Author Archives: Stephen Dawson

That’s a lot of bits

Posted on April 7, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

I’ve just been analysing the new Blu-ray release of the 1958 musical Gigi. This gets Dolby TrueHD 5.1 channel sound for the English track, backed up with Dolby Digital 5.1 at 640kbps. Foreign language audio is provided in French, German, … Continue reading →

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Finalising The Fifth Element

Posted on April 5, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

Well, I have finally completed my almost-proof that the Australian Blu-ray version of The Fifth Element has identical video to the US remastered version (see two posts down). To do this I extracted the first 999 ‘I’ frames from each … Continue reading →

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7669

Posted on April 4, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

While examining The Fifth Element I noticed that there was a one minute long video file on the disc, with no apparent linkage from the menu. So I dragged it into a video player and discovered that it was a … Continue reading →

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Slander Sony through jumping to conclusions

Posted on April 3, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

Thanks to reader James from Sydney for lending me The Fifth Element on Blu-ray. It arrived in the mail this morning. Thanks also to Theng from Perth, who also offered to make it available. The reason I wanted to examine … Continue reading →

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Is the Australian Blu-ray of The Fifth Element good quality?

Posted on April 1, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

It has been alleged on a forum that Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has dumped its substandard initial Blu-ray encode of The Fifth Element on the Australian market. I find this highly unlikely, but have been unable to get ahold of … Continue reading →

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Serenity re-encode improves quality

Posted on March 30, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

A couple of posts ago I mentioned that the Universal Pictures (Australasia) Pty Ltd Blu-ray release of First Blood had an identical video encode to the previous HD DVD release. I have now checked both Total Recall and Serenity, which … Continue reading →

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Wasting Space?

Posted on March 29, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

Last night I watched Pale Rider, a Clint Eastwood Western released on Blu-ray by Warner Bros. I strongly suspect it is the same as Warner Bros releases of the movie elsewhere in the world. I find this disc interesting for … Continue reading →

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Know It All

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

Since 2004 I have been writing a column for Geare magazine called ‘Know It All’. In each column I endeavour to explain how some bit or other of technology, or other working thing, actually does work. I’ve uploaded the first … Continue reading →

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Windows Vulnerabilities

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

A number of years ago I wrote a review of Microsoft Word for Windows 6.0 in which I concluded it has a significant list of problems, making it a lousy word processor. Except for all the other word processors on … Continue reading →

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DTS-HD High Resolution

Posted on March 23, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

I’ve been after a disc — any disc — carrying DTS-HD High Resolution audio. This is, of course, the improved version of DTS. It remains lossy, but can carry more bits of data, so it is less lossy than regular … Continue reading →

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