Beware: List of bad quality DVD's [Archive]

Dimmer

7th April 2004, 00:16

Originally posted by cypher_soundz
Well the Canadian Friends box set i think they were aiming for the whole season on ONE dvd both season one and two are like thisI'm pretty sure each R1 box set is 4 dual layer discs. R2 box sets however mostly are 3 DVD-10 flippers with pretty poor quality video and no surround sound.

cypher_soundz

7th April 2004, 01:13

Yeah it is on 4 dvd's but the quality is really bad! i was only saying that they must of AIMED for one dvd lol. Anyone else seen these dvd's?
I could pass it off as a VCD :p
I have both NTSC and PAL dvd's, i thought the NTSC one was alot worse.
Might be my player though.
Regards
cyph
p.s click on the . in my sig for the actual dvd i'm talking about.

Mug Funky

7th April 2004, 06:40

R4 Blade Runner (12905)... this is an earlier release, and there's possibly better out there now.

basically a betacam tape transferred carelessly. no special features, goes right to the movie.

main feature = 3.79 GB

one thing to watch for in PAL DVDs is transcoded audio. as we all know, if you transcode lossy->lossy (especially transform->transform), you get poo sound. well, a lot of PAL DVDs have sped-up NTSC soundtracks, re-encoded to the same bitrate. you'll notice lots of pre-echo, ringing, and all the crap that comes with lossy-lossy transcodes.

Teegedeck

7th April 2004, 10:20

This actually is one shame for the DVD industry: There hasn't been a new version of Blade Runner after this really low quality disc (R2 is just the same as R4). No acceptable version of such a classic (that re-defined movie design IMHO) has been made available.

BTW 'Showgirls' (R2) is an even uglier DVD... Perhaps less of a classic tho. :p

Slogra

7th April 2004, 12:16

Beauty and the Beast Disney (R2 Dutch), is full of mosquito noise. 3 different versions of the movie on one disc without seamless breaching, what were they thinking?? When are they gonna learn at Disney that cartoons need lots of bitrate!?
(I think Finding Nero could also have been better quality cause that movie only takes 4,8GB or so. There are no really noticable artifact in this movie though, but i think it could've been a lot sharper and more detailed)

Roger Rabbit (R2 Dutch) Lots of artifacts. The movie and lots of extras are on one disc... while the same extras are also on disc 2? Why did i buy this abomination of DVD?

Braindead Red Edition (R2 German) VCD2DVD conversion? English audio is mpeg2 format, which is a problem for many receivers.
(R1 version looks much better but it's cut though)

*sigh*
I have loads more... i had Snatch R2 Dutch too, but i gave it away. Got the Superbit version now :). I'm never gonna buy cheap DVDs anymore, unless i'm absolutely certain the quality is ok (which usually isn't)

ppera2

7th April 2004, 14:43

There is couple similar thread in this forum...

Yes, I had misfortune to buy Blade Runner R2 DVD. Even worse is Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves R2, German - obviously made from some bad tape source. And so on..

As I see, it's almost impossible to screw up Mpeg2 encoding itself so bad that it would be so bad as some bad source made with best effort and bitrate.

I bought some cheap DVD's in Hungary at street press shops (or how is called in English), at average price of 6 €. Quality was OK in most cases, except couple with big tape noise.

gatormac

7th April 2004, 16:29

One of the best gangster movies of all time was unfortunately transferred to DVD very poorly: GoodFellas (R1) Excessive noise that can pass on a CRT, but looks horrible digitally. Unfortunately is a flipper as well.

A great Clint Eastwood western that won an oscar for best movie: Unforgiven (R1) The same problem as GoodFellas.

The best DVDs as far as the main movie goes have both been directed by Frank Darabont. The Shawshank Redemption (R1) and The Green Mile (R1) both are very clean and needed no cropping whatsoever! No black bars at the top, bottom, or sides....just a 720X480 anamorphic image. Thats the way it should be.

Mug Funky

7th April 2004, 16:56

roger rabbit bad? i've got the "collector's edition". i didn't see anything wrong with it on my teev (Loewe... not too shabby), but it did have DTS sound, so perhaps i should have a closer look.

there should really be a limit to how many tracks are put on a feature. i know of titles that are limited to CBR 6000 kbps simply because there's so many languages on the disc. if somebody's really interested in russian 5.1 dub, then why not buy it online? catering for a varied audience is good, but not when it sacrifices quality for your _entire_ audience.

hmmm.... as far as non-classics go, there's "pretty woman" r4. it comes on a DVD-10 flipper :confused:, has no menus to speak of but a screen with "play movie" on it. not sure about quality as i don't watch chick flicks... (hahahaa! what am i saying? i watch them all the time!)

Soulhunter

7th April 2004, 17:08

Originally posted by Slogra
Braindead Red Edition (R2 German) VCD2DVD conversion? English audio is mpeg2 format, which is a problem for many receivers.
(R1 version looks much better but it's cut though) Have also this Red Edition... Looks like some sort of LaserDisc transfer... :sly:

Matthew

8th April 2004, 05:59

/begin tangent - sorry

Originally posted by gatormac
The best DVDs as far as the main movie goes have both been directed by Frank Darabont. The Shawshank Redemption (R1) and The Green Mile (R1) both are very clean and needed no cropping whatsoever! No black bars at the top, bottom, or sides....just a 720X480 anamorphic image. Thats the way it should be.

Umm, you do realise that means the sides have been chopped off? (albeit only slightly - 1.85:1 to 1.78:1). If this procedure were followed for 2.35:1 movies though...yuck...

/end tangent

SoonUDie

8th April 2004, 09:23

Sex and the city, first season, R1 (haven't seen the others). Lots of temporal noisiness.

Buffy, seasons 1-3 I think, R1. Way, way WAY too much temporal softening! Lots of evil noise that looks bad even on TV.

Meet the Feebles, R1. I don't know if the other regions are this bad, but the R1 is just horrible. Blocks and other artifacts all over the place, bad levels... I know the master couldn't be that great, but sheesh, this is as bad as VHS, with mpeg artifacts on the side! Possibly a re-compress of another region DVD.

Dragonheart, R1, collector's edition widescreen. A bit too much ringing, and somewhat blurry on top of that. However, the main offenders are the colors, levels, etc. They are *very* messed up when compared to promo shots I've seen. With some simple filters in Avisynth, this DVD can look great - but in its stock form, it approaches VHS quality to my eyes. Film-related noise (mild scratches, dots, hairs) are seen from time to time. ILM would have transferred this to digital to do their effects, so why wasn't that used as the source? Overall this encode is decent, but just a pet peeve of mine.

smiller667

13th April 2004, 22:07

Originally posted by gatormac
Excessive noise that can pass on a CRT, but looks horrible digitally. Unfortunately is a flipper as well.
I wouldn't call a TFT display "digital" ... unless you mean it is strictly black and white (no greys) :) ...

And as Matthew already pointed out, there is really no connection whatsoever between the presence of "black bars" and cropping ...

mudda_t

13th April 2004, 23:10

Demolition Man (R1) I was appalled when I saw this on dvd my vhs looked better than it. You can find it at wal-mart for less then $10.
.
.
"What seems to be you boggle?, my boggle is you put crap on disc and served it to me!"

Master Yoda

14th April 2004, 21:39

The Pal/uk version of snatch seems fine to me, but i have the suberbit version.

But the uk demolition man it rubbish, theres blocky ness, theres this gray line that comes at the bottom of the screen sometimes, just above the black bar.Warner really messed the transfer on this great film up..

MoritzT

15th April 2004, 00:32

Originally posted by cypher_soundz
Yeah it is on 4 dvd's but the quality is really bad! i was only saying that they must of AIMED for one dvd lol. Anyone else seen these dvd's?
I could pass it off as a VCD :p
I have both NTSC and PAL dvd's, i thought the NTSC one was alot worse.
Might be my player though.
Regards
cyph
p.s click on the . in my sig for the actual dvd i'm talking about.

Owning Friends season 1 to 7 on DVD (PAL R2), I can only confirm the bad quality.
I bought season 1 - 5 & 7 in Germany (4 DVDs each) and Seasom 6 in the UK (3 DVDs) and surprise surprise, season 6 looks the worst.
However, they seem to have worked on the problem in general, as season 7 looks much better than the older ones (still poor though).

theReal

17th April 2004, 00:08

The only Friends DVDs I've seen so far were Season 9, PAL, R2 - the quality is good, mpeg-wise, but the source quality seems to be pretty bad. Very noisy, colors are not too vivid - looks a lot like it was shot on 16mm film (I'm sure they didn't use anything digital like DigiBeta because it looks like film, and for 35mm I would've expected better quality). The DVDs itself are a little weird because on every side of a double-sided DVD there's 3 episodes covering 2.5 GB of space. Compressing with transcoders is very bad because of the noise - everything below 80% compression rate is getting really bad (however you can still watch it on a standard tv with 64% compression rate without being too much disturbed by the quality loss).

The worst DVD encoding I ever encountered was "Dark Breed" (German, R2) - the film is about 3.4 GB on a single sided DVD where the audio which is only 2ch Dolby Stereo has way too much bitrate (448k/s).
The movie looks like a bad 1 CD Divx rip with blocks and mosquito noise all over. It really looks like the person encoding this movie thought on watching the results "well, it looks like sh**, but I'm not gonna waste one more minute with that crap!" LOL

Mug Funky

17th April 2004, 02:36

theReal - most US sitcoms are shot on 16mm, at least those concerned with overseas distribution... theoretically they do 2 telecines, NTSC and PAL. in reality the buggers just send PAL countries the NTSC tapes and expect them to convert it, thus completely defeating the purpose of shooting on flim in the first place. (grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr).

the not-vivid colours are from a bad telecine process - the colours aren't filtered properly before they hit the CCDs, so there's crosstalk between the film layers, causing a greying effect.

due to the rather poor funding opportunities, most Oz feature films are shot on 16mm, and they look just fine on DVD if they're done with due care.

[edit]

just saw a contender for worst ever DVD authoring...

a double-feature (r4) DVD of hitchcock's "the lady vanishes" and "jamaica inn"

the ac-3 stream format is inconsistent, leading to the dvd player screwing up the sound in a big way after the first movie plays and needing a reset.

the sound in "jamaica inn" after 2 minutes suddenly goes 1.5 sec out of sync, giving a "singin in the rain" situation (oh yes, yes, yes... oh no, no, no).

the picture quality is completely poo and the sound (when it plays correctly) is so degraded as to be almost competely indecipherable.

the blurb on the back only describes the first 5 minutes, so it's clear the publishers of this disc knew how bloody awful it was.

i couldn't watch the second feature, but the first was (just) watchable. only problem there was a bad print and no attempt at restoration. the source wasn't as heavily degraded as the second feature, thank christ, or it'd be a return-to-the-shop-at-very-very-high-speed deal.

L84work

18th April 2004, 17:16

Originally posted by MoritzT
Owning Friends season 1 to 7 on DVD (PAL R2), I can only confirm the bad quality.
I bought season 1 - 5 & 7 in Germany (4 DVDs each) and Seasom 6 in the UK (3 DVDs) and surprise surprise, season 6 looks the worst.
However, they seem to have worked on the problem in general, as season 7 looks much better than the older ones (still poor though).

I don´t know season 6 of friends but season 1 (PAL R2) is indeed an insult to the eye. I doubt VHS looks worse :mad:

If you are looking for real bad quality you should check out Black Rain (PAL R2). The whole DVD looks like a bad terrestrial TV reception...

Marcel

27th April 2004, 22:54

I just got "Harry und Sally" ("When Harry Met Sally"), PAL RC2, from a public library. If I'd pay a per-DVD-fee, I'd be angry (but it's kinda 15EUR/year flat rate).
There's a lot of color flickering in many scenes, most times when there are some lines that are nearly horizontal. It's in 4:3 with black borders on left and right.
I didn't notice any MPEG-caused artefacts, because I was so disgusted that I had to get some distance between the CRT and me. The bad quality's origin must be in the analog part.
The movie itself fills 6.4 GB on the disc, and besides some trailers, there are no extras.
I don't know yet wether I'll keep the DVD for the weekend or I'll return it to get a VHS version.

You know, I've been like, "anything but a 320*240 pixels rip would be a waste of bytes".

echooff

28th April 2004, 11:57

I have one of those amazing mysteries box sets,(mysteries of the bible, strange events, strange places, ect.) The audio of the last 3 of the 5 are completely out of sync. Not just a little either. It is 5 seconds out in one place. These guys did a great job.

DaRat

28th April 2004, 12:30

Top Gun R2 is just one fine example to put in here. Tough the majority of the film is nice and clean, when there's a lot of action the source was not cleand and you can see awesome lot of dirt... :D Not to mention that the hungarian subtitle track has missing characters along the movie, like "õ" and "û".

Dimmer

28th April 2004, 12:44

Originally posted by MoritzT
Owning Friends season 1 to 7 on DVD (PAL R2), I can only confirm the bad quality.
I bought season 1 - 5 & 7 in Germany (4 DVDs each) and Seasom 6 in the UK (3 DVDs) and surprise surprise, season 6 looks the worst.
However, they seem to have worked on the problem in general, as season 7 looks much better than the older ones (still poor though).Funny you should mention that, because R1 season 7 they just released is a total shame in terms of quality. The quality is about the same if not worse than I get on digital cable. The only good thing about R1 releases is that they all are "director's cut", i.e. every episode has few extra minutes in it.

wmansir

28th April 2004, 12:53

I just had a major problem with Species , the R1 release with both FS and WS on one single-sided disc. The problem was the WS main menu was totally hosed. Actually, part of it was missing completely. I looked over the structure in DVDRemake and it had buttons, but no background still/video. Luckily I was able to copy part of the FS menu over and it fixed it. Perhaps it was due to a read error, or it was a bad print of the disc, because I haven't found any other reports of this problem online.

Johnny_Deep_Down_Below

19th September 2004, 11:35

Well, could you please put some samples of the Friends PAL DVDs online, because I think about buying all of them.

This is an untouched(!) sample of Friends - Season 8 - Halloween Party, recorded from TV (Canal+...30 from Spain):

http://s.colucci.s4.cybton.com/friends-sample.jpg

The average video bitrate is 3187459bps (min/max: 1176400/7252400).

To me it looks very good and has wonderful colours. And I can't imagine the DVDs could be worse!

The only problem is, that parts of the intro were interlaced, while the rest of the episode is progressive.

MoritzT

19th September 2004, 11:42

I'm gonna post some samples from Season 1 and 9 as soon as I get back home (if you want some samples from the middle seasons, fivish or so, just pm me)

Moritz

theReal

19th September 2004, 12:11

Johnny_Deep_Down_Below, I'd say this is about what you get on the R2 PAL DVDs of Friends - definitely not worse.
The whole friends material has some brownish tint, that's what I meant when I said colors are not too vivid on the DVD (in the meantime I was convinced that this film look actually does give the whole thing a lot better feeling than if it was shot on video...)

MoritzT

19th September 2004, 17:07

I agree with theReal.

I'm sorry I can't post the screenshots, but MediaPlayerClassic comes up with a
"Get current image failed, hr = 8000ffff"
error.

Moritz

Johnny_Deep_Down_Below

19th September 2004, 23:03

Well, the sample is just a normal JPEG-Picture, you should be able to get it from the following URL using any HTTP-browser or download-manager, and it should be possible to view it with any browser or pictureviewer:

h++p://s.colucci.s4.cybton.com/friends-sample.jpg

SeeMoreDigital

20th September 2004, 09:55

If you want to see examples of loads of brown in a frame... dig out some old episodes of "Cheers".

Oh, Cheers

MoritzT

20th September 2004, 10:05

Originally posted by Johnny_Deep_Down_Below
Well, the sample is just a normal JPEG-Picture, you should be able to get it from the following URL using any HTTP-browser or download-manager, and it should be possible to view it with any browser or pictureviewer:

h++p://s.colucci.s4.cybton.com/friends-sample.jpg

What I meant was that I couldn't post my screenshots because of this error.

Johnny_Deep_Down_Below

20th September 2004, 17:48

Just open them in VirtualDub MPEG2-Mod and copy source-frame to clipboard.

MoritzT

20th September 2004, 20:12

Ok, here are the screenshots (thx Johnny_Deep_Down_Below)

The first one is from the PAL Season 1 DVDs, the second ne from the PAL Season 8 DVDs.
As is clearly visible, the visual quality has increased a lot.

Season 1:

http://www.tybus.de/friends_season_1.jpg

Season 8:

http://www.tybus.de/friends_season_8.jpg

Moritz

Johnny_Deep_Down_Below

20th September 2004, 21:20

Thats a really big difference!

But remember: There are almost ten years between them, and in the beginning it was just a simple sitcom, and not yet the most famous and most successful one in the world, so that's maybe why they didn't take high-qualiy video material.

theReal

20th September 2004, 22:00

so that's maybe why they didn't take high-qualiy video material.No video involved, it's shot on 16mm film. I guess they increased quality in the postproduction process (film scanning, DVD production) because with 16mm film you don't have a real choice between different qualities - there's ARRI cameras and Kodachrome film - take it or leave it (means shoot on video).

btw. the screenshots are not good for a quality comparison between S.01 and S.08 because the S.01 picture is a wide shot with a lot of small details while the S.08 picture is a half-close shot with much less details (plus the details that are there in the background are not sharp, unlike in the first picture) --> easier to compress

azsd

19th October 2004, 10:53

Lovehina vol1~9 PAL/dutush

blur,PAL interlaced (May make from interlaced NTSC DVD).

Mug Funky

19th October 2004, 17:38

@ azsd:

there's not much choice for anime in PAL. they make it as hybrid 30p/film, and so converting to PAL is always going to be difficult - there are no good ways with anime (motion-compensated methods fail dismally on animation, and are WAY too expensive for the kind of place that releases anime).

FWIW, i find blend-converted PAL to look pretty good on an interlaced TV. the blending fools the eye pretty well for animation (where in natural video it fails badly because of the much higher and smoother motion).

if you're a purist, you can get the american or japanese discs. the jap ones will be better quality in a lot of cases (the US stuff will have titles re-done in english and possibly hard-coded sign subtitles that for some reason required everything to be converted to analog and back again, creating loads of rainbows and other analog nasties).