DVD's That Video Companies Did A Quality Job On

[Tom Saurus]

I have noticed that when buys a DVD that not all have the same video quality. I was pleasantly surprised by the good job that was done on the DVD picture and sound quality when we bought the first season of "The Virginian". The DVD box sets and we have all seven seasons finally of "The Golden Girls" the picture quality was not as good as it should have been. We recently bought the first season of "Little House On The Prairie" and it was remastered. The picture quality and sound for "Little House On The Prairie" is absolutely pristine. I though others here would be interested in writing their opinion of how well the Entertainment Companies have done at putting shows to DVD and Blu Ray. I was very disappointed with the boxsets I bought of "Due South". The picture was pixilated even on a 480p 20 inch LCD TV. When they used to put in on one of the channels here in the morning, Bravo Canada the picture looked better than the box sets.

[ndjamena]

Here in Australia we tend to have to put up with frame rate conversion problems when buying American TV shows. The best ones were recoded at 24p and have simply been sped up, unfortunately I bought Young Justice on DVD and although the frame rate conversion was fine, someone had added an atrocious amount of edge enhancement to the thing to the point of making it almost unwatchable.

I was pleasantly surprised to find JB selling the Jimmy Neutron series with the words "NTSC" displayed proudly on the box. I just couldn't help myself, so I bought the first two seasons. I ripped the first disc and took a look at it and it turned out to have been animated at 29.97fps. There were no terrible encoding artefacts or any of the kind of things I dread finding on DVDs. So as an experiment, I ran the thing through some simple avisynth filters and upscaled it to 1080p and it was beautiful. It's probably the best thing I've ever encoded and I was looking forward to doing the rest of the series.

So I rip all the season 1 discs and notice that there's interlacing in the later episodes. So I extract the video and have a look at it using AVISynth. it's 29.97i NTSC but after scrutinising it for a while and counting frames I realise at some point it had been converted to PAL. Upon a simple double rate deinterlacing I found out something even worse. Apparently the top and bottom fields went through separate frame rate conversions and unless I discarded one set they played out of order, the final straw was when I realised that in the bottom fields it looks at thought the luma and the chroma had gone through separate frame rate conversion too.

I can just discard the bottom fields and get 25p video from it, but I can't help thinking that the 4.97 missing frames per second might be hiding in the bottom field somewhere, but as far as I can tell, if they are, there's absolutely no way to recover them.

That's what I'm hating at the moment... I have more... The various Transformers cartoons... GRRRRR!