Worst DVD's You've Seen

[EddyH]

Hmmm.... talking of things that were made on tape before DVD came along.. I'll have to take a gander next time i'm out at the shops, what's on the Terminator and Terminator II DVDs... cuz the cut price budget VHSs I got of them as birthday presents (cheapskates ) a couple years back had featurettey bits tacked on the end, but they didn't look like they'd been copied from segments made for DVD. Definately early rather than mid '90s video production values and equipment tech level (such as the titles and all)...

Those weren't stunning tape quality either, can only assume because they'd been in the bargain basket for three or four straight years..

Now, what's the worst CDs anyones ever had, ever needed to take them back because they were unlistenable? Had a couple messed up discs, one seemed to have had white paint/toner splattered the silver side it even before it left the production line, the other was just dodgy. Replaced with working ones in both cases. (Beaucoup Fish by Underworld, and..... dammit.... I forget).

[NightWing]

Have a few:

#1: McLintock
Released by Goodtimes. YUCK! I guess they did not have the money so fix the camera and tranfered a wide screen down to 4:3 with no movement to keep actors in shot and with dust and dirt galore!

#2: 007 Goldfinger
First pressing. Only disk to make my poor old Sony 3000 click and do stange things.

#3: Neon Genesis Evangelion Collection #1
First pressing. Good disk to kidd your friend that VCD are better qualiy! Basically block city! Spent too much effort in the junk action menus and almost zero on shows!

#4: Wings Of Honneamise. Just bad quality! The LD or the R2 import is much better.

#5: Spirited Away { R2 } Red tint Nuffsaid!

[dlb]

I would have to say Vanilla Sky and xXx.

dlb.

[txpharoah]

Highlander. (Quality = YUCK) But the disc was one of the first DVDs, so I didn't really expect too much anyway.

[Hardcoreruss]

The roller blade 7, without a doubt the worst film on earth.

[EddyH]

Nightwing, send that copy of SA back (if the importers accept returns..) and get a newer version, like the recent US release. Much better colour balance. Quite whose crazy idea it was to release in 9300K colour temperature when maybe 5% of people's TVs support it cannot be right in the head. Commercial suicide..

What, did nobody here have the messed up Matrix disc?

[DivXExpert]

#5: Spirited Away { R2 } Red tint Nuffsaid!

R2 Japan or Europe?

[racer-x]

Road Warrior. It looked like somebody recorded it in a thearter with a DV camera.

[NightWing]

#5: Spirited Away { R2 } Red tint Nuffsaid!

R2 Japan or Europe?

Oh the Japanes one that was released last year.

[Conquest10]

yeah, i heard the japanese version is just horrible. the us version released a couple weeks ago is beautiful. the colors are just right.

[NightWing]

Yep its hard to describe how red tinted it looks. But the worst was what BV Japan said that it was done for the LCD-Plasma screen!

Wonder how many are being imported into Japan?

[Gristle McThornbody]

25th hour
Bad editting, scene changes are too fast, angles are messed up, all and all, just a bad film. Could be the director though, I've yet to see a decent film from Spike Lee

huh?

Yeah, I guess you're right. Coppola never made a decent film either. Scorsese may have gotten lucky once or twice though.....

[i-on-s]

Every Jackie Chan Film before the 90's.......Now that you think of it EVERY martial arts film made before the 90s is horrible...even some after the 90s are bad. but i still lov'em

[Lexus]

"Local Hero", region 2 from Universal (UK).

The video quality is unbelievably bad; blocking and matrix effects everywhere. Literally unwatchable.

[rhegedus]

Yeah, I guess you're right. Coppola never made a decent film either. Scorsese may have gotten lucky once or twice though.....

Erm.....Apocalypse now?

Regards,

Rob

[Faustus]

rhegedus from the context of the discussion I think you might want to invest in a sarcasam detector.

[rhegedus]

It's just gone off the scale.............

Regards,

Rob

[DVWannaB]

I rent most of my DVDs from Netflix, about 4-6 per month and the worst was "Heroes of the Bible". I thought it would be a good story that the whole family could watch at easter time. WRONG!!!!! Looks like a copy (a bad one) from somebodies VHS tape (probably in LP mode). Lots of artifacts and some really bad interlacing.

Well thats mine and probably the worst by far.

[Gazorgan]

Let's see;

Any flip disk (4:3 on one side and 16:9 on the other). These are circa 2000 vintage? Most are straight film rips, with no digital filterering of the grainy film (like, they didn't print form a master, just an old copy of the film).

Any film prior to 1980 ? I've only seen some 'Digitally Remastered' that are acceptable, but most are ripped and pressed, and it shows. I may also note, there aren't a lot of DVD's from this era. I mean any recent (5 years) film has a DVD, but it's been a slooooooow process getting some classics on DVD that are anything more than a disk version of the VHS tape(Still no Indiana Jones).

[scottb721]

Just watched U-571. The worst case of pixelation I've seen on a DVD.

[disturbed1]

25th hour
Bad editting, scene changes are too fast, angles are messed up, all and all, just a bad film. Could be the director though, I've yet to see a decent film from Spike Lee

huh?

Yeah, I guess you're right. Coppola never made a decent film either. Scorsese may have gotten lucky once or twice though.....

How can you compare The Godfather, Goodfellas, Casino, and Gangs of NY to Crooklyn, Jim Brown All American, or Girl 6? I don't follow the logic.

If you like Spike Lee films that's fine, but Spike Lee doesn't belong in the same catagory as Martin Scorsese, or Francis Ford Coppola.

[ChrisX]

The worse music DVD I've seen is "Live by the Sea" by the British band Oasis. I am complaining on the picture and sound as sub-standard. The DVD is in PAL format.

The picture as in standard 4:3 for TV and the color not quite as acceptable. Despite on the DVD cover says as digital sound, it isn't, not digital at all. The sound is linear PCM which is no better than the old analog stereo sound of a LD.

I do feel like sending the DVD back to the shop. It is a cheap 2nd hand and this what I get. Could have been worse, would have been a rip off and deceptive if bought as new. What a boring musicvideo of way back 1995 and should thrown into trash.

I now got the "Oasis" music DVD exhanged with a much better detective thriller DVD with much better sound, real digital this time.

The worse video I ever seen is "I Spit on your Grave", a very degrading and horrible film. This film is now banned in Australia. I noticed that I can order this movie from the US and I am not getting this crap.

[EddyH]

I thought PCM was about as digital as you could get (straight, pure, uncompressed copy of the original master... though in your case it sounds like it was mastered off a VHS)... just it's not surround, and doesn't leave anywhere near so much space for the video as the compressed Dolby Digital or DTS does.

CDs use linear PCM after all.. it's certainly better than what you'd get with a laserdisc, unless it was one of those combi CD-LD things.

4:3 is quite likely as it might have been a made for TV feature.

The colour, well, I can't defend as I don't know what's wrong with it


Well, at least you got a better film in the end. A band's live performance I think might get quite depressing to watch.

[ChrisX]

I thought PCM was about as digital as you could get (straight, pure, uncompressed copy of the original master... though in your case it sounds like it was mastered off a VHS)... just it's not surround, and doesn't leave anywhere near so much space for the video as the compressed Dolby Digital or DTS does.

CDs use linear PCM after all.. it's certainly better than what you'd get with a laserdisc, unless it was one of those combi CD-LD things.

4:3 is quite likely as it might have been a made for TV feature.

The colour, well, I can't defend as I don't know what's wrong with it


Well, at least you got a better film in the end. A band's live performance I think might get quite depressing to watch.

The sound of the Oasis DVD hardly has any tone or anything, so boring and terrible to listen. The Oasis recording is restricting copyright by using the PCM sound instead of using digital sound. The DVD player and my surround receiver got the sound as analog and this what I got, analog.

The image was a bit unnatural in colour, awful combination of red, blue and bit of orange. The original video live recording is to blame for the poor colors.

Oasis must improve themselves or else, such a bad image of a band, in fighting among themselves, the brawls, the drunk and the abuse. Such bad behavior and such poor release of their recordings.

[zzyzzx]

The NTSC version of "Gettysburg" purchased from a Parramatta "Grace Bros" store in Sydney. The quality not the best as pixels can be seen and the interlacing.

My copy of Gettysburg looks pretty good. But then again, I got mine shrink wrapped here in the US. No store manager touching it. It was hard to get, had to special order it.

[ChrisX]

The NTSC version of "Gettysburg" purchased from a Parramatta "Grace Bros" store in Sydney. The quality not the best as pixels can be seen and the interlacing.

This was me, the film "Gettysburg" was for TNT television in America. I've seen it in New York while on a visit and I enjoyed it and this why I bought it.

The DVD is still pretty good, great sound and color and I can still see the pixels and the interlacing on it. No much I can do, it was for television, not a full feature film in a cinema.

In fact I picked up another NTSC DVD, this time "Natural Born Killers" a great film and the most unusual film ever seen. No problem with the images, no pixels seen and no interlacing found. Very, very sharp and beautiful colors with excellent surround sound. Same for the film, "Cleopatra", this one on PAL.

A feature film will give you a much better enjoyment than the one originally for the TV.

"Prisoner", the Australian TV series is another one which will be seen as sub-standard due to the fact for TV. The sound is mono, 4:3 viewing without any subtitles available.

I haven't seen the DVD yet, this what you get due to its age and probably some in black and white.

[EddyH]

The sound of the Oasis DVD hardly has any tone or anything, so boring and terrible to listen.

Sermon time.

Well that's nothing to do with it being digital or otherwise, it's just crappy mastering. I have plenty old analogue cassette tapes that sound great when being amped in the car, but by the same measure there are some dog rough CDs (and anything recorded direct-digital from CD to LP4 minidisc sounds pretty nasty along the same lines).
I really dispair for the people working in audio mastering studios sometimes, and for that reason it's one of the few ideas I have for a job. Try to avoid damning them for all eternity by telling myself it's not their fault, they have very busy schedules and cannot afford to redo a mix or even run a quick fixing filter on something to make it better, so long as it can be labelled "OK", canned, and out the door for the next job to begin.
If I ever go for that job, get it, and find it to be a breeze with plenty remastering time, then some peoples souls are going to the fire

Honestly, its like they just dont care sometimes.

Usual suspects:
* Low line levels and/or high noise, esp on CDs or DVDs where the media can't be blamed. Have discs of each type where, when turned to a suitable volume, it's worse than a comparible audio or video cassette - and i dont mean those with Dolby system C either. Sounds nasty when you amplify it, and there's only so much a noise filter can do before crapping out and making it sound like a 48k MP3.
* TV-tube whistles. Most commonly at 15625 and 15750hz, but can range from high 14s khz to mid 16s. Not sure on the cause. Maybe someone left a badly sheilded set-monitor too close to a mike, an amp, or it's wiring. Perhaps its a studio that still uses ataris for midi sequencing (though, quite why they'd use it in low rez tv-mode rather than hi-rez monitor mode). Perhaps there was a TV on in the studio and they were just careless. Who knows. Many engineers seem to use a decent notch filter to get rid of mains hum, but not the easily as irritating TV whistle. Some CDs I've even ripped, filtered, and burned off a secondary copy to listen to instead of the original as it's so piercing and distracting.
If it's meant for output to a television, thats a little less distracting, but say you're using a powerful 5.1 system and a whistle-free HDTV.. the intermittent signal doesnt get swallowed up in to the continual tube noise any more...
* Crappy limitering and EQ. Can sound ok on many systems, but you try ripping & manipulating it, turning it just a touch too high, or putting it on a -decent- stereo, and all hell breaks loose. When a properly mastered disc can have 90db of dynamic range, and the average stereo can go louder than you'd ever want to turn it anyway, the trend towards limitering music so much into the top 3db that it's oscilloscope trace appears like a solid rectangle really hacks me off. (and it contrasts badly if you try to mix it into a compilation say, with some fleetwood mac that's really dynamic and *peaks* at around 90% - have to dive for the volume control). Equalisation can be badly lacking too; sometimes cutting the treble off way short, or putting it way too high, and equally with the bass. Not as noticable under standard crappy listening conditions, and can be corrected with a tweak of a tone knob or two. Midrange usually gets off easy as it's -very- noticable when something's wrong with that.
However you then transport that to something like a minidisc walkman that has very basic sound controls, and headphones that you may play loud in a quiet place, and ugh... sounds awful, like playing a cheap 7-inch with a blunted needle. All you can do is play with the equaliser and hope to rectify it, but as many hopeless attempts to do up some unique-sourced tunes that have rubbish EQ have proved, its very, very tricky.

So far as soundtracks go, an example from something im currently ripping - Crouching Tiger. It's got damn good EQ and treble range, but is BAD for dynamic range and the ol' whistles. If the guys in the studio had put the line levels up a bit higher, and placed the re-dub monitors a bit further from the vocalists microphones (for both english and chinese!) the time spent trying to a get a decent sounding, efficiently compressing soundtrack would have been a mere fraction of what it actually was. If it had been speaker-to-mike feedback, they would have done something...
Over the whole movie the sound peaked at maybe 20%, and so it had effectively about a 12 or 13-bit resolution rather than the full 16. The noise level after amping the peaks up to 95%, was almost exactly that of tapes i've recorded before - not hopeless, but still needed time-hungry filtering if to sound good at volume and not cause the actual 'signal' sounds to get murdered when encoding to mp2 or mp3.
And the TV whistles all the way thru.. it was either build an overall notch filter for the majority of the film to get rid of it on a mass scale and a few unique ones for where the vocals & SFX had seemingly been slowed or speeded up, or go for speed and sacrifice the sharpness of the clashing swords by zapping everything over 15khz, like broadcast TV does.

It comes to something when a home hobbyist just using freeware tools on a PC, taking an hour or two to set things up then leaving it all to batch overnight, can make something sound far better than it did coming out of the pro studio.

The Oasis recording is restricting copyright by using the PCM sound instead of using digital sound. The DVD player and my surround receiver got the sound as analog and this what I got, analog.

Eh? I'm not too clear on what you mean here. DVDs DO NOT store analogue sounds. They are *TOTALLY INCAPABLE* of doing so - everything on them is digital, including PCM sound which as i've said is as "digital" as digital gets, no compression or anything - the best quality possible, at 48khz 16bit stereo anyway. DVDs are not Laserdiscs, they do not work by varying intensity of reflection, but by 1s and 0s, presence or absence of any kind of reflection.
Despite that, if your "receiver" (you mean integrated tv/radio tuner and amp, yes? im a bit rusty on that terminology) is only connected to the DVD player by analogue wires, all you'll get is the digital signal, converted to analogue, and amplified in the normal way as for tv, radio, vinyl, tape, and 95% of all CD players.

If i'm to read between the lines here and try to guess what you mean, there's a couple possibilities:

1. You have your DVD player hooked up to the receiver both by optical or coax digital cables, and by analogue phono jacks, but for whatever reason your DVD player doesn't activate the digital output with a disc that only has LPCM on it, which is really wierd. I'll have to double check this later, but as far as memory serves, I've actually recorded direct through an optical TOSLink to minidisc from an LPCM music DVD single, so you may just need to change the DVD player setup... or something in the reciever, if it's getting uppity and not accepting any digital input thats not decoded surround sound or a raw dolby digital / DTS stream. Hm.

2. The smart people at record company (or again - mastering) central thought it would be a good idea to block digital bitstream output so that you cant make easy top-quality copies of the music (what, they never heard of DVD rippers?), and also not get the best quality playback. I've seen similar things being done on the PS2, but that still allowed decoding, just not any direct recording of the digital signal. Wasn't aware of it being possible on normal DVD players, but in any case, this still isnt a digital storage problem, just someone in the corporate ziggurat having their head where light doesnt reach. A player hack may be in order, or a bit of cheeky DVD burner activity.
Still, unless your player's phono outputs, the wires between, and your receivers phono inputs are *really* ratty, the difference between digital input to the amplifier and analogue should make little difference, especially with a live recording where the noise level is generally high and the EQ likely to be a bit dulled and off in any case. It gets converted to analogue as the final stage before going to the speakers no matter what system you use.

3. The "Dolby Digital" lights aren't illuminating on your DVD player and Reciever, so you're assuming anything going in is therefore analogue.. a fair assumption without any external clues, but no..

4. You wanted surround sound, and it's only in stereo (and not even Dolby Prologic, if the receiver supports decoding of it). Fair complaint, should be fairly standard on concert recordings these days, but how old is the concert footage? Might have been made before widespread occurance of surroundsound playback - and recording - hardware.

As for the EQ, well, thats the mastering again. Find the people who made it and give them a slap for cocking it up so badly, and demand they reimburse you the price of a filter unit to connect in tandem with your reciever (if it doesn't have any built-in EQ.. most i've seen have input and volume controls, and owt else).

Oh well, you could have my setup. £80 DVD player, boosted through a £70 home stereo and a pair of phono cables coming out of the player's headphone socket (to ensure it's stereo, not just the front two channels), or occasionally a £40 mini analogue 5.1 system, and a small £100 TV
Digital? Who needs it.

The image was a bit unnatural in colour, awful combination of red, blue and bit of orange. The original video live recording is to blame for the poor colors.

Odd. Is your disc NTSC or PAL, and what region are you in? It may have been recorded in NTSC (ugh) and badly converted to PAL, so the colours are stuck and cant even be improved with a Tint control on the TV. Or vice versa, it may be PAL and your NTSC TV is making a hash of it but disabling tint at the same time.
Plus TV cameras never do too well at concerts. Or they didn't anyway, newer models should have less trouble, which makes me again think this is a very early oasis gig. Forgive me for not checking which you said it was (perhaps it was just a concert lit in red, blue and "orange" - pseudo-white sodium lamps not coming across very well, like electric stove hobs to a digital camera?)

Oasis must improve themselves or else, such a bad image of a band, in fighting among themselves, the brawls, the drunk and the abuse. Such bad behavior and such poor release of their recordings.

They're still together?
Well, the infighting and splits and stuff are all very rock and roll No image is a bad image when rock music is concerned... particularly when the creativity and spark is gone and you cant rely on solid, chart storming tunes to hold you in the headlines any more.
Pity Oasis are doing so badly right now. They were (are?... hmm) one of my favourite groups, first two albums and the B-sides (masterplan) are no-dud solid performers (and very well mastered too )... since Be Here Now, well, goodness is sporadic at best. You could roll BHN, Giants and.. uh.. whatever the latest one is into one disc containing only the best bits and still walk away with a maxi single rather than an album. Sad, really, suppose the first few releases were so consistently good they burnt out.
To the brothers gallagher - Live fast, rock hard, sell millions - you've done all them. Now retire young and leave a good looking memory, rather than dragging and droning on, much like myself

'night

[EddyH]

Hm, it was made in 1995, DVDs were barely introduced then.. news was still of the burgeoning format war between DVD, SuperCD and Panasonic/Hitachi HDCD, and CDROM drives were up to about 5x speed

Sound was probably recorded direct to DAT and that source (DVD LPCM = DAT stream) was directly encoded to the disc. Nothing better than Dolby Prologic 3.0 (or prologic II 4.0 if you're real lucky) should really be expected in terms of surround, if they used a pair of DATs.

Though it's all academic now, did you pay much for it?


And don't, whatever you do, go near the upcoming Led Zeppelin lost-concerts DVD.. they've tried reprocessing it to 5.1, but its still the old mono 1972 bootleg sources..
</sarc>