Lord of the Rings month

Posted on March 28, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

April 2010 is the month in which the three Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies appear on Blu-ray. At this stage they are coming out as three separate discs, but I’m told that there will be a trilogy pack later in the year.

The cover art I’ve seen so far does not make it clear whether each movie will be appearing in a one disc or two disc set. I suspect the latter, but am seeking formal advice.

As to the disc movies themselves, here’s the basic data (there are no secondary languages, no subtitles other than English, no commentary, no extras other than some trailers). All use the VC1 codec for video and are presented in their proper 2.4:1 aspect ratio. All receive the sound as DTS-HD Master Audio ES at 24 bits. ‘ES’ means that there is a surround back channel explicitly mixed into the two regular surround channels and this may be extracted by a decoder in a 6.1/7.1 channel system. The audio for all has a core of 24 bit DTS-ES at 1,509kbps. Info that’s different for each movie:

Movie Run time
(mins)		 Video bitrate
Mbps		 Audio bitrate
kbps
The Fellowship of the Ring 178 23.35 4214
The Two Towers 179 22.75 4074
The Return of the King 201 19.14 4249

US readers: New Line Cinema titles released in Australia by Roadshow Entertainment are normally identical to the US version in terms of video and main audio encode, normally performed in a Warner Bros facility. However the Australian releases are all Region B restricted.

I’ve done a Blu-ray vs DVD comparison for The Fellowship of the Ring. Here is an example:

Lord of the Rings comparison example

Two things stood out for me from doing this example. The first was that the DVD was remarkably good. By avoiding edge and detail enhancement and accepting a slightly softer look, Roadshow’s DVD is about as good as DVD can get, even though the sheer length of the movie restricted it to an average video bitrate of about 4.45Mpbs.

The second is that the Blu-ray is better and a clear improvement, with more detail and sharpness. But by Blu-ray standards it is still a little soft. I suspect that it is the movie that is a little soft, and the Blu-ray faithfully captures this.

Posted in Blu-ray, Disc details, DVD | 4 Comments

Resurrecting Polaroid, but don’t knock digital

Posted on March 26, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating article about how an enthusiast has acquired the last Polaroid factory in Europe and started producing instant film again (monochrome now, colour to follow).

Great stuff.

But I would note that the piece is quite incorrect when it talks of  ‘those who prefer analog authenticity to the mathematical approximations of reality that define our whiz-bang digital age’. Well, I don’t dispute that there are such people. And of course I don’t dispute that digital signals are mere mathematical approximations of reality.

But what people of this mindset don’t seem to realise is that analogue signals are also no more than approximations of reality. In most cases, they are actually poorer approximations than digital ones, and they are far less robust, becoming worse with each subsequent copy.

Of course, film photography actually has little pretence of analogue authenticity anyway, compared to say audio. Film captures images by altering the colour of tiny dots on its surface. The only real difference is that the film dots are randomly scattered, while the digital ones (which, with 10megapixel+ cameras are generally more densely packed that film ‘pixels’) are in a regular grid.

Posted in Analogue, How Things Work | 2 Comments

Video bitrates for digital TV stations

Posted on March 25, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Rather than doing my usual mini-review for The Canberra Times for this coming Monday, I’ve done a piece on digital TV. Primarily, what it now offers. In preparing for it, I’ve gathered and calculated the basic technical specs for the various digital TV stations, at least as they’re broadcast in Canberra. So here they are, as of March 2010. I recorded not less than three hours of each station split across at least three sessions on separate days. Whether or not they are the same as used elsewhere in Australia I don’t know, although it seems likely for ABC and SBS.

Station Ch Audio
format		 Audio
bitrate
(kbps)		 Video
resolution		 Average
video bitrate (Mbps)
ABC1 2 MPEG 2.0 256 720 x 576i 5.40
ABC2 22 MPEG 2.0 256 720 x 576i 3.05
ABC3 23 MPEG 2.0 256 720 x 576i 2.50
ABC HDTV 20 DD 2.0 448 1280 x 720p 9.04
SBS ONE 3 MPEG 2.0 192 720 x 576i 4.01
SBS TWO 32 MPEG 2.0 192 720 x 576 3.85
SBS HD 30 MPEG 2.0 192 1280 x 720p 9.37
SC10 Canberra 5 MPEG 2.0 256 720 x 576i 5.92
One HD Canberra 50 DD 2.0 448 1440 x 1080i 14.31
PRIME Canberra 6 MPEG 2.0 256 720 x 576i 4.93
7TWO on PRIME 62 MPEG 2.0 256 720 x 576i 4.99
PRIME HD 60 DD 2.0 256 1440 x 1080i 10.25
WIN Canberra 8 MPEG 2.0 384 720 x 576i 4.92
GO! Canberra 88 MPEG 2.0 384 720 x 576i 4.11
WIN HD Canberra 80 DD 2.0 448 1440 x 1080i 9.88

The standouts: One HD gives a very high bitrate for HDTV, while ABC is extremely low.

Interesting points: all the HD stations use Dolby Digital except for SBS HD. All the 1080i stations use the lower resolution 1,440 pixel across version.

Update (Friday 26 March 2010): As requested in comments, I’ve added ABC3 which I overlooked. This involved two recordings on two days amounting to over 300 minutes. The two recordings were quite close to each other.

Posted in Codecs, DTV, HDTV, Video | 6 Comments

Video vs PC settings

Posted on March 22, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

As a comment to this post, Victor suggests:

You made some recommendations on settings in your S&I artical which I found useful, at least to confirm my own observations and assumptions. There was another setting I changed which was not mentioned in the article, and might be useful to other owners. I changed the colour space setting to RGB0..255. This had a dramatic improvement to black levels which were rather grey and unacceptable on the default setting.

I’d like to discuss this briefly. If you’re interested in what I settings I suggested for the Sony Blu-ray players (BDP-S360 and BDP-S760), I’ve put that under the fold. Just click ‘More’ below to see it.

Now in general you need not worry about changing the ‘colour space’ of your devices. Indeed, I’m pretty sure that some Blu-ray players don’t even provide this capability. But sometimes problems do arise.

HDMI supports two different colour spaces: YCrCb (ie. component video) and RGB. The video, prior to compression and encoding to the disc, was in YCrCb format, so that’s what the Blu-ray player initially decodes it to. Some — probably all — players have the ability to convert this to RGB. Remember, YCrCb consists of a luminence signal (Y) and two colour difference signals (Cr and Cb). Generally Cr and Cb are lower in resolution than Y, typically one quarter. Our eyes are more sensitive to luminence than to colour, so this works well. For RGB, all three colours have to be a full resolution, so this is a lower efficiency way of carrying video.

However displays ultimately require an RGB signal. So the YCrCb must be converted to RGB. Whether the Blu-ray player or the display does the conversion should not matter.

But sometimes it does. The main problem can arise with RGB because there are two kinds of RGB. There is ‘Video’ RGB and ‘PC’ RGB. We are talking about digital video here, so this is always sent in terms of numerical levels. In fact, for each colour the brightness is defined in an eight bit number, which means it can have a level of between 0 and 255. And indeed that is what is used when you use a DVI cable to plug a monitor into your computer.

But for backwards compatibility reasons, consumer video does not use the full range. In fact, it runs from 16 (for full black) to 235 (full white). That is, if your monitor has a pixel in which the red, green and blue values are all ’16’, it should show that pixel as black as it can go. If all three are 235, that should be full blast white. This signal is capable of carrying both ‘blacker than black’ (any signal less than 16) or ‘whiter than white’. In general, there will be no blacker than black, nor whiter than white in the signal, but some test patterns do provide this (eg. on the DVE HD Basics Blu-ray).

On rare occasions I’ve had miscommunications between sources and display. Very rarely it has the TV interpreting RGB as YCrCb, or vice versa, for some reason, producing astounding colour effects. More commonly, and subtlely, it has been the source and the TV applying different RGB types. If the source delivers video style (16…235) and the TV thinks it is in PC (0…255), then what should be full-on black will appear as dark grey, and extreme white will be duller than it ought to be. In other words, the whole contrast range of the picture will be compressed.

The other way around — source is PC (0…255) and TV is video (16…235) — then the signal will be ‘crushed’ at the dark and light extremes. Anything encoded as 16 or less will become full black, anything 235 or more will be full white.

You may be able to somewhat deal with the first scenario by turning down the ‘brightness’ control on your TV, and turning up the ‘contrast’ control. The other scenario involves moving those controls the other way.

But the best way is to avoid the whole mismatch. Where possible, set your Blu-ray player’s HDMI output to YCrCb. You may have a choice of 2:2:2 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 format. 2:2:2 4:2:2 is safer because everything will accept it. But you may want to experiment with the latter. I’m not sure that it makes much difference because, in the end, the display has to convert the signal into something that it can use.

Continue reading →

Posted in BD-Live, HDMI, How Things Work, Video | 2 Comments

Blu-ray reviews

Posted on March 21, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

I’ve just added five of my Sound and Image and Australian HI-FI Blu-ray reviews to the relevant page. The reviews are:

Some of these already had DVD vs Blu-ray comparisons up. For example, here’s one from Pulp Fiction:

Pulp Fiction comparison 3

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

Gone With the Wind: Blu-ray vs DVD

Posted on March 21, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

I think this is the oldest live-action movie I’ve done yet. Half a dozen comparison shots here, and here’s a sample (DVD to left, Blu-ray to right):

Posted in BD-Live, Disc details, DVD | Leave a comment

HD DVD

Posted on March 20, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Does anyone out there still own a HD DVD player? I do. What are your plans for it? Do you have a bunch of discs that you treasure? Or are you replacing them with Blu-ray?

Posted in Blu-ray, HD DVD | 4 Comments

Testing and cheating

Posted on March 19, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Has LG Electronics been naughty? Apparently it had installed a ‘circumvention device’ in a couple of its refrigerators. This, it is said, turns down the fridges when it senses they are in a 22C environment. The aim was to reduce their energy consumption in what would be expected to be standard test environments, thereby allowing them to achieve better scores and, consequently, more stars on their energy rating labels.

When this was pointed out to me today, I was quite prepared to take this at face value. LG naughty. But, as I wrote in an email this afternoon:

I am a bit surprised that LG would think it worth the extra sales/kudos from having an extra star on the fridge to take the chance of cheating.

Especially, now that I think about it, 22C is not an uncommon temperature in a home, so to have the unit function at a reduced level at that temperature could be positively dangerous, what with food spoiling and the like.

Now in one of those weird coincidences, later in the day I listened to a Quick Hitts podcast by Dave Hitt. I’d recommend these to anyone. He’s somewhat of a mad libertarian like me, but as a speaker on the radio he sounds so amiable and reasonable that it must take an effort of will to be offended. At the end of the podcast he asked for links to help boost the Google rating of his blog, and I thought I’d try to oblige. He suggested Googling his site for possible subjects of interest, so I Googled it for ‘audio’.

That led to this post on how the United State’s version of Choice magazine, Consumer Reports, is ‘clueless’ on audio, on cars and on … refrigerators.

This Blog entry was going to be about audio, but with the forgoing on LG’s fridge woes in mind, the most interesting thing was the closing section of Dave Hitt’s post.

Hitt is American and the post was written in September last year, so he had no knowledge of the current LG matter. But in it, he relates how a decade ago he overheard the engineers in a refrigerator company trying to deal with the fact that their fridges scored poorly in Consumer Reports‘ tests. The problem was that their fridges were optimised for normal room temperatures, but CR’s test procedure used a much higher temperature environment. Somehow other manufacturers’ fridges were able to perform well there. Read the details here, including how optimising for CR would actually reduce overall efficiency.

Now let’s put that story together with LG’s current troubles. Could LG’s ‘circumvention device’ have been developed initially to deal with CR’s test procedure? Might there have been a whole lot of shonky practices emanating from this, and not just by LG alone?

Posted in Testing | 1 Comment

Blu-ray giveaway – Halo: Legends

Posted on March 19, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Apparently this one is a number of animated stories coming out of the Halo game universe.

The disc does not have a proper Blu-ray box, nor a slick, but it works just like a bought one.

The disc is region free, but I’d prefer to only pay for postage within Australia. First request in comments scores it.

Data for Halo: Legends: Audio is Dolby Digital 5.1 @ 640kbps. There is also Japanese, French, German, Italian, Spanish and a Commentary. Feature is 119 minutes long. Video format is 1080p24, using the VC1 codec @ 18.17Mbps. There are 10 Featurettes (1080i60, VC1, DPL2.0 @ 192kbps – 101 mins).

Posted in Blu-ray, Disc details, Giveaway | 3 Comments

Better not offend

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

I’m looking at the Blu-ray for 2012 at the moment, particularly the special extras. More particularly, the Mayan Personality Profile. You stick in your date of birth and it tells you everything you need to know about yourself. Amazing, heh?

I’ve plugged in a few dates, and it turns out that everyone born on those dates only has good personality attributes. The only possible criticisms are of the ‘I’m to much of a perfectionist’ or ‘I give too much to others, leaving too little for myself’ type. In other words, not criticisms at all.

Posted in Blu-ray | 2 Comments