The Gladiator rises again?

Posted on August 10, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

I’ve had the Blu-ray of The Gladiator on my shelf since late last year, pondering whether I should do a review. I should have, but other titles kept bobbing to the surface.

It would have been unpleasant doing it, because I would have had to sit through the movie, paying close attention. But even when I was having a very cursory look when I first indexed the disc, it was apparent that the transfer was really rather poor. Various sites around the place have noted the noise, the appearance of upscaling, the lack of detail. What got me was that in one scene the encode was so poor that parts of the picture seemed to be moving independently of other parts. At 1:16:05 on the extended version, or 1:11:55 of the theatrical version, a stone wall in the foreground has a slight wobble, compared to the background foliage, as though it were on a fake set. Very poor.

Anyway, a review is now unnecessary since overseas a new ’10th Anniversary’ version has been released, with lovely picture quality. It doesn’t appear to be here yet. I shall enquire.

Update (11 August 2010, 12:49pm): Yes, Universal ‘hope[s] to announce it soon’ for release in Australia.

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The brain/eye mechanism at work again

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Here is an excellent video, from Quirkology author Richard Wiseman, illustrating an aspect of the blind spot in the human eye that I’d never before thought of. Go and have a look, and then come back here.

The new wrinkle isn’t that Wiseman’s head disappears when it hits the blind spot (which is the bit of the retina where there are no light-receptive cells, because that’s where all the bundled wiring makes its way out to the brain). What’s interesting is that when he raised the horizontal bar over where his head ought to be (but isn’t, because it is missing), the bar itself is visible!

What seems to be happening is that the brain, attempting to compensate for the hole, fills it in with its surroundings. The hole isn’t ’empty’. It has the orange background of the wall. And the brain must extrapolate between the bits to the left and right of the hole, since it fills in a horizontal bar.

Or, perhaps, it stretches the visual material to the left and right of the hole inwards, so as to fill it in. Either explanation would work with the content there.

Fascinating. And another illustration of the fact that human senses are not scientific instruments.

Posted in Imperfect perception | Leave a comment

Power, chemical and electrical

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

I was reading this Blog post on Depleted Cranium in which the spin of an Italian energy company is being highlighted. It has built what it calls a ‘combined cycle’ solar/gas power plant. The gas part has a capacity of 752MW of electricity production, while the solar part is good for 5MW. Peak. In practice, it should average around 1MW.

A megawatt seems like a big number, and it is in the domestic electrical sense. But let’s consider a different unit for power. One megawatt is roughly 1,350 horsepower. So the solar section of this plant, with its 30,000 square metres of solar collectors, is good for the same amount of power as three V8 Supercars, four or five sports cars, or a dozen family cars.

I need to do conversions like this myself from time to time because energy and power units are something I don’t have an instinctive feel for, unlike mass and length and velocity.

And I find it instructive to remember that chemical energy (eg. that in combustible fuels) is far more densely packed than electrical energy storage devices of all kinds, and that chemical energy using devices generally have much more power available to them than electrical energy using ones.

The maximum power produced by a 100 horsepower car engine is equivalent to a 240 volt domestic power source producing 310 amps. Most domestic power points are rated (in Australia) at just 10 amps.

Posted in Eco, How Things Work | Leave a comment

Frustration, for want of a numeric keypad

Posted on August 8, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

This past week or so I have had sitting in my office, too large to lightly put aside, a 55 inch Samsung LED/LCD TV. It looks lovely with its aluminium bezel, and its extraordinary sub-8mm panel thickness (over most of the panel, not all of it).

But it has a problem. When Samsung sent it to me, they included its remote, with its very fancy touch screen one, and with its Lithium-ion rechargeable battery. They did not supply the back panel of the remote (I can live without that) nor the charging cable for the remote (I can’t live without that).

The battery was flat from the start. I can’t charge it. The remote won’t work.

This need not necessarily be a problem. The panel is so thin that all the connections are actually made via the pre-attached desktop stand, and indeed its control panel is there too. I almost didn’t find this at all. You touch this barely visible horizontal line underneath the top of the desktop stand, and a little electric motor winds out a small panel. As it fully extends, a row of touch controls illuminate.

So I had the menu, and the means to navigate. All should be well.

Except for one thing: the TV was supplied in ‘Store Demo’ mode.

These days when you buy a new TV and switch it on for the first time, most brands will now ask you whether the TV is for a store or the home. These options allow the manufacturers to meet two conflicting needs (as they see them).

One need is make a splash in the showroom. The other is to consume a modest amount of power out of the box, so as to garner a good energy star rating. Choosing ‘Store’ often makes the TV poke you in the eye with its bright, over the top picture. These days, choosing ‘Home’ usually presents a default picture which is by no means perfect, but is often quite reasonable, even acceptable.

Of course, once I worked out how to use the touch controls on the slide-out panel, I set about resetting the TV to factory defaults (I always do this with all equipment, so as to start as if it were new). But as I embarked on this process, the TV would allow me to proceed no further until I entered a four digit PIN.

There is no numeric keypad on the slide-out panel, so I can’t change it.

Okay, in TV tuner mode with an SD station selected, I went into the picture menu, changed the picture mode from ‘Dynamic’  to ‘Standard’ and that improved it a lot, but it looked twittery — with little sharp edges flitting around, and flickering on and off. I checked and the sharpness control was on 50. I rolled it down to 20 and that softened the picture to what it should be for SD resolution, and eliminated all that irritating noise. The picture also looked a bit paint-by-the-numbers (ie. posterised). I drilled down through the menus and found in an advanced one that the setting for Gamma was ‘-3’, whatever that meant. I pushed it up to ‘0’ and now the picture was quite respectable. Not perfect, but good enough for general use until a remote came in (I found the slide out panel a pain because if I paused to ponder a choice, it withdrew again — seven seconds seemed to be the wait time).

A while later, though, the TV picture looked awful. I had changed between inputs and stations in the meantime, so I assumed that you had to set this for each particular station. Or something. I fixed it again.

And so it happened again. And again and again, I realise in retrospect. I, absentmindedly, would just fix it again whenever I noticed.

Until the penny finally dropped this afternoon. I had it on ABC24 to watch a speech and the discussion, and I know for a fact that I had changed nothing, but the picture I had set to very nice watchability that morning was now looking dreadful again. I checked, and the picture was back on ‘Dynamic’ and the ‘Sharpness’ back on 50.

This evening I went to a HDMI input. This had stuck with ‘Standard’ as I had last set it, but ‘Sharpness’ was up to a nasty 40. I put on a test Blu-ray, and found I had to wind it down to 10 before every last vestige of edge enhancement artefacts were eliminated. Then I clicked on the stopwatch and waited. After thirty minutes the picture went black for a flash, and then came back again … with the hard, distorted edges of the ‘Sharpness’ back up to 40.

I am getting pretty frustrated.

When the remote comes in and I can change out of ‘Store Demo’ mode, it will be interesting to see if the sliding control panel will also stay open a bit longer. I can imagine you’d have a quick countdown clock on store mode.

Update (11 August 2010, 12:51pm): Samsung finally provided a remote with charging cable yesterday. Now this is a ten thousand dollar TV, so you’d expect its bits and pieces to be pretty good. But I have to announce here, without a doubt this TV has the coolest remote control I have ever seen supplied with a piece of consumer electronics. If you ever see a Samsung 9 Series LED in a store, stop and ask them to show you what the remote can do.

Posted in Rant, Testing | 1 Comment

Blu-ray Secondary Audio

Posted on August 6, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

I’ve just been scanning the new Blu-ray release from Sony, From Paris with Love. Like so many discs, it has an audio director’s commentary. What’s different is that this is implemented as BonusView secondary audio, rather than as a separate track. So it plays over the top of whichever audio track you have selected.

Doesn’t matter much on this disc, but I can image this being useful for those discs with several different languages since the, say, Italian viewer can hear the movie audio in Italian, even though the commentary itself may be locked in English.

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

Crosstalk – 3D and audio

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

I have reviewed five different 3D TVs. All five of them had noticeable problems with crosstalk.

Crosstalk is a word that has been used for decades in regard to consumer electronics. It is used to label a legitimate signal ending up in the wrong place. In audio, it typically refers to the leakage of signal from left channel to right, and from right channel to left.

Andrew Woods from the Centre for Marine Science & Technology* at the Curtin University of Technology, WA, recently delivered a paper on the subject of crosstalk in 3D displays in Japan (right click to download PDF: Understanding Crosstalk in Stereoscopic Displays). In this Andrew outlines pretty much everything you’d want to know about crosstalk, including identifying the main causes. Of these, the two that seem me to be most likely to have significant effects in the home environment are:

  • Timing: if there is a time mismatch between the operation of the LCD  LC* shutters in the eye wear and the display of the picture, then material from the wrong eye views will be seen. Timing might be a straight misalignment between glasses and screen, or due to the switching time of the glasses from opacity to transparency and back again.
  • Opacity: how well the glasses actually block the other view when they are at full opacity.

In the paper, Andrew points out an exciting way to combat crosstalk: pre-cancellation. If the amount of crosstalk is known, then the system could feed negative crosstalk into the signals which would cancel the leakage. For example, if you know that you can see a black dot from the left eye image over a white background in the right eye image at the 5% level, then you could make that dot in the right eye image whiter than white (possible in the video world) by a sufficient amount to cancel out the black leakage. That’s probably oversimplifying, but you get the idea.

A lot of work would be required for this, along with enormously complicated cancellation maps (covering an enormous range of colour-on-colour and -intensity-on-intensity possibilities, and perhaps requiring different treatment for different parts of the screen).

I’ve just started fiddling with this stuff. I created my own 3D stills (using simple geometric shapes) to show that I could do it, and to determine how the left-right shifts of objects between the views is perceived. (This might sound hard, but it’s just a matter of creating side-by-side stills, and then playing them on the 3DTV using — in my case — the network photo display capabilities of a Beyonwiz PVR.)

I’ve also started trying to work out how to use some of the suggested test patterns to quantify crosstalk. At a guess (Samsung didn’t supply a working remote control with the TV I’m using, so it’s all bit of a struggle at the moment), I figure black images from one eye show through on white backgrounds of the other eye at something like the 10% level, and white images break through over black backgrounds at the same level.

That’s a worst case. Using this TV I was watching some richly colourful animation in which no crosstalk at all was discernible for seconds at a time.

Now consider audio crosstalk – the leakage between left and right stereo channels. These days 60dB or more as regarded as a bare minimum for uncompressed digital signals (all leakage would occur in the analogue stages). In the original home stereo format — the vinyl LP — midrange separation of ~20-25dB was considered fine, and there was never really any trouble with that.

Now, 25dB is about 5%. So should we consider 5% okay for 3D video crosstalk?

No!

Although both stereo audio and stereoscopic 3D use left and right signals to give the false impressions that images (aural or visual) are coming from places which they aren’t truly coming from, they are still entirely different. Stereo audio is primarily about where the signal appears to be between the left and right points. If a bit of leakage is occurring (consistently across the frequency spectrum), then that particular piece of sound will appear to be coming from a place a little closer to the centre than it should be. (If the leakage varies according to frequency, then the image will be smeared horizontally, which may explain the attraction of LP for some listeners, since this smearing can sound attractive, even though it is highly inaccurate).

3D vision is not about mixing the left and right signals. You don’t get an average from the leakage, you get a distracting ghost.

My guess is that 3D displays will have to get the figure to well below 1% (-40dB) before we can pronounce them to be of really high quality.

—-

* Thanks to Andrew for the corrections. I’m really going to have to be careful about the second. As he has previously reminded me, the shutter glasses are not LCDs – liquid crystal displays. They use liquid crystals as shutters, not display panels.

Posted in 3D, Audio, How Things Work, Imperfect perception, Vinyl | Leave a comment

The Asian Aviator

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

A while back I ordered a few Warner Brothers Blu-ray discs on a two-for-twenty dollars special from EzyDVD. They came in yesterday.

One of them was The Aviator, a fine movie. But when I was doing my indexing for my database purposes, I found something odd: the disc defaults to Chinese text. It opens with what I take to be some kind of copyright notice, followed by a main menu with Chinese text. When you start the movie, it has Chinese subtitles on by default.

That was in PowerDVD on the computer. I fiddled with its default languages to see if that made a difference,  to no avail. So I dropped it into the Oppo BDP-83 and the up came the Chinese stuff again. How about a Panasonic player? Same thing.

All the equipment was set with ‘Menu Language’ to ‘English’.

The disc comes with two audio tracks and two subtitle tracks for the movie: English and Chinese. It came in a proper Australian-looking Blu-ray box, but this says that the audio languages are English, French and Spanish, while the subtitle languages are English , French, Spanish and Portuguese.

My guess is that Warner Bros Australia has inadvertently purchased a batch of discs intended for the Chinese market and released them here.

I shall inquire.

Meanwhile, I have another copy of Law Abiding Citizen, which I have just reviewed for Sound and Image. I didn’t realise it until the last moment, but it turns out that this is a two disc release, with the theatrical and director’s cuts on different discs. Roadshow, the distributor, had sent me only the theatrical version. Two of them, in fact. I gave the other one away a while back.

Anyway, Roadshow urgently sent me the proper two disc version, saving my bacon for the purposes of the review. And so I have the theatrical version available. A test disc, no box and no slick, it works fine. No extras (they’re all on the other disc), this is a rather good, and very intriguing, mystery thriller. It will go to the first to ask for it in comments (Australian postage only thanks – and it is Region B locked).

Audio is Dolby TrueHD 24/48 5.1 @ 3214kbps with 640kbps Dolby Digital embedded. Picture is 1080p24, MPEG4 AVC @ 27.96Mbps.

Posted in Blu-ray, Disc details, Giveaway | 2 Comments

Madman Entertainment’s take on The Fifth Element

Posted on August 3, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

As I’ve previously mentioned, Madman Entertainment has taken over distribution of The Fifth Element in Australia. I’ve just received a copy and I’m happy to report that it is all good news.

First, the video is identical to that on the Australian Sony version and the remastered US version (shown here, for example). The run time is the same to the last frame. The average video bitrate is the same (27,880 kbps) with the same codec and the bitrate graphs are a perfect match for each other. So picture quality is identical. Consequently my disc comparison stands.

The English audio is in Dolby TrueHD, 24 bits, with the same average bitrate as the US version, so it appears to be identical as well (the Australian version had LPCM).

But unlike the US or previous Australian versions, this one has plenty of extras as well. In particular, it has 108 minutes of featurettes in 720p24 format.

Update (a few minutes later): This movie seems be improving in its appreciation. According to my DVD/Blu-ray database, in April 2005 its IMDB score was 7.1. By November 2006 it was up to 7.2, then 7.3 in November 2007, and now 7.4.

Do we see a classic in the making?

Posted in Blu-ray, Disc details | 2 Comments

Will MPEG4 AVC become the dominant Blu-ray video codec?

Posted on August 3, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

I’m just wondering because the only Blu-ray 3D codec is MPEG4 MVC, which is an extension of MPEG4 AVC. The likes of Warner Bros which has pretty much entirely used VC1 will have to use MPEG4 MVC for any 3D offerings, and if they are switching over for that purpose, they may well decide it’s easier to switch for all their disc authoring needs.

Posted in 3D, Blu-ray, Codecs | 2 Comments

New Blu-ray discs coming

Posted on August 2, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

The news that I’m sure that we’ve all been waiting for: Donnie Darko! Yes, it is set for Blu-ray release on 11 August. Read all the details here, but the important thing is that it is a two disc release with both the theatrical (~113 mins) and the director’s cut (~133 mins) versions of the movie, and pretty much all the available special extras.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy lobbed onto my desk this afternoon. This has the theatrical versions of the movies, and I’m pretty sure that the three movie discs are identical to the single disc editions I have previously mentioned. But you also get three DVDs: the special extras discs that came with the movies on DVD. These are all in PAL format and locked to region codes 2 & 4.

Also lobbing onto my desk was the 3 disc Blu-ray version of ‘Underbelly Uncut‘, the first series of the crime drama. I note an interesting not-quite juxtaposition: on the front of the box is a notice (printed onto both the cardboard outer container and the slick of the Blu-ray box, so they appear not to be anticipating any change). This says: ‘Not for sale, distribution or exhibition in Victoria’. On the back is the logo of Film Victoria, which presumably part funded the show.

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