The Blu-ray Awakens

[thomasaevans]

Amazon and Zavvi have listings for THOSE Series 1-5 blu-rays down as being released in February 26th 2018.

Is this actually now happening for the 30th?

Topic

[GlenTokyo]

American TV is 30/60hz, UK is 25/50, so if you play back American TV and don’t notice this it’ll be a bit faster and higher pitched. Mainly it’s lesser viewed channels that don’t notice this and broadcast it without correcting it.

Used to have the same issue playing Sonic on my megadrive, used to have an option to change to 50Hz mode.

I expect this will all be properly announced on the anniversary and we’ll

[GlenTokyo]

Get a nice preview on the TOS

[flanl3]

They did it the other way around on the American X DVD.

[Hamish]

> They did it the other way around on the American X DVD.

So I am not going mad…

[Moonlight]

I _thought_ the show’s theme music sounded weirdly low pitched.

[flanl3]

Everything feels just a mild bit dreadful at the slowed pace.

[JamesTC]

>Everything feels just a mild bit dreadful at the slowed pace.

If you are watching Dear Dave, it is supposed to be like that.

[flanl3]

As I also own X on Amazon and have watched clips from it online and on BritBox, I can entirely verify that it is much more dreadful at the slightly slower rate.

[GlenTokyo]

Can’t you just switch modes on your TV or something? Flat panel TVs made anytime in the last 10 years or so will almost certainly have 24/25/30/50/60Hz panels, because they do films and all regions the manufacturer ships too. A pal/NTSC option maybe?

[flanl3]

I don’t think my TV does that, and even if it did, it’s important to note that playing it on the original proper rate would also not be right, as the slowdown is minor because the correction was made but it wasn’t enough. It’s a slowdown that by the end adds maybe ten or twenty seconds at most, not six minutes.

[GlenTokyo]

Wonder if you can play stuff back 0.7% faster on VLC media player… That might be the only way.

I think VLC will play any region actually so importing might also work.

Or a region free Blu-ray/DVD player if you don’t want to use a PC.

Who releases the US ones? Is it still Warner Brothers? Have they ever addressed it?

[Flap Jack]

Reminds me of how films run faster on UK DVDs than in the cinema, due to the difference in frame rate.

I only realised this a few years ago, and it’s like learning the Easter Bunny doesn’t exist.

[(deleted)]

It’s the main reason I got into Bluray.

Saying that, there are some US shows I literally cannot watch in their native format, only the PAL speedups are ‘right’ to me. The Simpsons is a big one.

[RickLee84]

I hope if they do include smeg-ups they release them unedited. It was a nice surprise to see an unedited copy (albeit shockingly bad picture quality wise) on YouTube where everyone’s effing and blinding and a lot of the smeg-ups we got on the VHS tapes were just trimmed a little to remove the F word or we had ‘shit’ beeped despite the tape being rated as a 15. Let us hear the swears! Release a proper 15 rated set!

[Ben Paddon]

The X Bluray is a little slower, which is fucking dreadful. XI was a little better but suffered from being reencoded in, I think, 1080p. I ended up re-purchasing the XI set from Amazon UK and giving my US set to a friend.

The BTE set used frame blending, which is a crime.

[Hamish]

> I think VLC will play any region actually so importing might also work.

Using libdvdcss it will, yes.

It always amuses me when I see Windows users installing VLC with no idea how illegal using that particular library is, so much so that most Linux distributions refuse to package it and make their users have to fetch it independantly when installing VLC.

At least we know what we are getting in to.

[Ben Paddon]

Weird, I don’t use libdvdcss and VLC has always, from default installation, played DVDs from multiple regions.

[GlenTokyo]

Mine too. Play region 1 regularly on my region 2 drive, I’ve not done anything other than install VLC

[Hamish]

The libdvdcss library is included with the Windows installer of VLC by default. Because the project is based in France they feel immune to any legal repercussions.

That does not change the fact that the end user is still violating copyright and patent law by using it in their own countries depending on the jurisdiction. Especially for someone like myself living in Canada as the mere act of breaking a digital lock is specific crime here.

It’s insane, but there you go.

[Flap Jack]

The libdvdcss library is included with the Windows installer of VLC by default. Because the project is based in France they feel immune to any legal repercussions.

That does not change the fact that the end user is still violating copyright and patent law by using it in their own countries depending on the jurisdiction. Especially for someone like myself living in Canada as the mere act of breaking a digital lock is specific crime here.

So essentially, it is totally legal for VideoLAN to distribute it (even if it isn’t legal for Linux to distribute it), and some countries’ copyright laws are written broadly enough to make using it ambiguously legal in theory but in practice never challenge anyone.

Yeah, I think it’s pretty much OK really. Not nearly as amusing as the hype suggests!

[Moonlight]

The BTE set used frame blending, which is a crime.

I may be talking out of my ass, but wasn’t BtE back during first generation Blu-Rays, which were all interlaced because the first generation players weren’t powerful enough to do 1080 progressive?

[GlenTokyo]

BtE was 2009, Bluray players were widely available to the average person by 2007. I’ve got other blurays from 2007 that are 1080p too.

More likely that it’s 1080i because that’s what a lot of UK HD broadcasts used until pretty recently for whatever reason.

[(deleted)]

UK HD broadcasts are 720i. 50 fields. UK TV masters are all either delivered 1080i or converted to 1080i. TV broadcasting doesn’t support progressive scan in the same way that CDs don’t support monoaural sound – it’s a one-size-fits-all delivery method regardless of source.

All the Dave RD Blurays are 1080i because that’s what the masters are. Also they have interlaced elements like the end credits and the dodgy camera shakes in Trojan.

[GlenTokyo]

What about Sattelite? Like Sky Q? Comes up as 1080p or 3840*2160 on my TV, assume at 50p for sports.

[(deleted)]

That’s the actual picture output of the box. Transmissions are 720.

[GlenTokyo]

I mean 1080p and UHD broadcast is possible, as Sky Q does it, original programming and sports are in 4K, but obviously over the air standard aerial TV doesn’t.

Maybe the next one will be in 4K, Doug likes his new technology, 4K HDR could be his next extravagance.

[(deleted)]

That’s platform-specific streaming though, like Netflix and Prime do, although admittedly Sky Q’s live stuff is pretty clever. But still, all the HD transmissions for the UK are sending 50i images 720 pixels tall regardless of source.

[Ben Saunders]

So our TVs just upscale to 1080?

[GlenTokyo]

The font of all knowledge that is a random tech website I just found seems to disagree. BBC is now 1080p 25 or 1080i 50, even on freeview at up to 17Mbps bitrate.

Other HD channels seem to be the same.

[Ben Saunders]

I noticed iPlayer is 50fps now, I seriously doubt it’s 1080p though. Or just a shockingly low bit rate.

[GlenTokyo]

The website I was on says the average bitrate is 3mbps, so yeah, probably bitrate. I bet some of it is upscaled too. I doubt Antiques Road Trip and homes under the hammer are filmed full HD

[(deleted)]

The receivers upscale to 1080. iPlayer is also capped at 720 btw.

And whatever website said that about 1080p and 25 is wrong.

[GlenTokyo]

Got them from here. Can’t find anything else other than Wikipedia, which also says 1080

British TV Bitrates

[Ben Saunders]

My Dad is watching The Orville right now as I make a Pot Noodle, and either Seth MacFarlane hit puberty backwards and drinks helium for lunch, they’re playing it too fast/high pitched. I don’t know what channel it’s on. But it’s really noticeable, that’s not his voice. Unless he’s doing it deliberately which would be bizarre.

[(deleted)]

That link is wrong because SD transmission on digital has never been full height PAL either. I think whoever’s putting that info online is/are making a lot of assumptions about delivery methods based on format standards.

[neuro]

BBC have been broadcasting HD on Freeview and satellite at 1920×1080 since 2012. Most content is shot at 1080p also.

[Ben Paddon]

My Dad is watching The Orville right now as I make a Pot Noodle, and either Seth MacFarlane hit puberty backwards and drinks helium for lunch, they’re playing it too fast/high pitched. I don’t know what channel it’s on. But it’s really noticeable, that’s not his voice. Unless he’s doing it deliberately which would be bizarre.

I went from watching Battlestar Galactica on DVDs I’d borrowed from a friend to watching them on DVDs I bought while visiting family in the UK, and the NTSC-to-PAL conversion resulted in a very slight speedup that does in fact make certain people sound a little more chipmunky.

[RickLee84]

So they sound a bit “chipmunk-y” or like Paul Robeson on dope, depending on where in the world you are?

[Moonlight]

Is there any good reason why we can’t just show things in their original framerate at this point? The whole speeding up and slowing down is ridiculous, and the fact that they don’t even lock the audio pitch is downright pathetic.

Besides, if you’re altering from 25 to 24 fps, wouldn’t it make far more sense to just chop out the extra frame instead of screwing around with the speed? The loss of a single frame per second is a negligible difference.

But again, why not just use the goddamn original video?

[Ben Saunders]

Outdated transmission methods, maybe? Bear in mind I have no idea what I’m talking about. But there must be a reason for it otherwise they wouldn’t do it, surely. Maybe actually editing the files and re-rendering them at the correct speed/pitch is just slightly too much effort

[(deleted)]

I guarantee that if you ever saw the dropped frame example you give you’d change your mind – it’s nauseously unwatchable, and would not pass QC. There are only two options – respeeding or frame blending. Frame blending is still favoured for footage where the integrity of the source audio is prioritised – such as music releases and some film musicals.

PAL regions have quietly been NTSC compatible for a very long time, since the 90s at least, but NTSC regions have generally not extended the same courtesy in their TV specs. Certainly, Bluray has meant that commercial releases of anything in PAL regions are almost guaranteed to be true native, and bad standards conversion for disc releases is no longer our problem particularly.

As for the audio, the reason pitch correction is usually avoided is one of quality. Although timestretching and pitchshifting technology has massively improved over the years, it’s still wildly imperfect and imprecise, and when done to stereo and surround sources it often causes the channels to imperceptibly desynchronise and phase against each other, leaving sound that can resemble anything from a badly encoded MP3 to a psychedelic 1960s rock album. The processes work on estimation algorithms involving random factors – like an audio version of how artificial grain generation works on images – and you lose so much fidelity. Even someone not experienced in the field would notice it had gone ‘mushy’ sounding. This isn’t to say it’s never done for DVD/Bluray – it definitely is, but it sounds like absolute arse.

[Dave]

I was half-expecting an announcement on this today, to take advantage of the 30th anniversary publicity, but I haven’t seen anything yet. I hope we get something official soon.

[Dave]

Just checked Amazon and I see it has updated with a price of £49.99. In which case £36 from Zoom feels like a pretty good deal.

[Dave]

Oh, and this tweet from Doug made me consider the possibilities of doing more than just a straightforward colour grade:

What I wanted but we couldn’t afford it. #RedDwarf30 pic.twitter.com/xBXRiZdGOV

— Doug Naylor (@DougRDNaylor) February 15, 2018

[Moonlight]

Actually I would love to see that, if for nothing else than the novelty.

[flanl3]

Right, because Series I needed to be grayer.

[Ben Saunders]

The sets are already in black and white so Rimmer would just blend into the background half the time

[Moonlight]

I never said it was a good idea, I said it would be a fun novelty.

[Moonlight]

I guarantee that if you ever saw the dropped frame example you give you’d change your mind – it’s nauseously unwatchable, and would not pass QC.

You’ll never hear more pedantry about framerates than from me, but how in the world would dropping from 25 to 24 frames per second be unwatchable? I can see how maybe somebody in PAL region used to 25 fps would be able to tell the difference, but we’re talking about converting PAL to NTSC. Anyone in an NTSC region has been watching things in 24 fps their entire life and likely never even seen a program in 25 fps. Most shows are now produced at 24 fps, and even 29.97 fps shows are knocked down to 24 when streamed online. That’s the most common framerate for NTSC.

How is 24 fps worse than fucking around with the pitch, because you can definitely notice that without being a pedant like me?

[bloodteller]

so this has just popped up on amazon. blu-ray of 1-8 coming on October 1st i guess

[Author]

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