HD undermining quality of DVD

[lordsmurf]

Some of you folks have seriously been asleep at the wheel. DVDs that have movies under 4GB and mediocre encoding have been going on for years. This is nothing new.

Conspiracies are so stupid.

[harrisonford]

The file size of movies has come down compared to a year ago, and yes the reduce quality, I watch alot of movies every week, between 6 and 10 new movies a week, I play them in my computer, my own playback software tells me the encoded speed or bit rate, I noticed a shrinking data size upon playback and looked inside at the file size.They are lower and enter more artifact files into the files, I think this is sony, action sceening are getting so bad when played at upscale 1080p I have to down scale to 480 p sometimes to get the picture back in focus. The studio's need to be sued for selling inferior trash to they can resell us HD DVD trash titles all over again, two issues come into play, there should be a registery for people who buy a licence to media, buy it once and you own it for life no matter the format it comes out in, so you pay once and get it free download electronically and your licence is good for life, its a idea so stop pirates and stop moron RIAA and MPAA selling us the same crap 10 times in our life time, MPAA and studio's are all scam artist, screw you once they have your money, well its late, time to go to bed. Ok I am finshed ranting now.

Have a nice day. .....

[FulciLives]

I would go along with a "buy it once for lifetime" type thing. However when the next "best" version comes out you would still have to pay SOMETHING since it does cost money to create a DVD or HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc etc.

However if I have to pay as much as $50 to own a movie for a lifetime I would do it as long as I only had to pay a very nominal fee ... say like $5.00 ... when each new version came available. Assuming of course I am getting something physical like an optical disc.

If it comes down to a download then it better be free or like 99 cents or something like that.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[jman98]

The same thing is happening with CD's. The mixing is getting worse by the minute, to increase the sales of SACD and DVD-Audio.

I usually go to Europe a few times each year, so I know that things are different there. However, in America SACD and DVD-Audio are almost dead formats. Only classical music and jazz labels still release discs in these formats with very few exceptions. Roger Water's "Ca Ira" may be the final new rock or pop SACD released in the USA. The only other ones I've heard of since that one are some Moody Blues reissues that have been released here recently. DVD-Audio has a little more life in it here, but not much. The Beatles "Love" is the one of the few rock DVD-Audio discs released here in the past year. Some classical labels have abandoned SACD and DVD-Audio. Deutsche Grammophon stopped making both but I that recently they released something on SACD, so that format may have some life for them. I believe that Naxos has abandoned both formats. Mixing may be worse, but I'm not sure it's really because of SACD and DVD-Audio.

[adam]

The whole notion just sounds silly to me. You'd be talking about an orchestrated conspiracy organized by many studios across many production houses. And he's concluding this based on 3 releases that may or may not even be undersized. Bandidas is a DVD10 with FS and WS versions. THAT's why its sized down, it's to fit it into the 4.38gig limit. The movie is also only 99 mins long, well short of the 2hr films he uses as a reference. Crank is the shortest of the three, at only 87mins. Assuming it is indeed only 3.5gigs than it'd still have a bitrate of around 5mbits INCLUDING audio. That's not ideal but its not particulary bad and its certainly not uncommon. Assuming this guy's filesizes don't include the audio tracks as well, than hell Crank is right on par with every other relase out there.

[zoobie]

hilarious...
they're out to get you

following this logical progression in the future, HD-DVD will be dumbed down for the next big thing...purple mist

[Scarpad]

Well, I don't know what to think. I'd need more evidence than this before I would definitely conclude that this is a conspiracy. I did some research:

Title - Studio - current availability:
Bandidas - 20th Century Fox - only available on DVD
Crank - Lion's Gate - also available on BluRay
The Desent - Lion's Gate - only available on DVD

None of these are what I would call "blockbuster" movies. Bandidas cost $35 million to make and without spending more time than I want to, I am unable to determine what it made, but it did make an uninspiring $17 million total in foreign box office receipts.
Crank and The Descent are "Brit films". I know nothing else about them. I care nothing about either.

What might we conclude from this? Well, 20th Century Fox may just have decided to save money on a big budget film that tanked by putting out a single layer DVD. Then again, it might be a screw up. Are there other 20th Century Fox DVDs of recent films that made good money that are only single layer? Lion's Gate simply may not know what they are doing in making DVDs. Maybe this is a common problem on all their DVDs. I don't know. At this point it is a little suspicious, but we need more evidence before we reach a conclusion.

You can't go by file size it really depends on the source and compressbility of the movie, I've seen some new films be 3.5 gb where older movies from the 50's and 60's are 7.5 gb, I also suspect movies are being compressed down for extras to fit on a one disk edition.

[Rawit]

Mixing may be worse, but I'm not sure it's really because of SACD and DVD-Audio.

I agree with you that the "hot" mixing of CD's is already going on for a while, but the promotion of SACD made it even worse. You see the demos everywhere, where they show SACD vs CD. The SACD demo shows that they can make good mixes, too bad CD often get the sucky ones.
DVD-Audio was dead in Europe from the beginning, the players are easy to get, but the discs aren't.

See the same thing happening for HD-DVD and Bluray... I can easily obtain a Bluray player... I can pick from Sony, Samsung, and Panasonic. For a HD-DVD player, I have to order it online or travel far to obtain one.

Sometimes you get the impression that the video/audio mixers are getting lazy lately... First we were spoiled with full resolution widescreen presentations, and nowadays we get oddly letterboxed movies, with the subtitle stuck in the black bars, and of course, the non skippable "coming soon" intro's. But I'm talking about Europe (the Netherlands) here, I guess it's different from country to country.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

Major League Baseball is using my the fillings in my teeth to spy on me.

[festmaster]

The whole notion just sounds silly to me. You'd be talking about an orchestrated conspiracy organized by many studios across many production houses.

And if they were that good at conspiring with each other, you'd think they could have settled on one format.

[lordsmurf]

And if they were that good at conspiring with each other, you'd think they could have settled on one format.

Nice.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Waterworld and a few other HD-DVD's looked like crap.

No amount of cleaning, restoration etc will EVER make that movie anything but crap.

Rowing a supertanker - my arse!

[RabidDog]

Strange .. I think 384k 5.1 ac3 is more common than 448.. maybe its the films that I watch. I would agree that, even without an organized conspiracy, it could be std practice to degrade older formats in favor of newer ones. As to new hi-def releases looking like crap and being rushed out? thats because they are being rushed out.. marketing => there are 10000 titles for blu only 3400 for Hd. Also they can then release a re-mastered version later on, for which you can trade in your exising film, plus a nominal fee 8)

I didnt mind waterworld (ducks head)