imagined David Lynch yelling at some guys from the authoring team: "Chapters? What do you mean? You cannot divide a piece of art into chapters!!"
:D

Then you say he really did so (well, not word by word). It just fits his whole attitude. "Story? What do you mean story? I'm DIRECTING! I need no story!" LOL

[wmansir]

Originally posted by Slogra

- Get A Life R1 NTSC: Well, the source was probably not that good

The funniest part about this disc was the 2 soundtracks available on 3 of the 4 episodes. One contained the broadcast version, the other did not contain a laugh track. I'm not even sure there was a studio audience because the second tracks contains almost no laughter at all. It's amost embarassing to watch, especially when you switch to the broadcast track and hear a laugh riot.

[Ookami]

Shiri R2 (probably Croatian edition) ~ VCD quality...

[SirDavidGuy]

I've seen a Fullscreen (a major crime in itself) version of LOTR, and it was terrible.

The parts in which people were supposed to look formidable (Think Gandalf chastising Bilbo for accusing him of being evil). This scene had the voice reduced so much that it looked silly.

[therick]

I submit the Jakob's Ladder DVD- great movie, one of the worst authoring jobs I have ever seen...never seen so much noise on a DVD-

@natedawg- I assume you are talking about the first Usual Suspects release, which I have and is bad...have you had a chance to see the new special edition realese? maybe it is better...

[beta447]

The Langoliers:

- Parts of the movie were not deinterlaced properly so scanlines appeared (though none in my divx version).
- No extra features WHAT SO EVER. No subtitles, cast/crew interviews, not even a trailer. Even the OLD Star Trek movies released on DVD included trailers.
- Even though this movie is from 95, the AC3 audio is still at 192 kBit/s enstead of 448 kBit/s.

All of this is probably due to the fact that the movie wasn't very well done in terms of acting and was never well funded and there for wasn't very popular.

[Acaila]

Shit, I just bought Dune R2 when I was on holiday. If only this thread had been around before I went...

I agree it's a very lousy DVD. Looks like it comes straight from a VHS source with all the chroma noise it's got (and it's got a lot!). Plus I always hate 4:3 movies coz they're a bitch to rip :)

[Slogra]

Originally posted by Acaila
Shit, I just bought Dune R2 when I was on holiday. If only this thread had been around before I went...


DOH! I got it as a gift, so i can't even throw it away. :sly:


Waarom praat ik eigenlijk engels? ;)

[smiller667]

Originally posted by Slogra
Waarom praat ik eigenlijk engels? ;) So that all the other folks can understand you :) ...

[Infophreak]

Highlander is a pretty good candidate as well... I haven't seen it, but I hear that it is really bad (there is a newer [read: expensive as hell special edition] version of it, that is pretty good though)

[BeNBeN]

BATTLE ROYALE zone 2 is quit a joke, even worse than some of my divx!!!
I really mean it (i'm able to understand that writing this may choke some)
Black level is out, gamma is out, whites are low, heavy blocking, grey layer on the whole movie...

SEEYA
beN

[beta447]

Scary Movie would not play on my DVD player, but did play in my DVD-ROM drive. Scream's Bonus DVD included with the trilogy set will play on a DVD-Player, but not in a DVD-ROM.

[Dagon]

Worst would be the Original Highlander, crap!

The newest one I've noticed would be Van Wilder, look at scene in the ice rink.

[natedawg]

Yup, its the first usual suspects release that sucks.
No wonder they keep re-releasing movies as a "special edition" might as well say "this time we got someone to do it right. Oh, and we put a few shots of the director taking a dump for some extra features."

I had a friend that brought over lord of the rings...fullscreen version. He's not my friend anymore.

Anyone know why the original terminator 2 release has 72 chapters? I thought that was a little overkill.

[theReal]

I think first releases are often deliberately made with less quality - people will buy it anyways because it's the first and one and only release available. If this first release was perfect, then who'd buy the "special edition" because of an extra trailer and an interview with the stage-hand's assistant? ;)

[Slogra]

I like to keep friends who like 4:3. That way i can always sell my crappy DVDs to them.

Terminator the Ultimate Edition has even more chapters, around 80 or something :p.

[Arky]

Pulp Fiction R2 - this release has the distinction of being the only disk EVER that steadfastly refuses to play on my Toshiba Laptop. Ok, so it's a laptop, I hear you say! But if EVERY other disk I've ever fed it plays perfectly well, then there's damn well gotta be something awry with the P-F disk!

Bad Quality? Well Bladerunner R2 is pretty poor, but nowhere NEAR as bad as AARDMAN Animations R2, which looks like it was encoded at near-VCD quality, probably using some crappy encoder like Xing or something. Pity, really, cos the animations themselves are fantastic.


Arky ;o)

[thana]

The Abyss Special Edition R2

1. the AR of the movie is actually 2.35:1, but the DVD was encoded in 4:3 (non-anamorphic) Mode, so more than half of the pixels essentially are wasted on the black bars, and because of this limitation the movie is quite unsharp by default.

2. in ~90% of all frames there is water visible somewhere, and we all know that the detailed structure of watersurfaces requires quite some bits for encoding. nevertheless the movie was encoded with only ~4.5MBps although there are ~3GB free on the disc, and therefore some scenes are quite ugly and blocky (it reminds me of my first flask-encodes some years ago)

3. the disc is full of interlacing-artefacts, where most of the time only one field of a frame exists and is combined with a repeated field of the frame before. sometimes the frames of a hole chapter are constructed of a field of the original frame A and a field of the original frame B, so essentially shifted by on field. this doesn't matter when you watch the movie via dvd-player on your (interlaced) tv (although you can see it on some scene-changes too), but it looks absolutly terrible on any progressive output device. it seems that they took the telecined version of the normal edition, added the extra scenes and then applied an extremly poor ivtc-filter that most of the time acts more like a frame-drop-filter. i had to manually search thru all frames to at least correct the shifted fields on scene-changes and on the most ugliest scenes (and sometimes this wasn't even possible because the second field simply didn't exist).

all in all i can say that this is the most poorly encoded dvd i've seen to date (even some old charlie chaplin b/w-dvds look better).
it took me 3 encodes and about 15 hours of vdub-frame-by-frame-artifact-search-sessions to sort all those shitty frames out. but i think the movie was worth all the hassle, the special edition is really good (but stay away from the normal version, the story is really crippled, maybe that's why the movie was a box-office-flop).

[xer0mark]

None of you guys have probably heard of Juno Reactor but they had a few hits off of their latest release titled 'shango'. I think their song was in a tomb raider trailer or something. ANYWAYs they released a DVD of a live performance from JAPAN and believe me the thing is a mess. I basically gave up all hope on trying to copy it. Its only like an hour and a half long and with multiple angles and such .. the thing is a nightmare to try and figure out. The menus, the extra features ... hidden tracks and warning notices (that never even get displayed) are all littered in the main movie vob files in random order. And the video quality was horrid!

[BeNBeN]

That's fun but the name "juno reactor" comes from a role playing game called Final Fantasy 7 (or 6).
Well...not interesting.

If you guys like unwatchable dvds then give a try to "Moulin rouge" R2.


SEEYA
BeN

______________________________________________________________________When u have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk!*

[diji1]

without mentioning any titles off-hand, every single pr0n dvd that i have viewed has been absolutely terrible quality.

moulin rouge, hahaha ...that was terrible from every angle.

[Faceman101]

Dead or Alive (Takashi Miike) All Region

Worst encode, worst attempt at anamorphic, worst colour matching.

Seriously this was a total waste. The colours are all off, the picture is blurry and way too dark, no matter what player you try it in you can not get it to play in the right aspect ratio. Also had large bouts of stuttering. Then I see a trailer for the movie on the Jinroh DVD and Dead or Alive looks great. Very disappointed.

[Lord Sandwich]

Anyone mention The Shining R1 yet?

4:3 fullscreen, chroma noise, and patches of COMBED frames with missing fields. All this on VHS-quality footage--heck, I'll bet the VHS version actually looked better!

[BeNBeN]

Another good one is the Warcraft 3 bonus DVD, some of the (great)videos seem to have been deinterlaced with an axe.

A+
BeN

[bkST88r[CTL]]

omg i cant belive no one has mentioned the worst one ive seen, FIGHT CLUB.....


so some moron thought it would be fun to encode in different fps? theres not as much wrong with others (moulin rougue ughh)....but at 517 megs...i cant believe its the most circulated copy of it out there...people should be ashamed of even downloading that =P LOL!

it was a fucking nightmare to watch!

[Ookami]

bkST88r[CTL],er, the question was: "Most poorly authored DVD's you've seen", not "Most poorly encoded pirate copy you've seen" :) .

[therick]

Man, that is funny because I was thinking of starting a BEST authored DVD post and the first one that came to mind was fight club-that DVD looks great...so my suggestion to you bkST88r[CTL], is to go buy the disc...hehe

Got another one that I ripped last night and I didn't even bother trying to encode it to CVD...the Pollock DVD is atrocious, noise noise noise...life is too short to try and fix another's aurthoring fuc* ups...