Unused features

Posted on March 12, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

The other day when I went to pick up my daughter from school, I decided to load Bach’s ‘Golderg Variations’, as performed by Glenn Gould, in the car CD player. All part of the ongoing musical education for my kids. I purchased this CD back in the mid-80s, very soon after getting my first CD player (a Sony CDP-101) and I have been in love with it ever since. The piece is about 45 minutes long and consists of a theme, forty variations on that theme, and then a recapitulation of the theme.

There is a problem with the disc: it has the whole thing in just one track. Good luck going straight to your favourite variation.

So what possessed CBS to structure the disc that way. Was it some extreme commitment to musical integrity causing them to make it as hard as possible for listeners to not go through the whole thing in sequence?

Actually, it did have jump points, but in a form largely forgotten about these days. Within the CD specification there is provision of an ‘Index’ within each track. Yes, each track could be divided up into a lot of smaller segments.

Unfortunately, while this is apparently used in some professional CD gear, it never really caught on for home CD players. My old Sony DVP-S725 DVD player had the ability to jump to Index numbers, but that’s the only device I’ve ever had so capable.

The same CD was later re-issued, but this time with track markings for the all the variations.

CBS isn’t to be blamed for my disc. At the time, how were they to know that this feature would languish unusued.

Two other features provided for in the CD specification but rarely or never used: CD text and four channel sound. The latter was mentioned in the spec, never fully developed, and in any case by the time the CD had gotten going, the industry recalled the 70s experiments with quadraphonic sound with shudder of horror.

CD text would have been useful, but it required the disc makers to put the text (titles, artists and, potentially, even lyrics) onto the disc in the absence of players supporting this, and the player makers to provide display facilities for the text in the absence of discs carrying it. If you’re burning a disc, you will know that you can add titles to it, but few players will show them to you.

Posted in CD, Equipment, Music | Leave a comment

Blu-ray giveaway – The Butterfly Effect

Posted on March 12, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

This is actually one of Icon’s ‘Blu-ray Double Feature’ discs, which means that it has another movie on the same disc. In this case it is the quite forgettable The Butterfly Effect 2 (4.4/10 on IMDB vs the original’s 7.8/10).

Note that the main movie, The Butterfly Effect, is the theatrical version, not the somewhat darker Director’s Cut.

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 The Butterfly Effect: Audio is DTS-HD Master Audio 16/48 5.1 @ 2025kbps, core is DTS 16/48 5.1 @ 1509kbps, also provided is Dolby Digital 5.1 @ 640kbps. Feature is 114 minutes long. Video format is 1080p24, using the MPEG4 AVC codec @ 23.98Mbps. No extras, no subtitles.

Data for The Butterfly Effect 2: Audio is DTS-HD Master Audio 16/48 5.1 @ 2010kbps, core is DTS 16/48 5.1 @ 1509kbps, also provided is Dolby Digital 5.1 @ 640kbps. Feature is 89 minutes long. Video format is 1080i50, using the MPEG4 AVC codec @ 23.91Mbps. No extras, no subtitles.

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

Paranormal Activity and DTS-HD Master Audio

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Paranormal Activity Blu-ray packagingIcon Film Distribution is releasing Paranormal Activity in Australia on Blu-ray and DVD on 2 April. This is a film that cost about $US15,000 to make and has since done about $US100 million at the box office. Pretty good ROI!

The Blu-ray version has a 6.5 minute featurette and a 4.5 minute alternate ending. The disc also uses seamless branching so that you can watch the whole movie either in the theatrical version or in the version with the alternate ending. As it happens, different files are used on the disc for the alternate ending provided as the special extra, and the seamless insert for the alternate version of the movie, even though their contents are identical (I did a bit-level file compare to confirm this).

The disc is Region B and the US version is Region A coded. They are clearly very different encodes. Here’s the data for the Australian version (which I’ve put on the AVS Forum for Blu-ray specifications) and here’s the data for the US version. Even the lengths seem to be different, but this is probably due to different logos for the distribution companies. Clearly the Australian version gets a much higher average video bitrate.

Note in particular the audio. Both use DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 with 24 bits of resolution at 48kHz sampling. But the Australian version has an average bitrate of 2,928kbps for the theatrical version, and 2,956kbps for the alternate one. The US numbers are 3,678kbps and 3,680kbps respectively.

I suppose it’s possible that these are entirely different mixes, but that would seem unlikely. I think it’s likely that almost all the difference goes to the different approaches to the DTS core. The Australian version uses 768kbps, while the US version uses the more common 1,509kbps.

Someone has previously noted (here?, or elsewhere?) that the use of the smaller core is much more efficient. Of course, that also means that those using legacy equipment and thus relying on the DTS core may get lower quality sound. Still, this could be a good trick if space is tight.

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

Saving the world, 13 grams at a time

Posted on March 7, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Box for Blu-ray of HomeUniversal studios sent me a bunch of Blu-ray discs recently. One of them is a movie of which I had never previously heard. Called Home, it is apparently an environmental documentary. From the blurb:

In 200,000 years, humans have disrupted the fragile balance on which Earth was living for 4 billion years. Global warming, shortage of resources, endangered species: humans are jeopardizing their own living conditions.

From the very quick look I’ve had so far, it seems to have lots of glorious cinematography of different parts of the world, both natural and human made.

(Tech info: the video is presented in 1080i50 format using the VC1 codec and enjoys a pretty healthy video bitrate of 26.8Mbps.)

Now your eye may be drawn to that green oval on the front cover of the box. Mine was. What does it say? Well, there it is to the left.

The packaging apparently assists with the salvation of the world.

But how precisely does an ‘Eco-Box’ (TM, of course, mustn’t forget the trademark!) do that. Well, it invites us to see the back for details. And what does the back tell us? Let’s see:

Why, it tells us primarily that the box uses less material, is recyclable and, more importantly, results in a ‘20% reduction in carbon footprint compared to standard Blu-ray packaging.’

So how do you reduce the carbon footprint by 20%? Perhaps by reducing materials by 20%. One way to do this is to leave holes in the product. A normal Blu-ray box consists of the hard transparent-but-blue plastic of the case itself, largely covered with a non-blue transparent thin plastic slip, under which is placed the paper sleeve.

This box has sections missing from the hard blue case, as though it were a racing car where drilling out a few kilograms here or there could make the difference between winning or losing. Here’s the result: a regular Blu-ray case (from a Universal disc included in the same batch) on the left, and an Eco-Box (TM) on the right:

 

Normal Blu-ray box left, Eco-box right

This, and possibly the material changes, mean that the case as shown weighs 51 grams, whereas the other case weighs 64 grams. That weight saving comes to — to two significant figures — twenty per cent.

I’m sure that will stop us from ‘jeopardizing [our] own living conditions’.

Posted in Blu-ray, Mysticism, Rant | 3 Comments

Anamorphic revisited

Posted on March 7, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

I have a little bit of sympathy for DVD distributors who used pan and scan for some of their titles, at least in the early days. Back then the vast majority of TVs were still 4:3, and that was what the viewers had been entirely used to.

Of course, I prefer the original movie presentation, which for most movies produced since the mid-1950s and many TV shows since the early 2000s has been widescreen.

But the worst possible presentation on DVD has been non-anamorphic widescreen. Here I describe what anamorphic video is in the DVD context. In essence, it means that the picture is distorted prior to being laid down on the disc, squeezed horizontally, and then is expanded out horizontally by the DVD player during playback. This allows the full height of the picture to be used.

Non-anamorphic widescreen achieves the correct aspect ratio by instead inserting black bars in the top and bottom of the frame. Consider the superb 1962 movie, To Kill a Mockingbird. Here’s what I wrote in my review of the DVD:

The movie was filmed in black and white at a time when colour was the Hollywood norm. Despite this another Oscar was earned for Art Direction. This makes the DVD all the more disappointing. Although presented in a widescreen (1.85:1) ratio, the DVD is not anamorphically encoded and consequently suffers from a lack of resolution of detail. This matters little on the closeups of faces, but there are many distant shots and much of the movie is set in a packed courtroom, the occupants of which seem on this disc to be only sketchily represented. Even the regular outdoor shots, with their high contrast and lush Southern US foliage, look busy and borderline aliasing constantly distracts the eyes.

Now here’s a frame from the disc, in the original aspect ratio as held on the Australian DVD:

Note how of the 576 vertical pixels available, only 412 are actually used. The remainder merely store blackness. In other words, 28% of the potential picture resolution is simply thrown away.

Universal later released a 2 disc special edition of this movie, but the movie disc was the same as the original release. To date there is still no anamorphic version of this movie available in Australia.

But a week ago the movie was broadcast on ABC2 on a Saturday night. I recorded it and was pleased to see that the movie was anamorphic. Here’s a frame as it would have been broadcast packed into a 720 pixel wide frame:

Notice how tall and skinny everyone is. Now a DVD player will reformat the top one from 720 pixels wide to 768, while a set top box will reformat the bottom one from 720 to 1,024 pixels wide.

If you watch these on a widescreen TV, this is what you will see (first the non-anamorphic DVD, then the anamorphic TV broadcast):

As you can see, the picture is much smaller from the DVD than from the free to air transmission. But on a widescreen TV you can always select ‘Zoom’ and have it fill the screen. Here are a couple of examples from the movie for the differences when you do that. The top of each is the full frame from the TV broadcast, and underneath is a detail. The left side is from the DVD, the right from the TV transmission.  The DVD side was scaled up as though the Zoom key on the TV had been pressed, so you can compare the two. First, here’s a frame not long before the one shown multiple times above:

And now is a night-time scene just after the classic confrontation outside the lockup:

Both of these show that there is an immense amount more detail on the free to air broadcast than there is on the DVD, and the TV version certainly looks a lot sharper.

I should add that the FTA version is still pretty weak, but for a different reason. The average video bitrate for the DVD is 4.18Mbps, and remember that is being used almost entirely for a smaller picture, since the black bars don’t require many bits when compressed.

The FTA broadcast offers a video bitrate of just 2.95Mbps, and this manifests mostly as MPEG2 noise in the image, especially around fine detail. That can make it a bit hard on the eye.

There’s probably no point issuing a proper anamorphic TKaM now, because surely a Blu-ray version can’t be too far away.

Posted in Compression, DTV, DVD, Video | Leave a comment

Pan and Scan again

Posted on March 5, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

About nine years ago I published an article in which I suggested that so-called ‘Pan and Scan’ isn’t always as bad as feared. Pan and Scan is a technique by which a widescreen movie is reformatted to full frame display on a 4:3 aspect ratio display, and the naive view was that it involved simply lopping off the left and right edges of the frame.

All this came to mind today because I am in the process of (finally!) doing a VHS vs DVD vs Blu-ray comparison to appear in Sound and Image and the VHS versions of the movies are, of course, in 4:3 format. And here’s what I find for Independence Day. First, this is the full frame for the VHS version:

and here is the full frame for the Blu-ray version:

So, what do we actually see? Both frames have been heavily cropped. In the 4:3 frame, substantial chunks of the left and right edges of the film frame have been omitted, but on the 2.35:1 version, a bit of the top and lots of the bottom of the film frame have been abandoned.

Posted in Blu-ray, DVD, Video, Video tape | 3 Comments

LED Projectors

Posted on March 4, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

My review of the Vivitek H9080FD LED home theatre projector shall be appear in The Canberra Times on Monday, and I’m hoping to look at a Runco LED projector next week. But I’ve been thinking: must LED projectors be limited to DLP projectors?

LED projectors use three powerful LEDs — one each for red, green and blue — instead of a lamp. Because of the individual control of each colour, the colour wheel normally included in a single-chip DLP projector is dispensed with.

But is there any reason why LEDs cannot be used for 3 chip projectors, such as LCD or LCoS models? Presumably all that needs happen is the three colours to be physically separate, rather than packaged together.

Posted in Video | Leave a comment

Another Heinlein movie coming

Posted on March 4, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

I’d missed this until now, but it looks like Robert A. Heinlein’s long short story, or short novel, ‘The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag‘, is being made into a movie.

Being of a somewhat optimistic disposition, I hope this will turn out well. The attempts so far to turn Heinlein novels into movies have been disappointing (The Puppet Masters) or infuriating (Starship Troopers).

But the movie is apparently being directed by Alex Proyas, of The Crow, Dark City, I, Robot and Knowing fame. I think that the way he did I, Robot in particular was brilliant. He took Asimov’s main device from the series of stories — exploring the unexpected consequences of the Three Laws of Robotics — and made them the centre of a story broadly appealing enough to pull in nearly $US350 million internationally.

Apparently plenty of people didn’t get it, including this dill who misses the point that the puzzle in this movie was that ‘man’s creation tries to get the better of him’ even though man explicitly tried to prohibit this through the Three Laws.

I shall forever love this anyway for the aftermath of the car crash scene.

So I wish Proyas well and hope Heinlein at last gets the kind of movie he deserves.

Posted in Cinema | Leave a comment

Am I to be forced into employment?

Posted on March 4, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

I don’t normally comment here on politics, despite having very strong views on the subject, because it isn’t usually relevant to home entertainment or to me writing about home entertainment. But when Robert Gottliebsen writes that people like me are to be forced into a massive amount more paperwork by the Australian Taxation Office, and that I could potentially find myself an accidental employee of my clients, regardless of my or their wishes, I must protest.

Surely the basis on which I conduct my business — I sell articles — is mine and mine alone?

Posted in Admin, Rant | Leave a comment

A further Blu-ray giveaway – Angels and Demons

Posted on March 4, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

This is a ‘Testmold’ disc, which means that it don’t have a proper label and so forth, nor a proper Blu-ray box, nor a slick, but it works just like a bought one. Has both Extended and Theatrical versions my means of seamless branching.

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

Data: Audio is DTS-HD Master Audio 24/48 @ ~3700kbps. Core is DTS 24/48 5.1 @ 1509kbps. Main feature is 146 minutes long, uses the MPEG4 AVC codec @ ~24.1Mbps. There is BD Live access and bookmarks. Other features are: ‘Path of Illumination’ text and links to mini-featurettes; BD-Live: CineChat, MovieIQ with extended version, Standard Sony BD-Live; 2 feature demo videos (1080p24, MPEG4 AVC, DD2.0 @ 192kbps – 2 mins); 7669 Test Patterns (1080p24, MPEG2 – 1 min); Featurette: ‘CERN: Pushing the Frontiers of Knowledge’ (1080i60, MPEG4 AVC, DD2.0 @ 192kbps – 14 mins); 2 Featurettes (1080p24, MPEG4 AVC, DD2.0 @ 192kbps – 27 mins); 17 mini-featurettes (1080p24, MPEG4 AVC, DD2.0 @ 192kbps – 11 mins)

Also: I’ll toss in a Dolby demo clips Blu-ray.

Posted in BD-Live, Disc details, Giveaway | 2 Comments