Cricket in HD!

Posted on October 31, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

WIN TV (and presumably Channel 9) is broadcasting the Twenty/20 Australia vs Sri Lanka cricket match in proper 1080i50. Looks wonderful!

Posted in DTV, HDTV | 10 Comments

Alien and more released, without region codes

Posted on October 30, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Over at the AVS Forum the specifications for the Blu-ray release of the Alien/Aliens etc boxed set have been posted. Looks like they’ve got a healthy ~26Mbps MPEG4 AVC transfer.

Two points of interest: although a Fox title, they are region free. Looks like all the major studios are abandoning that silliness, although region coding will no doubt live on through the smaller distributors, who are typically required by contract to apply them.

Second, in addition to 5.1 lossless, the first two movies have a 4.1 track Dolby Digital track (at 640kbps) for their theatrical versions (both director’s cut and theatrical versions are provided by means of seamless branching). This is apparently the original sound, although that would have been presented in cinemas as ‘Dolby Stereo’ (as the cinematic version of Dolby Pro Logic was called). My guess is that that the 4.1 is actually 3/1.1. Rather than encoding the four streams down to two using a matrix process, apparently they’ve simply allowed them to have their own discrete channels.

Except that back in 1979, there wasn’t a 0.1.

Posted in Blu-ray, Disc details | 3 Comments

Blu-ray frame rates

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Last night I received a question by email, and I thought I might as well deal with it here. David writes:

I’m a big fan of blu ray’s 24p mode, because it eliminates two bug-bears of DVD transfers from film; 3:2 pull down artefacts on NTSC (although I’ve never noticed them), and the wrong speed transfers of PAL (which bothers me just knowing about).

I was wondering if you could tell me which frame rate would be used for the Australian blu-ray issue of a TV series made for American TV.

Frame rates don’t seem to be listed in the features section on the back of blu-ray packaging, although I specifically selected my TV because it was compatible with 24p, when some cheaper ones don’t make that claim. I can only assume they won’t do work with that, and that’s the reason 24p is an option on my blu-ray player, in case you have a TV that won’t work with that. Please advise?

The great majority of movies released on Blu-ray have a frame rate of 1080p24, by which I mean that the frame rate is 23.976 frames per second (ie. 24/1.001). The reason for this slightly-under-24fps figure is murky, but related to the US TV system. This is a very slight slowdown from the rate used in the cinema, and should be practically indistinguishable.

Some other Blu-ray movies sold in Australia use a frame rate of precisely 24fps (I mark these as 1080p24* to distinguish them). These should be identical in run length and audio pitch to those in the cinema.

And some Blu-ray movies sold in Australia use the 1080i50 format: that is, HD interlaced at 50 fields per second.

With a good Blu-ray player doing the progressive scan conversion, the output becomes 1080p50, with each two adjacent frames identical to each other, so in effect it is 1080p25. The picture quality should be just as good as 1080p24, in this case, but you have the 4% movie speedup and audio pitch increase.

If a Blu-ray disc’s packing specifies the video as being 1080p, then that must mean either 1080p24 or 1080p24*. Other frame rates at 1080p are not supported by Blu-ray.

If it specifies 1080i, then it could be 1080i50 or 1080i60. I expect that most US content at 1080i would be 1080i60.

As for US TV shows released on Blu-ray, they tend to be mostly 1080p24 (eg. Band of Brothers, Futurama, Pushing Daisies, Star Trek (The Original Series), Star Wars: The Clone Wars). The stuff that’s worth putting out on HD has generally been shot on film, or is recent enough for them to have anticipated HD home release. Even some non-US TV content — Thunderbirds from the UK, made in the mid-60s — gets the 24 fps treatment (1080p24* in this case).

I’ve got the precise frame rates recorded on my Blu-ray reviews and comparisons, and there are even more shown on the ‘NEW Unofficial Blu-ray Audio and Video Specifications Thread‘, to which I contribute, and in which I recommend anyone with a Blu-ray drive in their computer participate.

Posted in Blu-ray, Video | 4 Comments

To spam, or not to spam!

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

There are various spambots out there that look for blog commenting facilities to which they can add advertisements for some or other crap. By definition whatever they are advertising is crap, or they wouldn’t use such underhanded methods.

Since I have to approve each user on his or her first making of a comment, I can simply mark these as spam. And I do.

But recently I’ve just received first posting approval emails for comments which aren’t spam in themselves, but are curiously non-specific. For example, yesterday in response to my Power, chemical and electrical post from over two months ago, I received a first-comment-email-approval-request for this comment (sic):

i still dont know whether i agree with you on this one or not. but its good arumentative post.

Now, this could be perfectly legitimate, but it seems to me to be worded specifically so that it can be applied to just about anything. If it were spam and I were to approve it, then it would probably be picked up on a subsequent crawl by a spambot, whereupon it could unleash its full tirade of spam.

I considered emailing the reported commenter, but that would simply provide the spammer with my confirmed email address.

So I’m consigning this comment to ‘Spam’ treatment. If it was a legit comment by a real human being, then please find my email address on this site and contact me, so I can restore your words.

Posted in Admin | 6 Comments

Speaking of 2.0

Posted on October 21, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

As Anthony points out in comments, Two Hands only scores 2.0 audio. Which is probably due to the movie producers keeping the budget down.

The title presumably wasn’t big enough for Icon to spend a lot of money redoing the sound, so that’s how the Blu-ray was presented: as 2.0.

Unlike, say, Warner Bros (which often uses Dolby Digital in these cases), Icon chose to use a lossless format. It isn’t at all important, but I’d suggest they used the wrong lossless format.

Any guesses why I might think that? You may need to check the specs to see why.

Posted in Audio, Blu-ray, Codecs | 2 Comments

One hundred Blu-ray vs DVD comparisons

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

In the last couple of days I’ve put up Blu-ray vs DVD comparisons for Donnie Darko and Two Hands. Both are fine movies. The results for Donnie Darko (go here for the comparison) are somewhat disappointing, primarily due to the limited resolution of the original film:

They’re somewhat better for Two Hands, which benefits quite a bit from the HD treatment (comparison here):

These additions mean that I now have one hundred Blu-ray vs DVD comparisons up.

Posted in Blu-ray, Disc details, DVD | 5 Comments

Blu-ray vs DVD comparison: Beauty and the Beast

Posted on October 16, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

On Blu-ray, Disney’s classic — and I reckon the best of all its animated musicals — Beauty and the Beast is available now. I see that as I write, EzyDVD seems to have sold out. I can see why: the Blu-ray is so much better than the DVD. Here’s an example:

Go to my comparison to see other shots, plus some information about the release.

Posted in Blu-ray, Disc details, DVD | 1 Comment

Subtracting colours

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Yesterday I got my hands on a sample of a projector that will soon be released. It worked beautifully yesterday but, as is often the case with samples, it developed a problem which appeared in fits and starts today, and finally locked in, apparently permanently.

I’ve recreated the visual appearance of the problem using Photoshop on a SD digital TV frame I happened to have on my computer. Here’s what I saw:

Clearly something is amiss, but what is it? Initially I thought that the projector and my home theatre receiver were having a disagreement about the colour space. HDMI can carry the video in the form of RGB or component video. Sometimes a display incorrectly interprets one as the other, producing very interesting colour effects.

But I noticed that what was supposed to be the white text of the projector’s own menus was also appearing as bright yellow. The penny dropped: white minus blue equals yellow. This was a 3 panel projector, and produced the image using the red, green, blue colour scheme. Disable the blue and all that’s left is red and green, which added together look yellow.

I generated the frame above by killing all the blue in the following frame:

Interestingly, it seems that blue is the most dispensable of the three colours. The top frame is almost watchable. Compare that to the following two, first with the green extracted:

and then with the red removed:

Posted in Equipment, Testing, Video | Leave a comment

Edith Piaf lives!

Posted on October 14, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Well, kinda. When I went to see Inception at the cinema a month or two ago, I recall thinking at one point: is that Edith Piaf singing? I was ambivalent, because while it sounded like her, it also sounded too good. After all, she died in 1963.

Right now I’m writing my formal review of Psycho on Blu-ray, and I am about to discuss the 5.1 audio mix — the amazingly good 5.1 audio mix. So I looked up the company that managed to pull this off: Audionamix. It turns out that it also did the work on Edith Piaf for Inception:

Mr. ZIMMER: Oh, yeah, yeah. Yes. Some science fiction actually did go into the score. I mean – and nobody has actually asked me this question. So how did you get the voice totally separate? Because we’ve extracted her voice out of a preexisting recording. We found some scientists in France who could do that for me. So I actually have a pristine, clean version of Miss Piaf singing the song without any backing track. It’s a bit like, you know, pulling out one cell out of a DNA of somebody.

My goodness. I can see endless uses for this technology (so long, as with Psycho, the original mono is also provided).

Speaking of Psycho, I have the Blu-ray version of this to give away. Disc only, no packaging. First request in comments … Australian postal addresses only.

Posted in Audio, Blu-ray, Cinema, Giveaway | 3 Comments

Foxtel disabling RF output? Apparently not.

Posted on October 14, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

My brother emailed this link the other day to a forum discussion in which it was alleged that Foxtel had been performing firmware updates on its various set top boxes which, for unaccountable reasons, were disabling their RF output. Obviously RF output is used by only a small proportion, but some find it useful for multiroom setups and such. (Theoretically one might be forced to use this if the only TV one had was an old analogue model devoid of A/V inputs, but that seems particularly unlikely in practice.)

I put the claim to Foxtel, which replied today denying it. Specifically:

FOXTEL is not disabling the RF output in set top boxes. Not all models of FOXTEL set top boxes are provisioned with RF output (these include all iQ2 set top boxes and iQ set top boxes installed in subscriber homes from October 2008), but for those that are, the RF output is not being disabled. Should the RF output stop working, the customer should put the set top box into standby and then take it out of standby, the set top box should then tune to the required RF channel.

That seems pretty clear. I’m not signing up to the forum to correct the original report, but any readers who are signed up to Whirlpool Forums might want to post a correction, linking back here.

Posted in Pay TV | 6 Comments