Madman Entertainment today sent me the Blu-ray versions of Afro Samurai and Afro Samurai: Resurrection. Both look like they are going to be very interesting.
The reason for this Blog post is just to chuckle over an interesting little quirk with the former disc. It is coded Region B, which means it will work in players from Australia and Europe, but not in those from elsewhere The way I check the region coding is by forcing the region code on my computer to Region A, then Region C, and finally Region B. This disc would only play when I set the code to Region B. But if it was set to either Region A or C, the graphic above was displayed: ‘This Blu-ray disc will playback on Region A players only’.
My guess: the disc was prepared in the US for Madman, and the authoring house forgot to change the graphic. Madman would probably never notice, because they’d do all their quality control in a Region B player, so the rejection screen would never appear.
Actually, aside from the region coding issue, this disc seems very similar indeed to the US release (which is region coded ‘A’). They have the same playlist file name, and the same actual transport stream file names. They use the same video codec and have the same average video bitrate. They both lack subtitles. They also have the same average audio bitrate for their Dolby TrueHD track.
Oddly, though, they differ in their two channel Dolby Digital audio track: the US version gets 640kbps while the Australian version gets 448kbps.
So just another of those amusing quirks one comes across.